Welch’s Relocating to BXP-Owned Property in Waltham

Reservoir Place. Photo courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield

Welch’s Grapes is set to depart the town that gave Concord grapes their name and its headquarters of the past four decades after inking an office headquarters lease in Waltham.

The juice and snacks manufacturer leased 60,000 square feet at 1601 Trapelo Road for a new headquarters that is scheduled to open in 2025.

The Reservoir Place office park owned by Boston Properties contains two buildings totaling 600,000 square feet. The new offices will include office and lab space, and a renovation project is scheduled to begin this summer led by Boston-based architects SGA and project manager A/E/C Solutions.

The deal represents the largest suburban Boston corporate headquarters move of 2024, according to brokerage Cushman & Wakefield which represented Welch’s in its property search.

Welch’s, which is owned by the National Grape Cooperative Association, is currently headquartered at 300 Baker Ave. in Concord, where it occupies 84,000 square feet, according to a Boston Globe report.

Welch’s CEO Trevor Bynum said in a statement the move will support the company’s growth and innovation goals.

Demand for suburban office space continued to decline in the first quarter, according to a CBRE report. The nearly 106 million-square-foot Boston suburban market had over 742,000 square feet of negative absorption.

In the Route 128 west submarket, the vacancy rate was 18.5 percent in the first quarter, CBRE reported.

Boston Properties executives recently said the firm’s suburban Boston portfolio saw a “strong pick-up” in activity beginning in early 2023. The firm is in negotiations or has signed leases with tenants for more than 220,000 square feet of office and lab space in recent months, President Douglas Linde told analysts during the company’s first-quarter earnings call on May 1.