Will Pepsi can New York?

Danbury may join the cola wars

By ALEXANDER SOULE

Pepsi Bottling Group Inc. is quietly shopping in the Danbury, Conn., area once more for a corporate headquarters, sources say.

The distribution arm of PepsiCo Inc. leases 350,000 square feet of space at 1 Pepsi Way in Somers for its headquarters, where it employs some 1,100 people.

Parent company PepsiCo Inc. is among the largest employers in Westchester County with more than 2,000 people at its Purchase headquarters, which among other draws features a sculpture garden.

Danbury’s Corporate Center, the third-largest corporate facility in Fairfield County at 1.2 million square feet, currently has 330,000 square feet available, though the largest single block of contiguous space is 90,000 square feet. It could not be determined how many leases turn over in the next few years.

The facility has served once before as the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company: Union Carbide Corp. occupied Danbury Corporate Center after its completion in 1982.

The property was acquired in June by Grubb & Ellis Inc., which is currently asking $24 per square foot in rent.

The buildings have undergone renovations since 2000, when Pepsi Bottling hired The Staubach Co. to scout the site and other locations in Westchester and western Connecticut, according to published reports that year.

After officials in Westchester County and New York state put together a $5.8 million incentive package, the company elected to stay put at 1 Pepsi Way in Somers, inking a 10-year lease in 2001. Cushman & Wakefield is marketing more than 100,000 square feet of space at 1 Pepsi Way in Somers.

A Pepsi Bottling spokesman confirmed the company is again weighing moving its main office, without specifying locations that might suit the company’s needs.

“We have not come to any decision about whether to relocate our headquarters,” said Jeff Dahncke, a Pepsi Bottling spokesman. “We are considering all of our options.”

Any relocation would be a major coup for Danbury, which has seen Stamford and Norwalk benefit from their location on major rail lines, attracting major relocations from companies like UBS AG, Royal Bank of Scotland Inc. and GE Commercial Finance.

As of the third quarter, Danbury had a 16.8 percent vacancy rate for its roughly 2.5 million square feet of Class A office space, according to real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, the highest rate for any subregion in Fairfield County.

In addition to the renovations at Corporate Center, Connecticut has another economic-development carrot in its pocket: tax credits that reward companies for every job they move into Connecticut.

State officials used such incentives to lure Harrison-based GlobeOp Financial Services to establish a Hartford office last year for the hedge fund administration services it offers; and to convince UST Inc. this year to abandon the notion of moving its headquarters out of state.
In the third quarter, Pepsi Bottling had a $260 million profit on $3.7 billion in revenue, with sales up 8 percent over a year ago. 

The company employed 33,500 people in the United States at the start of 2007, and more than 70,000 worldwide.

Staff reporter Bob Chuvala contributed to this report.

 

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