The Spreckels Sugar Company is an American sugar beet refiner that for many years was the largest beet sugar producer in the western United States. The company was incorporated in 1896 and originally headquartered in San Francisco, with its largest operation being its beet sugar refinery in the company town of Spreckels, near Salinas, California. It has operated seven more factory locations during its years of operations. As of 2025, the company is still in business as a sugar wholesaler to the food and beverage industry and is a wholly owned division of the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative (SMBSC). It has one remaining factory, located in the Imperial Valley town of Brawley, California, where the company is also headquartered. In 2025, SMBSC announced that they would be closing the Brawley factory during the following year and shutting down its Spreckels Sugar division.
The Spreckels Sugar Company was founded by industrialist Claus Spreckels (1828–1908), the so-called "Sugar King" of California, in 1896. The company was a continuation of Spreckels's efforts to produce beet sugar in the Central Coast area of California. He had previously been one of the owners of the ultimately unsuccessful Soquel Beet Root Sugar Company in what is now Capitola from 1873 to 1879. In 1888, he opened the Western Beet Sugar Company, which ran a much-larger factory in Watsonville, and financed sugar beet cultivation in the surrounding Pajaro Valley. By the end of the 1890s, Spreckels envisioned rebuilding a larger and more modern factory, but felt that the Salinas Valley would have greater potential for large-scale production of beets. [1] [2] [3]
The Spreckels Sugar Company was incorporated in San Francisco on August 6, 1896 [4] and subsumed Spreckels's Watsonville operation, the Western Beet Sugar Company. The company's first factory was opened in February 1899 and was located a few miles south of the city of Salinas. At the time of its opening, the Spreckels Sugar Factory was the largest sugar refinery in the United States and the third largest in the world. The company town of Spreckels, California was built in the area around the factory. [1] [2] [3] The company also owned extensive tracts of beet-growing farmland throughout the Salinas Valley, as far south as King City.[ citation needed ] Shipping to and from the plant was mostly by a private Spreckels-owned narrow-gauge railroad system connecting to the docks at Moss Landing and to sugar beet-growing areas in the Pajaro Valley. [5] [6] Though most of the company's operations were in the Salinas and Pajaro Valleys, its headquarters was located in San Francisco.[ citation needed ]
Upon Claus Spreckels' death in 1908, his second son Adolph B. Spreckels (1857–1924) assumed the management of Spreckels Sugar Company. On Adolph Spreckels death, controlling interest in the company would pass to his wife, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels. The company would open two additional factories during this time, in Manteca (1917) and Woodland (1936) in California's Central Valley.
The company's fortunes would be badly affected by the spread of beet curly top virus in the 1920s. The Manteca factory ceased operations for 9 years after the close of the season in 1922. By 1926, the sugar beet supply in California would become so low that the company had its worst year to date and nearly closed down. The years of the Great Depression would ironically represent a period of recovery for the company, due to a combination of the development of curly top-resistant varieties of sugar beet, new demands for a profitable cash crop by farmers, and the availability of cheap "Dust Bowl" labor in California. [4]
The Spreckels family continued to hold a majority stake in Spreckels Sugar Company through the 1930s and 1940s, but took little interest in the company, doing little to reinvest in the company, and instead draining the company's coffers to maintain their personal fortunes. [4] In 1949, the company was sold to pay off debts, however, Alma Spreckels managed to engineer a takeover of the company by her nephew, Charles de Bretteville, who led a group that purchased controlling shares.
