Five: It’s home to the biggest guns in the food industry
While New Jersey is the 4th smallest state by land mass, its GDP is a juicy $482bn. It also houses 1,888 food manufacturing companies employing about 31,000 people, 165 of which had annual sales topping $5m. Meanwhile, four of the 107 food companies with a HQ in the state notched up annual sales of more than $1bn: Campbell Soup, Unilever USA, Goya Foods and Pinnacle Food Group.
It’s also known as a global center of excellence in flavors and fragrances, boasting a concentration of jobs and wages in flavors and fragrances that is three times the national average.