Five thousand acres of a former U.S. Navy shipyard sit at the center of Vallejo's food and beverage growth, on grounds that built ships for more than a century before closing in 1996. That shipyard, Mare Island, is now home to a production brewery founded in 2013 that turns out more than 20 beer styles and employs roughly 90 people, plus a craft distillery on adjoining grounds producing whiskey, bourbon and rye. A plant-based protein food company founded in Vallejo in 2017 adds a third leg to that craft-production base, and packaging equipment needs are rising right along with it. That need is only growing. City officials treat the redevelopment of Mare Island into a food, beverage and production district as an active economic priority, alongside health care, retail trade and manufacturing, which together make up Vallejo's largest current industry categories.
None of these producers need a full industrial line yet, and we don't have a facility in Vallejo to sell them one, but that's exactly the stage where the right packaging equipment matters most. Hand-canning stops working somewhere past twenty beer styles from one production brewery, and we build the line for the volume that comes after that point. A brewery or distillery bottling and canning at Mare Island's current pace is a strong match for a Mars Series VFFS bagger once it adds pouched or bagged products, or an automatic case packer to replace hand-packing cases of bottles and cans as volume grows. A plant-based food producer moving from direct-to-consumer orders into retail distribution faces a similar shift, where consistent case packing becomes a requirement rather than a convenience. We work with food and beverage producers across California at exactly this point in their growth, and we scale our equipment lineup alongside your business as Mare Island's redevelopment continues to bring in more producers like it.