Less than a month after announcing it would move its headquarters from the North Shore to Virginia, StarKist Co. said it will spend $3.6 million to relocate its corporate and administrative headquarters operations to Fairfax County.
The packaged seafood and chicken company will occupy almost 24,000 square feet at 1875 Explorer St. in Reston, where it expects to have about 83 employees.
"At StarKist we are committed to growing our business in Virginia," said Andrew Choe, president and CEO, StarKist, in the official announcement. "We expect to have more than 80 employees working from our new Reston headquarters starting in April 2022."
“I am so pleased to thank StarKist for choosing Fairfax County for its new headquarters,” said Victor Hoskins, president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, in a statement. “This is a testament to the growing attractiveness of Northern Virginia to a wide variety of industry sectors and companies that know we have the assets and talent base to succeed here.”
The company said its Pittsburgh headquarters on the North Shore, near PNC Park, will close on March 31, 2022.
StarKist Co., originally called the French Sardine Co., was founded in California in 1917 by Martin J. Bogdanovich. In 1953, the French Sardine Co. officially became StarKist Foods.
The seafood company connected with landlocked Pittsburgh when it was sold to the H.J. Heinz Co. in 1963. In 2002, Del Monte Foods acquired StarKist. Then, in 2008, the South Korean firm Dongwon Industries bought the company from Del Monte Foods for $363 million.
StarKist has operations in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
While it’s the world’s largest supplier of canned and packaged tuna with a 47% share of the market, StarKist has been widening its net beyond tuna.
The company has been diversifying to catch other forms of protein — adding salmon in 2015 and chicken in 2018. In addition, it was the first company to develop the single-serve pouch concept for tuna, which gave consumers another option beyond the familiar can that was clunkier and would need to be drained.
Stephanie Ritenbaugh: sritenbaugh@post-gazette.com.
First Published: June 10, 2021, 9:22 p.m.
