Company Buys 5.2 Acres for Garden Grove Food Factory : Purchase: House Food is the second Japan-based firm to acquire land for an O.C. processing facility this year.

A Japanese food giant has bought 5.2 acres in Garden Grove, where it plans to build a 158,000-square-foot food processing facility.

House Food Industrial Co., based in Osaka, Japan, bought a lot at Orangewood and Western avenues for $3.8 million in a deal that closed March 31, said Wayne Lambert, a broker at the Seeley Co. in Anaheim.

It was not immediately known how many employees would work at the site or when the food processing facility would be built. The site had been owned by Perkin-Elmer Corp., a real estate holding company based in Connecticut, Lambert said.

House Food is a leading maker of spices, such as Japanese curry powder, and also makes snacks, instant noodles and tofu. The publicly traded company is projecting a 1992 net profit of $76.52 million on sales of $1.67 billion in its fiscal year ended March 31.

Seeley Co. brokers represented House Food as well as Perkin-Elmer Corp.

Earlier this year, Maruchan Inc., the Japanese ramen noodle maker, bought a 32-acre site in Irvine Spectrum to build a food processing facility. Sources familiar with the transaction said that the deal was worth about $14 million.

Maruchan plans to add 100 jobs initially when it opens the Spectrum facility in the 1994 third quarter. Maruchan already operates two smaller sites in Irvine with about 300 employees.