Fear of demolition sparks hope to make it National Historic Site
At the June auction, some Tupperware offices still looked alive with activity. (Photos/Ken Jackson)
The 43-acre site on Orange Blossom Trail that housed the worldwide headquarters for the Tupperware Brands corporation has hit the market for sale.
While parking lots along Mary Louis Lane are full of Teslas for a nearby sales and delivery center, the “For Sale” sign recently went up at the OBT front entrance.
Records show commercial agent group CBRE is listing 41 acres and nearly 216,000 square feet of office and industrial space across seven buildings.
“Potential uses for the site include warehousing, manufacturing, office, cold storage, heavy parking, outside storage or distribution,” the sale listing notes.”
For decades, the campus bustled with the activity of the worldwide company, housing hundreds of employees. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 made the workforce work from home, and reports say that many of the employees took to working remotely and did not return to the office.
Sometime in 2021, Tupperware sold the property to O’Connor Capital Partners LLC and leased it back. Records show O’Connor quickly sold it to real estate holdings company Spiriti Realty Capital of San Diego, Calif. for $43 million. Spiriti was acquired by Realty Income in 2024, which took over ownership of the site, which was bought by company founder Earl Tupper in 1953 and began housing operations in 1954.
While Tupperware revolutionized food and kitchen storage in the latter half of the 20th century and became a household name, on the strength of the “Tupperware party” in-home sales model in the 1960s and 1970s, it plateaued and became “troubled for years” according to a LinkedIn post authored by Rick Goings. He served as CEO from the mid-1990s to 2016.
“My first act on Day One was to take the iconic building off the market,” the post reads. “That was an easy decision as every pillar of the building was emblazoned with the names of sales leaders from around the world who had helped build the renown company.
“When I arrived at Tupperware’s world headquarters and settled into my new office, I found the cabinets crammed with an abundance of consultancy plans, filled with their golden ideas of what needed to be done to resurrect the company. During the first few months my office received a barrage of calls from those same consulting firms and others wanting to come and “help”.
Whether the pandemic had a hand in it or not, the company began cutting operations in some foreign companies in the 2020s, and parent company Tupperware Brands filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2024 and the campus was closed on the last day of the year.
The county’s property appraiser’s website shows the land owned by Spiriti Realty has a value of $27.9 million, including the structures.
O’Connor Capital still holds about 485 acres closer to Orange Avenue, adjacent to the Tupperware SunRail station. It’s among its other area properties that include the Crosslands and Cinque Terre shopping centers just across Orange Blossom Trail, and the Tesla Sales Service and Delivery Center on OBT just south of Osceola Parkway.
In June, an auction was held to sell off items inside the Tupperware headquarters building, including office furniture and supplies, items from the building’s main kitchen and cafeteria and, frankly, many other things left behind by the company. A couple of the attendees who came as buyers said they had worked in the building but did not share their names.
“If these walls could talk, there would be some great stories,” one woman said.
Lifelong Kissimmee resident Sherry Marcoe worked at the headquarters as a clerk in the 1980, and was able to tour the husk of the buildings the week after the auction while buyers were picking up their merchandise. Her thoughts were like those at the auction—that it would be “really sad” if the buildings were torn down.
“It was like a family working there. People took care of each other. It would be sad because of what those buildings represent … a company that took care of a lot of people.”
Fred Daunno, a longtime art director for the company, said he and Marcoe worked with another employee, Bill Simpson, who led luncheons for other former employees. He volunteered to put together an alumni newsletter after he retired in 2008.
The company was still a part of what I did after I retired,” Daunno said. “It meant a lot to me. It was a company that genuinely cared about people.”
In November 2024, the Tupperware brand name was acquired by Party Products LLC. A business listing shows that company is headquartered in New York City; contrary to information received by the News-Gazette in March that “the company’s headquarters are still in Florida.” Two messages to an email address to reach company officials provided went unreturned.
It is important to note Tupperware remains active, with consultants still selling the products worldwide. But, a piece of its lineage in Kissimmee will soon be gone.
“It’s going to be the same great product, it’s just backended by a different company,” said Sam Corcione, who maintains a Tupperware History Facebook page; his mother was with the company for over 40 years, he said.
A member of that Facebook group noted a movement to get the main headquarters building, designed and built in the 1960 by renowned architect Edward Durell Stone, who also designed the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and the Florida State Capitol complex in Tallahassee, designated a National Historic Landmark, but it would need to get the (new) owners of the property on board.
“It worries me that it might get torn down,” Daunno said. “It was the last project he did.”
A member of the Orange County Regional History Center & Historical Society confirmed this week that the Center is, “Helping to preserve the history of Tupperware on behalf of Party US Operations LLC.”
The corporation, at one time, owned the entire site, which now includes Osceola School for the Arts and a new housing complex being built on the property just to the south of the headquarter complex. Even if the existing buildings are razed for a new land usage the new housing will pay homage to the company; its entrance road is Royal Tupper Circle.
