California Governor ERUPTS As A Historic Almond Processing Plant OFFICIALLY Shuts Down And Moves Out

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]A big announcement from a longtime California a company. Blue Diamond Growers says it will be winding down its almond operations at its plant in Sacramento. 115 years. That is how long Blue Diamond Growers has been part of Sacramento. Not as a tenant. Not as a corporate outpost that could pick up and relocate with a board vote. As a foundational piece of the city's economic DNA. the kind of institution that outlasts mayors and governors and recessions and droughts. The kind of place where people build 30-year careers and retire with a story to tell. And on June 6th, 2025, the CEO called 600 of those people into a room and told them the plant was closing. The company announced it would wind down its 53 acre Midtown manufacturing campus on Sea Street.

[00:00:48]>> Story in Sacramento, Blue Diamond announcing it's shutting down its plant in Midtown. that's been there for decades >> in phases over the following 18 months.

[00:00:58]The Sacramento buildings, the company said, had simply become too costly and inefficient to keep running. A straightforward operational explanation, clean, professional, and completely disconnected from any acknowledgement of what the broader policy environment in California had to do with getting them to that conclusion. Governor Gavin Nuome, the man who spent the first half of 2025 touring international stages to make the case that California remains an unrivaled destination for business, commerce, and ambition, issued no statement, no response, no acknowledgement that one of his state's oldest agricultural institutions had just announced the end of its manufacturing presence in the capital city that shares its zip code with his own office.

[00:01:45]Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarti put out a joint statement with a council member thanking Blue Diamond for over a century of partnership. That was it. A thank you note where an economic reckoning should have been. Make sure you subscribe before we go further. And hit that like button so more people see this story because it is not getting the coverage it deserves. Here is what I want you to answer in the comments. When a 115-year institution shuts down manufacturing in Sacramento and the governor's office treats it like a footnote, what does that tell you about how California's leadership actually understands what it is losing? Put your answer below. Let's talk about what Blue Diamond actually represents because the press coverage of this closure treated it almost entirely as a labor story. Hundreds of jobs, a hard day for workers, a cooperative offering severance packages. All of that is real and all of it matters. But the deeper story is about what kind of institution Blue Diamond is and why its presence in Sacramento meant something that pure headcount cannot fully measure. Blue Diamond Growers is a cooperative. That means the people who own it are the farmers. Nearly 3,000 California almond growers, the men and women who manage the orchards, run the irrigation systems, and deliver their harvests to the cooperative for processing and sale. There is no private equity firm extracting margin from the top. There is no distant corporate parent making decisions from a skyscraper in another city. The cooperative exists to serve the growers who built it. And for more than a hundred years, the physical manifestation of that mission was the manufacturing campus on Sea Street.

[00:03:32]California grows roughly 80% of the world's almonds. The Blue Diamond facility was central to turning that agricultural dominance into a commercial one. The brand that showed up on grocery shelves across the globe, the almond milk, the flavored almonds, the snack products that Blue Diamond turned into a billion dollar product line, all of it moved through Sacramento. This was not peripheral. This was the core. CEO Kai Bachmann was direct about the decision.

[00:04:02]The challenges of running a plant from these historical buildings, he said, had become too costly and inefficient.

[00:04:09]streamlining manufacturing was necessary to strengthen the cooperative's market position and deliver more value to growers. He acknowledged the difficulty of telling the workforce. He described the Sacramento team's work ethic as central to what Blue Diamond became. And then he told them their jobs were ending. The phase timeline gives the whole thing a measured quality that almost obscures the scale of what is happening. About 10% of the workforce left by the end of 2025. A second phase of departures followed in early 2026.

[00:04:42]The final phase, completing the closure, runs through September 2026. The company offered severance, outplacement services, transition incentives, and relocation opportunities for some workers willing to move to Central Valley operations. By the end of it, 600 positions in Sacramento will be gone.

[00:05:02]Now, pause on the explanation that Bachmann gave and ask the question that did not get asked in most of the coverage. The buildings became too costly and inefficient. When did they become that? And what role did California's operating environment play in accelerating that calculation?

[00:05:20]Industrial facilities age everywhere.

[00:05:23]Maintenance costs rise everywhere. The decision to modernize a plant or relocate manufacturing is a calculation that every capitalintensive business faces eventually. What determines where that calculation lands is not just the age of the building. It is the cost structure of the environment surrounding the building. energy costs, regulatory compliance costs, the capital investment required to bring an aging facility up to modern operational standards inside a permitting and environmental review process that has become one of the most expensive and timeconuming in the country. The labor cost floor in a city whose housing market has been driving up the cost of living for everyone who works there. None of these factors are secrets. None of them appeared without warning. They compounded year after year until the spreadsheet stopped producing a number that a cooperative serving its farmer members could justify. That compounding is the story inside the story. Blue Diamond did not wake up one morning and decide Sacramento had become intolerable. It watched the math move in one direction over a long period of time and eventually the math moved past the point of reversal. Subscribe right now to keep following this as it develops.

[00:06:42]Blue Diamond is also not standing alone in this moment, and that context is essential. The announcement came within the same general period as two other California industrial closures that barely made a ripple in the national conversation, but together form a picture that Sacramento cannot continue to explain away individually.

