From left: Brothers Ed and David Mafoud at the new Newark facility and 56 Gold Street in Brooklyn

The city of Newark will become a second home to Brooklyn-based Damascus Bakeries, which has agreed to open a new 117,000-square-foot facility in the city’s South Ward in 2012. Damascus, a family-owned supplier of pitas and panini bread since 1930, has been looking for new facilities for at least three years, agreed to buy an old manufacturing plant at 60 McClellan Street in Newark and will redevelop the site to hold 180 employees, including new hires and workers from its current Brooklyn offices at 56 Gold Street.

“We’ve had a very good year in communicating the advantages of Newark for food-related manufacturing or distribution,” said Lyneir Richardson, chief executive of the Brick City Development Corp. “From Newark they can distribute products from Buffalo to Baltimore.” [more]

The site at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue and Newark Mayor Corey Booker

Mayor Corey Booker is expected to announce a deal with Stamford, Conn.-based Pitney Bowes tonight, which signed a seven-year lease to relocate its international mail distribution center to Newark, a deal that will bring 180 jobs to the city and provide for another 25 new jobs over the next five years. Pitney Bowes agreed to lease 76,000 square feet of space at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue, an existing Urban Enterprise Zone location that includes 64,000 square feet of production space and 12,000 square feet of office space. The new facility will be used to sort 50 million pieces of international mail per year.
UEZ was established by the state of New Jersey in 1983 to revitalize urban communities and stimulate growth by encouraging businesses to develop and create private sector jobs through investment. “This part of our business — a combination of international mail and the pre-sorting of domestic mail — has been a very rapidly growing part of Pitney Bowes,” said spokesperson Matthew Broder, in a telephone interview. “As the network has grown, we’ve been on a pretty constant search for facilities to keep up with it.” [more]