Juice Maker Gets Boost From Anaheim, State : Government: Deal gives Procter & Gamble division $3 million over 10 years. The company is planning a $30-million expansion.
A major fruit juice manufacturer plans to spend $30 million to nearly triple the size of its Anaheim plant under a business retention deal that calls for the city and state to kick in almost $3 million in incentives over the next 10 years.
The agreement was approved Tuesday by the Anaheim City Council.
Procter & Gamble Inc.’s Sundor Brands unit, which makes Sunny Delight juice drink, had asked the city for assistance in return for the company’s commitment to remain in Anaheim.
The company says it plans to add 111,000 square feet of storage and manufacturing space to its 60,000-square-foot plant on North Tustin Avenue over the next two years.
The expansion will initially add about 25 new jobs, bringing total employment to 150. But company executives told the city they expect to add up to 50 more workers in the ensuing four to five years.
The retention agreement, part of a city and state effort to keep businesses from relocating, calls for Anaheim’s city-owned electric utility to waive as much as $1.8 million of the plant’s electricity bills over a 10-year span. Sundor is a major electricity user whose 1995-96 bill is estimated to be $890,000. The expansion would not double the bill but will add to it “substantially,” said Al Bracamonte, Procter & Gamble’s manager for the expansion project.
Anaheim’s Redevelopment Agency also will provide property tax subsidies to help the company offset some of its equipment renovation and plant improvement costs. In addition, the state has agreed to provide about $200,000 in job-training funds and to grant a manufacturing investment tax credit that could reduce Procter & Gamble’s state income tax bill by nearly $700,000 over five years.
The incentives “depend on how we perform,” Bracamonte said. “It is a pay-for-performance plan in which we get the incentive after we have shown that we are doing what we said. The total also is associated with the number of people we hire.”
Bracamonte said Sundor approached the city about the incentives after receiving a city brochure about the business retention program.
“We wanted to expand and we had several options, including moving to another area, doing it all here or keeping the original plant here and building the new facilities elsewhere,” he said. “When this information [about retention incentives] landed on our doorstep, we though we’d better check it out.”
He said that Sundor prefers to stay and make the capital investment in Anaheim, because the company has been here since 1974.
“There were two overriding factors,” Bracamonte said. “Our proximity to consumers, and we sell a lot of Sunny Delight product in Southern California, and to suppliers. The companies that make our plastic bottles and our corrugated boxes are right down the street.”
City officials say the business retention program keeps far more money in the community than is paid out in incentives. In the past three years, Anaheim has provided similar assistance to about 50 companies that employ a total of more than 7,000 people.
Businesses like Sundor that stay and expand in the city “are making a valuable investment in Anaheim from the standpoints of improving the site, increasing local employment and making a commitment to the community,” said Elisa Stipkovich, director of the city’s Community Development Department.