In 1963, Charles de Bretteville sold his interests to the American Sugar Company, which had been a major shareholder in Spreckels Sugar Company since its founding. American Sugar, which changed its name to Amstar Corporation in 1970, operated Spreckels Sugar as a division of the company for the next 24 years. The Spreckels division became less profitable by the 1980s, and the company would close down its original sugar factory in Spreckels, California in 1982, though it continued to use the site as a storage and packaging facility. [7] In 1985, the company moved its headquarters to Pleasanton, California after being headquartered in San Francisco for 88 years. [8]
In 1987, a management-led group of investors purchased several divisions of Amstar, including Spreckels Sugar, as well as other divisions that specialized in the production of industrial machinery and tools. The new company was known as Spreckels Industries and operated Spreckels Sugar as a division of the company. [9] By the mid-1990s, the management of Spreckels Industries decided that their industrial products divisions were more lucrative and sold Spreckels Sugar to the sugar conglomerate Imperial Holly Corporation in 1996. Spreckels Industries changed its name to Yale International, Inc and would soon after be acquired by the machinery company Columbus McKinnon. [10] [11]
Imperial Holly Corporation was the result of Imperial Sugar's 1988 buyout of the Holly Sugar Corporation, [12] and following the 1996 merger, Spreckels Sugar was merged into the Holly Sugar Corporation subsidiary, but did business as Spreckels Sugar in California while using the Holly Sugar name in Wyoming and other mountain states. At the time of the merger in 1996, there were three active Spreckels Sugar factories in operation, and three additional California factories acquired from Holly Sugar. The Manteca and Hamilton City plants were closed soon after the merger and the Tracy and Brawley factories were rebranded as Spreckels Sugar operations. Imperial Holly would downsize the division over the next decade, closing the Woodland and Tracy plants in 2000 and selling the remaining Holly Sugar refineries in other states as well.
In 2005, Imperial sold its Holly Sugar Corporation subsidiary to Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative (SMBSC) of Renville, Minnesota, [13] [14] but retained the rights to the Holly Sugar brand name [15] while selling the rights to the Spreckels Sugar brand to SMBSC. SMBSC then relaunched Spreckels Sugar Company as a wholly owned subsidiary. The company closed its factory in Mendota in 2008 and its distribution facility in Tracy in 2009, [16] leaving the Brawley refinery as its sole remaining operation, and the last remaining sugar beet factory in California. This location also serves as the headquarters of the company. The company is currently exclusively a sugar wholesaler and sells refined sugar in bulk to the food and beverage industry, with a secondary business in beet molasses and beet pulp that is sold for commercial yeast manufacture and for animal feed. [17] [18]
In April 2025, SMBSC announced that they would be decommissioning the Brawley, California refinery and closing the Spreckels Sugar division, ending sugar production in August 2025 and shutting down the site entirely in late 2025 or early 2026 once remaining product stocks had been sold. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] Spreckels Sugar Company is the last remaining beet sugar factory in California. [21] [23] It is expected that the closure will have a significant impact on the economy of Imperial County, with the loss of hundreds of jobs and local beet farmers left scrambling to find an alternate crop. [22] [23] [24]
| Location | Coordinates | Designation | Opened | Closed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spreckels, California | 36°37′12″N121°39′29″W / 36.620°N 121.658°W | Factory #1 | 1899 | 1982 | The site continued to operate as storage and packing facility after 1982. The factory was irreparably damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and finally demolished in 1992. In 1995, all remaining operations at Spreckels were sold to Tanimura & Antle. |
| Manteca, California | 37°47′35″N121°12′00″W / 37.793°N 121.200°W | Factory #2 | 1917 | 1996 | |
| Woodland, California | 38°42′47″N121°45′14″W / 38.713°N 121.754°W | Factory #3 | 1937 | 2000 | |
| Mendota, California | 36°44′17″N120°19′12″W / 36.738°N 120.320°W | Factory #4 | 1963 | 2008 | |
| Chandler, Arizona | 33°13′12″N111°49′30″W / 33.220°N 111.825°W | Factory #5 | 1967 | 1984 | |
| Hamilton City, California | 39°44′17″N122°00′32″W / 39.738°N 122.009°W | (none) | 1996‡ | 1996 | ‡ Acquired from Holly Sugar Co in 1996. Closed soon after merger. |
| Tracy, California | 37°46′19″N121°25′19″W / 37.772°N 121.422°W | (none) | 1996‡ | 2000 | ‡ Acquired from Holly Sugar Co in 1996. Site operated as a packing and distribution facility until 2009. |
| Brawley, California | 32°54′36″N115°34′05″W / 32.910°N 115.568°W | (none) | 1996‡ | ‡ Acquired from Holly Sugar Co in 1996. Slated for closure by 2026. |
Spreckels, California survived the closure of the original Spreckels Sugar factory in 1982 and as of the 2000s is considered one of the best-preserved former company towns in California.[ citation needed ] Spreckels Boulevard outside Salinas, as well as Spreckels Road outside King City, and Spreckels Boulevard in Manteca, still bear witness to the mark Spreckels Sugar made in the area. [25]
American author John Steinbeck worked on ranches owned by Spreckels Sugar throughout the Salinas Valley in the early 1920s.[ citation needed ]