Hershey Plant Kisses Off Employees in Oakdale As Plant Starts Shutdown (Corrected)
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The Hershey Co. is closing down their Kisses Plant in Oakland, California. The plant has over 615,000 square feet of space and dozens of acres just outside of Oakdale.
While this story is not the most important real estate story of the day, the headline that popped into my head had to be written no matter what. My apologies… 
The Oakdale plant closure is part of a restructuring plan by Hershey that will transfer some candy production to a new plant in Mexico. The candy company has closed five other plants in the United States and Canada this year, resulting in thousands of layoffs.
Meanwhile, Hershey has signed up with CB Richard Ellis, a major commercial real estate firm based in Los Angeles, to sell the Oakdale plant.
A brief listing and aerial photographs of the chocolate factory appear in the July issue of CB Richard Ellis’ “Monthly Exclusive Listings.”
The $18.5 million sale price includes the 417,000-square-foot main plant, as well as a nut storage building, a tank, bean storage areas and a temperature-controlled warehouse. The property sits on 85 acres. via sacbee.comCorrection - Previously the story said the plant was outside of Oakland, not Oakdale as it should have been. Thanks to our reader, Jose S., the story has now been corrected.


Comment by john on 9 July 2007:
As long is the company or companies that take over can provide jobs for locals that are of the non-porn related kind so to speak. The ex-armory building in the Mission district of San Francisco was taken over by porn site Kink.com: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/13/BAG0INI8PD1.DTL
Thought it was pretty amazing that such a key area of SF wasn’t sold or split up housing by an investment firm. But what pays pays….
Comment by Fred on 10 July 2007:
You are probably aware of this, but Hershey is actually cutting about 3000 jobs in the US and Canada and creating about 1500 in Monterey, Mexico. And here in their hometown (Hershey, PA) they are cutting about 900 jobs at their 3 manufacturing operations (2 Hershey plants and Reese’s). They are also closing both of their Canadian plants and two smaller production operations in Reading and Hazelton, PA.
Comment by Jose S. on 24 July 2007:
err…think you got it wrong here… it’s oakDALE, not oakLAND. OakDALE is about 100 miles from the bay area and is actually no where near oakLAND. It’s in the Central Valley aka the San Joaquin Valley and the nearest large city is Modesto (population about 225,000) which is 12 miles away.
I know this because I lived in OakDALE for more than 20 years. Hershey has been the largest employer there since 1965.