Food factory’s move to Seaport sunk
The food processing giant looking to move out of Widett Circle is going back to the drawing board, pulling out of a plan to develop an industrial site in the Seaport — an area a developer says needs significant repairs to the barrier protecting it from the sea.
New Boston Food Market and Boston Global Investors originally joined forces last year to build on a 148,000-square-foot site at the southern tip of the Raymond L. Flynn Industrial Park, which is owned by the Boston Planning & Development Agency. The groups won a bidding process for the site and signed a letter of intent to develop last year but have since pulled out and stopped working together, leading the BPDA to once again put the site — which can’t be used for residential, office or entertainment uses — back up for bid.
BGI CEO John Hynes said plans fell through in part because the site was too small to accommodate all 900 of New Boston Food Market’s workers and that the company didn’t want to move some facilities while waiting for nearby parcels to open up. But he also said a study of the site showed significant wear and tear on the jetties abutting it.
“The bulkhead that supports the land and keeps it standing up really needs some work,” Hynes told the Herald. “The cost to fix it up could be more than the value of the land itself ... the economics of the deal have a long way to go, the site itself needs to be shored up.”
The BPDA’s request for proposals says the jetties are not part of the site and that BPDA assumes “no financial responsibility whatsoever for the repair of the Jetties as it may relate to the redevelopment,” but also requires the developer to keep access to the jetties for future repairs. A BPDA spokeswoman said the agency is regularly evaluating its capital needs, and recent repairs to an outer bulkhead at Pier 5 cost $2.5 million.
Michael Vaughan, a development consultant for New Boston Food Market, called the area a “great site” and said city officials have worked to keep the co-op in the city, but that high construction costs led them to back out of the plan.
“We could’ve sat and noodled over (the site) forever and not have gotten there — we tried to get it done, realized it couldn’t work for us and thought it was best to give it back to the city to explore other options,” Vaughan said, adding the market is still looking to relocate somewhere in Boston.