L.A. Produce Supplier Moving to Los Alamitos : Foodstuffs: Frieda’s Inc., which popularized the kiwi fruit, packing up headquarters and 115 employees to Corporate Center site.

Frieda’s Inc., a specialty produce supplier best known for popularizing kiwi fruit in the United States, is moving its headquarters and 115 employees here from Los Angeles.

The company, the seventh-largest women-owned business in Los Angeles, has leased an 81,000-square-foot office and warehouse in Los Alamitos Corporate Center on Cerritos Avenue near Lexington Drive.

The move, to be completed by July 1, ends a three-year search for a new and larger base of operations. Nearly all of the employees are expected to make the 20-mile relocation.

Frieda’s, which distributes more than 400 exotic fruits, vegetables and other foods, has annual sales of more than $20 million.

The company’s new headquarters building was previously occupied by PCH Clothing Co., which moved to Huntington Beach, said Frieda’s President Karen Caplan.

“The building found us,” Caplan said, explaining that the company had been looking for sites near its downtown Los Angeles location to stay close to produce dealers.

But the Los Alamitos building was so perfectly suited, she said, that the distance became less important.

The company was founded in 1962 by Karen Caplan’s mother, Frieda Caplan, who began selling California brown mushrooms from a stall in the old 7th Street wholesale market in Los Angeles.

Later that year, Frieda Caplan came across a hairy brown fruit from New Zealand called the Chinese gooseberry. She renamed it kiwi and began promoting it.