Abbott plans 195 layoffs at Solano County plant tied to discontinued ZonePerfect nutrition bar brand
Abbott Laboratories plans to lay off 195 employees this spring and summer as it closes its two-decade-old Nutrition division plant in Solano County.
The Illinois-based health care products giant intends to begin cutting jobs May 18 at the 83,990-square-foot facility at 2302 Courage Drive in Fairfield and complete the layoffs in September, according to a state filing.
“This was a difficult decision to make and was reached only after analyzing the options available to the company to obtain significant reductions in costs,” Sarah Chomiak, divisional vice president for employee relations, wrote in the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice dated March 19.
Abbott Nutrition, best known for its Ensure meal replacements and Similac infant formula, ranked third among the company’s four divisions in 2023 sales, at $8.15 billion out of $40.1 billion globally last year. U.S. sales alone for the division last year were $3.4 billion, or 22% of the $15.45 billion domestic total for the company.
While Nutrition division sales growth in 2023 (9.3%) ranked second companywide, behind Medical Devices (14.1%), Abbott’s total sales growth from 2022 was down 8.1% because of a 39.4% drop in Diagnostic division sales, which the company has noted is because of a fall-off in COVID-19 testing.
A big drop in pandemic testing also was tied to Thermo Fisher Scientific’s laying off 74 workers at its Petaluma facility and plans to close that nearly 90,000-square-foot facility this year, the Journal reported.
But what seems to be at play in Abbott Nutrition’s plant closure in Solano is the phase-out of a nutrition bar product line.
The Fairfield site is one of the company’s “priority manufacturing plants” for making ZonePerfect protein bars, according to a LinkedIn job posting early this year by an Abbott recruiter. On March 20, the company announced on Instagram it decided to discontinue the brand.
A division spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The ZonePerfect brand was started in 1996 as an outgrowth of the anti-inflammatory diet popularized by biochemist Barry Sears in his 1995 book “The Zone.” In 2003, Abbott acquired Massachusetts-based ZonePerfect Nutrition Company for $160 million in cash and folded it into its Ross Products Division, which was later renamed Abbott Nutrition.
Abbott’s presence in Solano came via MLO Products, according to Brooks Pedder, a CBRE real estate agent who brokered MLO’s significant expansion deals in the Fairfield area in the early 2000s.
How Ross Products Division came to occupy the Courage Drive property and an associated property at 2351 N. Watney Way in the city couldn’t be independently verified. MLO, Ross Products and Abbott were listed on building permits for the same buildings in the early 2000s, according to city records.
MLO Products was started in 1964 by San Francisco food chemist and amateur bodybuilder Milliard “Mel” Williamson to make sports nutrition bars and protein powders, according to trade journal Prepared Foods. The company in 1997 launched the GeniSoy brand, which was sold in 2005.
Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.
