Wonderful Co. Inks Million SF Lease with Fortune 500 Food Manufacturer

SHAFTER, CA – GlobeSt.com has exclusively learned that Wonderful Real Estate Development, one of the most active industrial real estate developers on the West Coast, has leased its most recent 1-million-square-foot speculative building to a prominent Fortune 500 American food manufacturer.

The building is located at 3800 Fanucchi Way and features 1.063 million square feet, 40 feet of clear height, 215-dock high doors, and parking expandable to 1,000 stalls to accommodate trailers and employee spaces. The facility is located on a 70-acre site with a building-to-site coverage of 35%.

The food manufacturer intends to use the facility as a distribution center to sort and ship goods across the western region, including California, Nevada, and Washington. More than 150 jobs will be created with operations expected to begin in Q1 2023.

“With over 10 million square feet of occupied space in Wonderful Industrial Park by some of the best known brands in America, our park has become the premier logistics and distribution business park in the Western U.S. that reaches a population size and market that is comparable to New York and New Jersey’s,” explains Joe Vargas, SIOR, President of Wonderful Real Estate Development. “In terms of demand, we see no let up from tenants that require very large and efficient industrial real estate.”

Vargas adds that the company is already underway with another 1 million-square-foot speculative building and has two tenant proposals in hand, as well as a speculative 400,000-square-foot building “that will likely be leased before the building shell is completed.”

Over the last four years, Wonderful Industrial Park has delivered three 1 million-square-foot warehouses and over 4 million square feet in industrial space including both build-to-suit and speculative projects. In 2021, Amazon leased a 1 million-square-foot building on 72-acres located at 4500 Express within Wonderful Industrial Park.

Other large occupiers in the park include Ross Stores with +3 million square feet on 130 acres, Target’s 2 million square feet on 80 acres, and Walmart at 630,000 square feet and 80 feet of clear height on 60 acres. Walmart’s prototype state-of-the-art grocery-focused distribution center incorporates the most sophisticated automated sorting equipment and systems in the industry.

Other WIP occupants include Essendant (Staples, Inc), American Tire Distributors, Formica, and Hillman as well as other 3PLs who have found WIP’s location and amenities extremely profitable.

In addition to its industrial developments, WIP recently introduced the Wonderful Career Center, a 98,000-square-foot office project that includes office space for several Wonderful Company brands as well as a vocational tech training center, that features three classrooms, four labs with dock doors, and an expansive conference room that is available for use by both The Wonderful Company teams and WIP tenants. The vocational school’s current offering is the Wonderful Technical Operator Program, with a curriculum that prepares students for high-paying roles through mechanical and electrical training.

WIP is a fully entitled 1,625-acre distribution center located approximately 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The park is a rail-served industrial development, entitled for 26 million square feet, with nearly 10 million square feet completed and under operation to date. WIP provides tenants with access to a workforce population of over 700,000 residents within a 30-minute drive from the park.

According to Wonderful Real Estate Development, the central location of the park gives companies access to a robust transportation infrastructure. The property is minutes from Hwy-99, I-5 and Hwy-58 and offers convenient port access to the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Oakland.

The industrial park’s location allows access to 14% of the U.S. population within 300 miles and same-day delivery to 30 million Californians. It has a FedEx Ground hub onsite and is near a UPS ground hub in Bakersfield, CA with Meadows Field Airport located only seven miles away.

The park also features an onsite rail yard with more than 17,000 feet of track able to accommodate unit trains with direct access to Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway’s mainline. WIP is equipped with an in-place high-speed fiber optics network with 10 gigabytes in place with a capacity of 40 gigabytes.