[00:07:02]Lepro Foods, the largest mozzarella cheese producer in the world, closed its processing plant in Leore in California's Central Valley. The facility had been operating since 1910, same year Blue Diamond was founded. The reason Lepro gave was the same one Blue Diamond gave. High operating costs. The plant they built to replace it is in Lach, Texas. More than a billion dollars committed. 300 jobs already staffed with plans to double.

[00:07:32]California lost a century old food manufacturing operation. Texas gained a billion dollar investment. Annheiser Bush closed its Budweiser Brewery in Fairfield, California in early 2026.

[00:07:45]Decades of production history gone. The Fairfield facility had been part of Northern California's industrial landscape long enough that its closure should have generated a serious policy conversation. It generated a press release. three food and beverage manufacturers, three closures in the same general window, all citing cost structures that made continued operation in California unsustainable.

[00:08:11]The governor toured Davos. Sacramento issued thank you notes. Now, there is a counterargument worth presenting honestly because this story is not as simple as the narrative of pure decline.

[00:08:23]Blue Diamond's cooperative structure means the closure of the Sacramento plant is not a departure from California. The headquarters stays, the growers stay, the Turlock and Salida facilities stay. In a strict operational sense, you can describe this as a California company consolidating within California rather than fleeing to another state. The manufacturing is moving to the Central Valley, closer to the growers who own the cooperative into facilities better suited to the demands of modern food processing. A management consultant brought in to evaluate Blue Diamond's footprint might well have recommended exactly this. That framing is available and it is not dishonest, but it does not survive contact with the Lepro situation. Lepro did not move to another part of California. It moved to Texas because the cost of doing what Lepro does at the scale Lepro does it is substantially lower there than it is here. When you put Blue Diamond and Lepro side by side, the honest conclusion is not that California is fine and everything is consolidating naturally. The honest conclusion is that California's cost environment is pushing manufacturing decisions toward outcomes that would have looked different 20 years ago. Sometimes that means moving to the Central Valley. Sometimes it means moving to Lach. The direction is the same. What does Sacramento actually lose in this transition beyond the 600 jobs in the headline number? A manufacturing campus of this size and age does not operate in isolation from the neighborhood around it. 53 acres in Midtown Sacramento running three shifts employing 600 workers has a gravitational pull on the local economy that does not show up on any official jobs report. The workers who ate lunch somewhere on Sea Street every working day of their careers. The contractors who maintained the refrigeration systems and the loading docks and the processing equipment. The supply vendors whose client relationships were built around proximity to a reliable long-term customer. The families who chose neighborhoods within reasonable commuting distance of a stable employer that offered real wages, real benefits, and the kind of job security that a cooperative built on a century of history tends to project. Every one of those connections now absorbs an ending.

[00:10:48]The property will be sold. That 53 acre Midtown site will attract developers and investors who see in its vacancy an opportunity the almond plant never represented. What gets built there may generate more property tax revenue per acre than the plant it replaces. That is likely actually. But the workers who built careers in food manufacturing do not automatically transition into the tenants of whatever mixeduse development comes next. The economic stability they represented does not get transferable credit in a redevelopment perspectus.

[00:11:24]That gap is where the real cost of this closure lives. Not in the gross number of jobs, but in the specific kind of jobs, the specific kind of community stability, the specific kind of economic ecosystem that a long-standing manufacturing employer generates around itself. When that employer leaves, the ecosystem does not simply pause and wait for the next one. It dissolves quietly over time in ways that show up in city budget projections and school enrollment numbers and neighborhood vacancy rates years after the press releases have been filed away.

[00:12:00]Governor Nuome has a practiced response to this kind of argument. California's economy is too large and too dynamic to be measured by individual closures. The state remains the world's fourth largest economy. New companies form continuously. The talent and institutional infrastructure that California has built over generations cannot be replicated by any tax incentive Texas offers. These points are not invented. They represent real competitive advantages that the state genuinely possesses. But those advantages were built on a foundation that included places like the Blue Diamond Plant on Sea Street. The workers who spent decades inside that facility were not working in the innovation economy. They were working in the manufacturing economy, the part of California's economic story that turned agricultural abundance into industrial production and industrial production into community stability. That part of the story does not get replaced by the next unicorn. It gets replaced by silence and maybe eventually a mixeduse development with a Whole Foods on the ground floor.

[00:13:08]Blue Diamond Growers was established in Sacramento in 1910. It grew through every disruption the 20th century could produce. It built a cooperative model that made California almonds into a global commodity. And in June of 2025, its leadership looked at the cost of continuing to operate in the city where it was born and concluded that the numbers no longer worked.

[00:13:31]600 people were told on a Friday morning. The governor was somewhere else. Sacramento said, "Thank you. The 53 acres will go on the market. The buildings will be quiet by September 2026. And the California business environment that made a 115-year manufacturing presence unsustainable will keep doing what it does, compounding costs and compounding departures, while Sacramento manages the announcements and waits for the next one.

[00:14:02]Subscribe to the channel if you want to keep following the numbers underneath the press releases. Hit like to make sure this reaches people who should be asking these questions. And drop a comment telling me this. What would have to change in Sacramento's actual policy environment for the next Blue Diamond to reach a different conclusion? Not in a press release, in a spreadsheet, in the real numbers that determine whether a business stays or goes. Because right now, those numbers keep arriving with the same answer. And the thank you notes keep getting written.