The nearly 75-year-old Anheuser-Busch beer brewery in Newark will close early next year after being sold, the company said.
The St. Louis-based company announced Thursday that the plant along Routes 1 & 9 will close early next year along with Anheuser-Busch breweries in Fairfield, California and Merrimack, New Hampshire.
The 475-employees at the three plants will be offered jobs at one of Anheuser-Busch's other facilities along with money to move and training to learn new skills. Employees who don't want to relocated will be offered severance packages.
"We will be shifting production from these three facilities to our other U.S. facilities and these changes will enable us to invest even more in our remaining operations and in our portfolio of growing, industry-leading brands," the company said in a statement.
The Newark facility is being sold to the Goodman Group which "plans to repurpose the site for industrial manufacturing and logistics uses," the company said.
At the plant on Thursday, located across from Newark Liberty International Airport, tractor trailers moved in and out of the sprawling compound through a narrow and closely monitored entrance. An NJ Advance Media reporter was not allowed past the gates.
Anheuser-Busch said it has invested $2 billion in its 100 U.S. facilities.
Company leaders averted a nationwide strike last year by agreeing to a five-year agreement that would significantly raise pay, improve health care and retirement benefits, and enhance job security for workers days ahead of a planned walkout.
The Anheuser-Busch brewery in Newark opened in 1951 and is the second oldest of the company's 12 U.S. breweries. The original brewing location and company headquarters opened in 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri .
Many of the company's core brands are brewed at the Newark facility, including Budweiser and Bud Light, Busch, Busch Light, Natural Light and Rolling Rock.
The Newark factory drew praise in 2022 when it stepped in to brew Chernigivske, Anheuser-Busch's most popular beer in Ukraine , after the company closed its three breweries in Ukraine leading up to the invasion by Russia.
There have been other labor battles at the site over the decades. Anheuser-Busch cut 60 jobs at the plant in 2015.
The Anheuser-Busch plant is one of the last working vestiges of Newark's heyday as a beer mecca in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the now-defunct and partly demolished Ballantine brewery was one of the world's largest, and the city's beer barons built mansions that survive to this day in varying states of preservation.
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