The long-running California-to-Texas business exodus was alive and well in headquarters moves in 2023.
Of 19 headquarters relocations that made headlines in Dallas-Fort Worth this year, 11 of those involved companies moving from the Golden State to the Lone Star State.
However, the biggest corporate relocation of the year belonged to a multibillion-dollar firm exiting the East Coast for more modern offices in Dallas’ Uptown district.
Connecticut-based Frontier Communications made its headquarters move to McKinney Avenue official in September, pledging to create as many as 3,000 new jobs in Texas over the next decade. The cable and internet provider chose Dallas over competing cities such as Tampa.
With just under $5.8 billion in revenue in 2022, Frontier became one of the 30 largest publicly traded companies to call D-FW home.
Among the California transplants to North Texas, food manufacturers and technology companies were the most prominent this year.
In May, Cacique Foods relocated its corporate headquarters from Monrovia, Calif., to Irving. As one of the leading brands in Mexican food products, the company said it wanted to deepen its Texas connections and better serve customers in a centralized location.
Cacique leads a billion-dollar category of foods with at least one of its products in 80% of grocery stores across the country. The food maker known for its Mexican-style cheeses, cremas and chorizos also opened a new dairy processing facility in Amarillo.
Last year, frozen Mexican food maker Ruiz Food Products established Frisco as a co-headquarters with its Dinuba, Calif., office. This year, the more than 50-year-old family-owned business made its Hall Park office its sole corporate hub with its California office remaining a manufacturing facility. Ruiz produces frozen burritos, taquitos, enchiladas and tamales under the El Monterey and Tornados brand names for grocery stores throughout the U.S. and Canada.
In August, the direct-selling company behind a $1,500 cooking appliance said it would move its corporate headquarters from Thousand Oaks, Calif., to Dallas by the end of this year. Thermomix sales consultants host in-home cooking experiences to demo its signature TM6 Wi-Fi-connected appliance, which features 28 functions and access to over 80,000 guided recipes.
In March, another food-related company quietly made its corporate move from Davis, Calif., to Dallas. Arcadia Biosciences, a publicly traded company that now makes plant-based food, beverage and body care products, set up its new home base on Sherry Lane.
Its brands include GoodWheat pasta and pancake mixes and Zola coconut water.
“Over the last three years, Arcadia has transformed from an R&D-focused biotechnology company to a vertically-integrated consumer packaged goods company that produces and markets next-generation food and beverage products, leveraging our proprietary innovations in agricultural crops,” CEO Stan Jacot told The Dallas Morning News in an email.
During that transition, Arcadia became a virtual company with employees spread throughout the U.S.
“We selected Dallas as our corporate office location due to its central location, ease of travel options in and out of the city, and its business-friendly climate,” said Jacot, who formerly held executive roles in D-FW with Mission Foods and Borden Dairy Co.
Arcadia went public in 2015 in initial stock offerings that raised about $68 million. Its revenue totaled just under $10 million in 2022.
Food-related businesses weren’t the only California transplants.
Technology firms Inbenta, Informativ and McAfee also made D-FW their hubs. Inbenta, an international artificial intelligence firm, shifted its headquarters from the San Francisco area to an office tower on U.S. Highway 75 in Allen. Informativ, formerly Fresno, Calif.-based Credit Bureau Connection, moved its headquarters to Frisco and rebranded. The lead generation and credit report company serving automotive dealers and lenders is backed by a Houston-based private equity firm.
McAfee, a California-based global firm specializing in online security software, set up a regional headquarters in Frisco in July. It’s home to about 220 employees in finance, accounting, product revenue, technology services, marketing and customer service.
Other West Coast movers this year included Kelley-Moore Paint Co., home builder Landsea Homes and military-grade eyewear maker Wiley X.
Kelly-Moore Paint Co. relocated its corporate headquarters from the San Francisco area to Irving’s Las Colinas business district. The firm opened a North Texas manufacturing plant more than five years ago in Hurst.
With annual sales of about $400 million and a workforce of more than 1,200, Kelly-Moore sells its products in 157 stores in California, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas. It competes against paint giants like Sherwin-Williams, with more than $22 billion in revenue, and Benjamin Moore, with more than $1 billion in sales.
The California transplants are among at least 237 companies that exited the state since 2005, with many citing its regulatory and tax climate, according to a tally kept by the California Policy Center. More than half moved to Texas.
Three other notable moves didn’t involve California.
Fisher Investments pulled up stakes in Washington state and made Plano its new corporate home following a court ruling in March that upheld the constitutionality of a capital gains tax on the state’s wealthiest residents.
The company, founded in 1979 by investing guru Ken Fisher, has over 1,200 workers in Dallas-Fort Worth and 4,200 in the U.S.
Allen’s new 14-acre Prodigy Park landed the new U.S. headquarters of Omnilife, a Mexico-based nutritional products and supplement firm.
And Irving won the western headquarters of rapidly growing home improvement company West Shore Home. Its 80,000-square-foot headquarters in the Las Colinas area will serve as the home base for all the company’s business west of the Mississippi River.
Since its founding in 2006 as a local remodeling company based in Mechanicsburg, Pa., West Shore Home has expanded into 17 states with 36 branch locations, with five of those states coming in the past two years. The company is most known for its promise to install new showers, bathtubs, windows and doors in one day.
