Blue Diamond's 35-Acre Midtown Pivot: From Almond Factory to Housing Hub

Sacramento’s industrial landscape just got a major facelift. After months of uncertainty, Blue Diamond Growers has announced it’s selling 35 acres of its Midtown plant to Bardis&Miry Development, a Sacramento-based outfit that’s planning to transform the longtime almond processing hub into something radically different: a mixed-use community with 1,000 to 2,000 new homes, ground-floor retail, and various“community amenities.”

The move marks a striking reversal from Blue Diamond’s initial consolidation plan. Back in June 2025, the company announced it would shutter its Sacramento operations entirely, moving everything to Turlock and Salida because the local facility had become, in their words,“costly and inefficient.”But that all-or-nothing approach didn’t stick. Last month, the company closed its gift shop but kept its processing doors open, realizing that specialized in-shell almond equipment and on-site storage made Sacramento irreplaceable for that particular operation. About 90 employees will stay on to handle that work, and Blue Diamond’s corporate headquarters will remain at the campus through at least April 2030 under a three-year leaseback agreement.

What this really signals is a broader reckoning about industrial land in Sacramento’s urban core. The 35 acres being sold represent a vote of confidence that the Midtown area’s future lies in residential density and walkable retail, not food processing. Katherine Bardis-Miry and Bay Miry, the developers behind the project, say they’re still in preliminary planning stages and that“all redevelopment options remain on the table”—a careful way of saying the final shape of the project will depend on community input, city approvals, and market conditions.

For the neighborhood, this could be transformative. For Blue Diamond, it’s a pragmatic compromise: keep what’s essential, monetize the rest, and collect steady leaseback income while it winds down. For Sacramento as a whole, it’s another data point in a larger story about how old industrial sites are being recycled into denser, more urban places. The next chapter will depend on how neighborhoods respond and whether the city and developers can genuinely honor the site’s history while building something new.