Jacksonville's manufacturing scene is a Florida anomaly. Jacksonville is home to several manufacturers making products that one would not expect to find in Florida. Here's a few.
1. Anchor Glass Container Corporation
2121 Huron Street
Jacksonville, FL 32254
Image courtesy of Ardagh Glass
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With as much as 624,000 square feet, the Anchor Glass Container Company is the only glass bottle plant in the State of Florida. Paying between $400,000 to $900,000 a month on energy costs, it's also one of JEA's major accounts. Glass making on the site actually dates as far back as the 1926 when Antonio Scalise founded the Tropical Glass and Box Company. Scalise's clients included Pepsi-Cola of Florida, Dixie Lily Company, and Frostie Root Beer. Daily tours of the plant were also allowed between 10:30am and 4:30pm. By the 1960s, Tropical Glass and Box had been acquired by the Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation. In 1983, Anchor Glass Container was carved out of Anchor Hocking by Wesray Capital Corporation, a private equity pioneer co-founded by William Simon, U.S. Treasury secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Over the last twenty years, employment at Florida's only glass manufacturing plant has hovered between 235 and 400. Today, it makes 2.7 million beer bottles a day for its only client, Jacksonville's Anheuser Busch brewery.