"After looking at many Bay Area sites — from north of Santa Rosa to the south in Fremont — we chose Fairfield. The city’s location near major freeways makes it a good distribution point, and its excellent water quality and supply were a major factor in our decision to move here."
— Masanori Yasunaga, President and CEO,
Calbee America, Inc.
Background
Snack food manufacturer, Calbee America, Inc. is a subsidiary of Japan-based Calbee Foods Co., Ltd. The company makes and distributes snacks such as Snapea Crisps, Shrimp Flavored Chips and other chip products. Its products are supplied to retailers throughout the United States, Canada and parts of Europe.
In 1970, Calbee opened a plant in the United States and in 1999 established an R&D facility in Sonoma County, California with an aim to improve the quality of products by utilizing ingredients abundantly available in the US. In order to expand production capacity, the Sonoma County facility was moved to Fairfield’s Solano Business Park in 2007 where Calbee built a new 40,000-square-foot plant (four times larger than its Sebastopol plant) with the ability to expand by 35,000 square-feet. Today, the Fairfield site, with 45 employees, is the U.S. headquarters for the company.
Why Fairfield
When Calbee America realized it was outgrowing its facility in Sonoma County’s Sebastopol, California, company president and CEO, Masanori Yasunaga, spent a year traveling up and down San Francisco Bay Area’s freeways looking for a site where he could build a new manufacturing plant with room to expand. Yasunaga chose Fairfield because it offered easy access to major freeways, rail, ports, and airports as well as to local agricultural goods and marine products. Calbee uses California shrimp in some of its products.
Fairfield Offers Important Business Benefits
With Calbee’s move to Fairfield, it joined a long list of food and beverage companies already located in the city including the Jelly Belly Candy Company, an Anheuser-Busch brewery, Sepay Groves Olive Oil, Guittard Chocolate, Englehart Gourmet Foods and Abbott Laboratories’ Ross Products, manufacturer of Zone Perfect nutrition bars and meal-replacement bars. Food companies choose Fairfield for its ample supplies of superior-quality water, critical in the manufacturing process, accessible location and available land with room to expand.
