Jura Inc., the U.S. unit of a Swiss coffee machine company, is moving from Closter to a 30,000-square-foot building in Montvale because it needs space for future expansion.
About 50 employees will make the move this summer from Jura’s current 20,000-square-foot building on Ruckman Road in Closter to a building at 20 Craig Road, according to Becky Sawicki, Jura’s senior sales and marketing manager. The new building will include offices, warehouse space and a showroom.
Jura has signed a five-year lease with the building’s owner, Mountain Development Corp. of Woodland Park. Mountain Development took possession of the building after buying its mortgage at a Bergen County sheriff’s auction in 2012. According to Michael Seeve, president of Mountain Development, the building fell into foreclosure after the previous owner, a mortgage business, ran into financial trouble in the housing crash.
The move is the second announced this week to the area off Exit 172 of the Garden State Parkway. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center plans to open a regional cancer center, with 330 employees, in a 145,000-square-foot office building on Summit Avenue, which was previously occupied by Toys “R” Us and Barr Laboratories.
The area, in Montvale and Park Ridge, has long been home to a number of large corporate offices, including Benjamin Moore, BMW and the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. (A&P). But the office vacancy rate in the area has risen as several large corporations, including Hertz and Mercedes Benz USA, have announced plans to move out of state.
Jura Inc. is the U.S. division of Jura Elektroapparate AG, which was founded in 1931 by Leo Henzirohs in the Swiss town of Niederbuchsiten, at the southern end of the Jura mountains. The company is still based there.
Jura sells coffee centers, mostly for home use, under the Jura and Capresso brands. Its Jura brands retail from $800 to $5,600.
Capresso – the name combines cappuccino and espresso – was started in New Jersey in 1994, and has been owned by Jura for about a decade, according to Sawicki. The company has been in Closter for about 18 years.
According to Sawicki, the U.S. headquarters needs to expand because of a rising demand for European-style coffee. The U.S. is now the Swiss company’s second-largest market, after Germany, according to Jura AG’s web site. The company sells its automatic coffee centers in over 50 countries.
The U.S. company does not reveal sales figures, but the parent company says it had 2014 revenues of 378.5 million Swiss francs, which is equal to about $397 million. About 73 percent of its sales are in Europe. It has 685 employees worldwide.
Source: http://www.northjersey.com/news/business/jura-coffee-machine-company-moving-to-montvale-1.1316496
