Nestle to move professional beverage headquarters to Tampa

Nestle, the Swiss conglomerate best known in America for its chocolate, is moving the headquarters of its professional beverage division to downtown Tampa.

Nestle has announced it is buying Vitality Foodservice Inc., formerly the juice division of Lykes Bros., which operates from downtown Tampa's Colonial Bank tower.

The newly merged company will likely take over more offices to accommodate an undisclosed number of Nestle employees shifting to Tampa from Glendale, Calif.

"I don't know quite how many people will move to Tampa," Vitality president and chief executive Gary Viljoen said Tuesday. "But there will be some relocations."

Lykes got out of the juice business in 1999, turning over its Dade City processing plant to Vitality. What used to employ 1,000 in a massive squeezing and packaging operation now employs just 15 people making coffee extract.

The fate of the Dade City coffee operation is uncertain, Viljoen said. Nestle plans to beef up Vitality's beverage lineup. It will stress the hot drinks, including Nestea, for which Nestle is known. The merged company wants to grow sales by about a third over the next five years.

"Health drinks are key," Viljoen said.

Vitality employs 700, including about 100 in the Tampa Bay area. Most of the rest work in a Chicago plant. Under Nestle ownership, the new company will be called Nestle Professional Vitality Beverage Solutions.

A large part of Vitality's business is selling and servicing institutional dispensers of drinks such as Tetley tea and Sunkist citrus juice.

Nestle also owns Zephyrhills Natural Spring Water, produced in Pasco County. But it belongs to a different corporate division, Nestle Waters North America.

The Nestle-Vitality merger is expected to close in late December.

James Thorner can be reached at jthorner@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3313.