Blue Diamond Growers is not walking away from Midtown Sacramento entirely after all. The almond powerhouse now says it will keep part of its C Street processing campus open, preserving in-shell processing and storage and roughly 90 jobs at the downtown site, while preparing to put a large portion of the 53-acre property on the market.
What Blue Diamond Is Keeping
According to The Sacramento Bee, Blue Diamond plans to hold on to its in-shell almond processing and storage facilities on the north side of the C Street campus. Those operations are expected to support about 90 positions, a smaller but still significant footprint in the neighborhood.
Jeff Hatfield, the company’s chief global supply officer, told the Bee that “right now we’re not in any rush to move” and that Blue Diamond will “take advantage of using that space while we have it.” In other words, Midtown keeps a piece of its almond empire a little longer.
What Will Move And The Timeline
This partial reversal does not change the broader plan to shift a majority of manufacturing and hundreds of jobs to Blue Diamond’s facilities in Turlock and Salida, a strategy the company first announced in June 2025. As reported by KCRA, the Midtown plant employed more than 600 people as of last summer.
In a June 2025 company release, Blue Diamond said an estimated 600 team members would be impacted by the transition. The cooperative projected that remaining manufacturing at the C Street site would wind down by the end of 2026, with in-shell operations expected to continue into 2027.
Support For Workers And The Property Sale
As jobs migrate out of Sacramento, Blue Diamond has been working with the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency to organize job fairs and training opportunities for affected employees. Company officials have also said they hope to lease back their headquarters space from whoever ultimately buys the property.
According to The Sacramento Bee, one of the first highly visible signs of the campus transition will come on April 24, 2026, when the Blue Diamond Nut & Gift Shop on the campus is set to close.
Why The Campus Matters
The Midtown site has anchored a chunk of Sacramento’s industrial landscape since the early 20th century, and keeping some operations there maintains a working link between the city and California’s almond economy. Blue Diamond represents nearly 3,000 almond farmer-owners, per the cooperative’s website, and export demand, with countries such as India among the largest markets, helps explain why in-shell receiving and storage still make sense at a downtown location, according to the Almond Board of California.
City officials and developers will now wrestle with what to do with the southern portion of the 53-acre campus as it hits the market. Blue Diamond says its corporate headquarters will remain in Sacramento for the foreseeable future. The new plan leaves a smaller industrial footprint in Midtown than many longtime residents expected, but it keeps a slice of the city’s blue-collar job base intact while the cooperative shifts much of its manufacturing to the Central Valley.
