The historic Tom’s Foods plant in Columbus has a new owner. What does the future hold?
The downtown Columbus manufacturing facilities once belonging to Tom’s Foods have a new owner, parties involved in the transaction told the Ledger-Enquirer Friday.
New Mill Capital, a disposition and acquisition firm with offices in New York and other U.S. cities, purchased 28.3-acres with roughly 510,000 square feet of buildings last week from the Campbell Soup Company. The properties are on 10th Avenue, 6th Street, 8th Street and 9th Avenue.
The total sales price and other terms of purchase are subjected to a non-disclosure agreement, but the price is in the millions, according to sources close to the deal. Details of the sale did not appear in real estate records filed with the Muscogee County Superior Court Friday afternoon.
How will the deal work?
New Mill will auction off the equipment inside the facilities, beginning in June. NAI G2 Commerical, a Columbus real estate firm, will lease or sell the properties to new tenants on New Mill’s behalf. New Mill formed a new company, Industrial Columbus LLC, to manage the property.
New Mill leased the property’s “peanut building” back to Campbell for several months so the food company can produce peanut paste as it works to transfer those operations to Charlotte, said Gregory Schain, the New Mill executive who manages the company’s real estate property acquisitions.
“Our hope is that the market remains strong for industrial space,” he said. “Our hope is to attract other businesses in the future, whether it is one or multiple, to these buildings. They are very functional. Columbus is a growing and strong industrial market.”
NAI G2 Managing Director David Johnson told the Ledger-Enquirer it will release marketing information for the properties in the coming days. A warehouse on Martin Luther King Boulevard has been sold, and another property on 9th Avenue is under contract.
“This is a very good project (and) puts industrial property on the market. ...Availability of any type of industrial property (has) been extremely tight in this market for two-plus years.”
Tom’s Foods was founded in 1925 by businessman and inventor Tom Huston, who came to the city after Columbus Iron Works agreed to produce his hand-operated mechanical peanut sheller, according to a Historic Columbus blog post, citing Sara Crawford and Janis Eberhardt’s “Tom’s: Back Home Where We Belong” and Virginia Causey’s “Red Clay, White Water, and Blues.”
His bagged, toasted and salted peanuts were an instant success. The company grew from a 32nd Street shotgun building to topping $2 million in sales by 1929. Huston’s work brought him into close economic partnership with famed agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver.
Huston left the company on bad terms in the early 1930s, but it continued to grow. General Mills acquired Tom’s in 1966. After Rowntree-Mackintosh acquired Tom’s in the 1980s, the Columbus operation changed hands a few times.
Campbell Soup Company purchased Tom’s Foods in 2018. In January 2021, Campbell announced that it would close its Columbus operations in the spring of 2022.
This story was originally published April 8, 2022 at 4:27 PM.