The Orange County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved an incentives deal for Morinaga America Foods on Tuesday night, a final piece of the puzzle to help advance the Japanese company’s major expansion planned for Mebane.
Board members approved more than $2.9 million in tax incentives for the construction set at Morinaga’s facility at 4391 Wilson Road, which is just south of Interstate 40. The performance-based package will be distributed across the next five years as long as the candy manufacturer meets its hiring goals for a new 40,000 square-foot building that will be constructed on the same property as the current factory.
Morinaga announced in July it chose Orange County and its current Mebane property as the site for its $137 million expansion over several of its factories in Asia, including locations in China, Taiwan and Vietnam. President of Morinaga America Foods Noriyuki Nishikawa told the board of commissioners on Tuesday the Asian countries may have been more cost-effective for the company — but the choice of Orange County came down to the tremendous support from local community. Rising sales in the United States also played a role, with Morinaga seeing an increase of $137 million in the U.S. last year — largely from its signature, chewy fruit candy HI-CHEW.
According to the county’s Economic Development Director Steve Brantley, the tax incentives offered to Morinaga will still result in a net positive for revenue each of the five years based on the property tax revenues for the development. He added that within a decade of the expansion coming online, Orange County is projected to net more than $4.5 million from Morinaga in taxes, making them the #2 manufacturing-related corporate taxpayer in the community. Thermo Fisher Scientific, with its future manufacturing facility for laboratory products at West Ten Road, is projected the top such taxpayer.
Orange County’s incentives for Morinaga come after North Carolina approved a $6.8 million incentives package in July and the City of Mebane passed $1.1 million in local incentives this August.
The Morinaga candy manufacturing facility in Mebane, taken in 2016. (Photo via Alicia Stemper/Orange County Arts Commission.)
The Orange County factory produces more than 7 million individual pieces of HI-CHEW every 24 hours, and the expansion development will allow Morinaga to double that output. As a result, it also plans to double its workforce and hire 204 new employees for the facility by 2030. For Orange County, the Japanese business already represents $31.6 million in property tax valuation.
The incentives approved by Orange County mirror the performance-based package initially passed for Morinaga in 2013 when it began constructing the current candy factory. The local government has also used similar incentive structures for its deals with ABB and Medline Industries.
Morinaga is set to break ground on its Mebane factory’s expansion on October 3 and aims to complete constructing facility in mid-2026 for operation to begin in January 2027.
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