CHICAGO (CN) — The Blommer Chocolate Company announced Friday that it plans to shutter its 85-year-old factory in Chicago, citing "elevated operating costs" and "production reliability issues" in the aging facility.
Located in Chicago's Fulton River District, close to downtown, the factory first opened in 1939 — the same year that brothers Henry, Al and Bernard Blommer founded the company in Chicago. It's well known in the city for occasionally making the downtown area smell like chocolate.
Blommer's chief operations officer Mark Okita said in a prepared statement that “it was an incredibly challenging yet inevitable decision to close the Chicago plant," adding that the company viewed the shuttering as an embrace of "progress, transformation and elevation.”
“Now it is time for us to evolve ourselves to the next stage. We are committed to fortifying relationships with our customers and offering sustainable tailored to their unique business needs," Blommer CEO Tomoki Matsumoto said in his own prepared statement.
Lofty rhetoric aside, the company was mum on Friday regarding the Chicago plant's workers. It did not return a request for comment regarding what will happen to those employees, nor what severance, if any, it will provide them should they be laid off.
With the Chicago factory closing, Blommer said it plans to reinvest $100 million into its three remaining chocolate factories and cocoa-processing plants in North America — $40 million to further automate its facilities in Pennsylvania and California, and $60 million to make a plant in Ontario, Canada "one of the largest confectionery coating manufacturing facilities in North America."
Blommer also said it will still maintain a presence in Chicago, keeping its corporate headquarters in the city's Merchandise Mart commercial center. It further announced a it would launch a new "research & development center" in the Merchandise Mart this fall that will "support future development, concept testing, processing and ingredient research."
Japanese food processing company Fuji Oil Holdings acquired Blommer in 2018 for $750 million, calling the aging Chicago factory's life expectancy into question. The announcement of the plant's closure comes on the heels of Fuji's shareholders facing a string of relatively bad years. The company's operating profits dipped from ¥17.9 billion in 2021 to ¥10.9 billion in 2023, or from about $118.4 million to $72.3 million USD.
Blommer nevertheless remains one of the largest chocolate and cocoa-processing companies in North America, with Crain's reporting that it handles 45% of all cocoa beans processed in the U.S. It also claims to employ over 900 people, though Courthouse News was unable to independently verify that figure.
Blommer also boasts of being a leader in "advancing sustainable cocoa farming" as one of the founders of the World Cocoa Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit launched in 2000 that claims to be committed to combating child labor, improving cocoa farmer income and reversing deforestation.
However, critics have accused the World Cocoa Foundation of obscuring how many of its members — which include Mondelez International, Nestle and Mars — continue to profit from unethical labor in the chocolate industry. A 2020 report from the U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs found that over 1.56 million children work on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the two countries that produce almost 60% of the world's cocoa.
In 2005, six Malian men sued two World Cocoa Foundation members, Nestle and Cargill, Inc. — the same company that owned half of Blommer's shares in the early 90s — in federal court. They claimed they had been trafficked as children to work as slaves on cocoa farms that supplied the two corporations. Through a circuitous, 15-year legal saga, they took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, only for high court justices to bounce their case in June 2021 in an 8-1 decision.
An independent 2022 report from the cocoa industry watchdog group VOICE also concluded that "of the sixteen board members of the World Cocoa Foundation, not one is from West Africa. None are black."
The same report ranked Blommer among the worst-performing in farm traceability of all the companies VOICE investigated. Of all the cocoa Blommer used in 2021, it could only trace about 40% of it back to where it was farmed.
Follow @djbyrnes1
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
California certifies March 5 primary election results April 12, 2024 -
