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Even cranberries need to fight for Boston’s top tech talent.
Agricultural cooperative Ocean Spray, the maker of Craisins, employs about 400 at its Lakeville, Massachusetts, headquarters. The wooded campus along Interstate 495 may be picturesque, but it isn’t drawing much millennial interest. Ocean Spray is now making a play for younger talent with a new office at the One Seaport Square WeWork, the Boston Globe reports.
Ocean Spray CEO Bobby Chacko, who has been in his role for about a year, decided the expansion to a 4K SF office within the coworking venue in the Seaport was needed to recruit more employees. Chacko views the Seaport as the East Coast’s version of Silicon Valley. He officially opened the company’s new office Monday.
“Primarily it’s about the energy that the city can provide,” he told the Globe. “With a WeWork, you have like-minded, aspirational entrepreneurs.”
About 60 marketing and innovation employees moved from company headquarters to the Seaport, but Ocean Spray is still holding onto its Lakeville campus. The Boston team will primarily focus on developing new products in the health and wellness sector, like Ocean Spray’s Growing Goodness juice line for children and a line of wellness shots expected to debut this summer.
The company’s Seaport move is similar to other groups looking to capitalize on the neighborhood’s growing reputation as a cluster of technology and innovation.
Red Hat has a 175K SF engineering and product headquarters on I-495 in Westford, but it opened a 40K SF executive briefing center and innovation and engineering lab in Fort Point in the summer of 2017.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s main campus is in Central Massachusetts, but it opened a 6K SF office at 303 Congress St. in early 2018 to better connect students, faculty and alumni to nearby tech and innovation companies.
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