Category Archives: Deal File

Noteworthy completed sale or lease transactions.

Real Mex Foods Expands Food Processing Plant

Real Mex Foods expanded food processing plant in Vernon, California

Real Mex Foods supplies more than 200 restaurants as the distribution branch of Real Mex Restaurants, Cypress, Calif., including Chevy’s, El Torito and Acapulco restaurant concepts located in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.  In addition, Real Mex Foods has branched into broader frozen foods processing for foodservice, co-pack and retail channels serving clients such as Sysco Distributors, El Pollo Loco, Carl’s Jr.-Green Burrito, Albertson’s and U.S. Foods.

In February, Real Mex closed its 32,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., and moved into a 100,000-square-foot space in Vernon, California. The city of Vernon and a developer came to us and proposed a deal where we got a 100,000-square-foot building retrofitted to a state-of-the-art USDA manufacturing plant, Angulo explains.  It was an opportunistic deal.   They got us into 100,000 square feet at the cost that we would have gotten a build-to-suit 65,000-square-foot building.

Food safety also was a major priority for Real Mex in building out the new plant. The company built an in-house lab and hired a complete quality assurance team. Other food safety precautions include a triple boiler system, floor foamers, centralized sanitation system, in-house chlorination system for vegetables and a full quality assurance staff.

The developer invested $10 million in the build out, while Real Mex spent about $4 million on equipment. The completely refurbished plant quadrupled the company’s previous capacity and allowed it to more than double the number of kettles, tumble chillers and blast freezers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Mex_Restaurants

23 Acre Industrial Site Sold

The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to pay $50 million to settle an eminent domain dispute with Meruelo Maddux Properties over 23 acres of land in Cypress Park which is located north of Downtown Los Angeles.  The site is commonly referred to as Taylor Yard.  Meruelo Maddux originally purchased the site for $31.8 million, snatching it from the claws of the LAUSD.

Here is another example of the misdirected LAUSD board removing more industrial zoned land from the city.  They should take residential properties for schools not industrial as industrial properties create the sorely needed jobs for L.A. denizens, especially the lower classes that live in Cypress Park.

City of Vernon Purchases 11 Acre Site – To Redevelop

The City of Vernon recently acquired the 11 acre Smurfit-Stone (formerly Container Corp) site on 57th Street, after the container manufacturer decided to close the Vernon plant and consolidate operations into other facilities.  The City expects to have a contractor demolishing the existing facilities on the site beginning later this month.  The City’s Industrial Development staff is currently in discussion with several large manufacturers about future use of the site.

The City has purchased several large land sites over the past several years in order to control the destiny who occupies the sites.  The City prefers companies that manufacture, employ more persons than warehousing operations, and that use copious amounts of the power that the City sells.  This interference by the government in the free market of real estate deals definitely rubs some people the wrong way.