Governor Beverly Perdue, along with local and state officials gathered at the former Dell Inc. plant on Temple School Road in Winston-Salem Wednesday for a major economic announcement.

“You can see all these green signs behind me. Today, we are here to announce that Herbalife will locate its manufacturing plant here in Winston-Salem North Carolina,” said Perdue.

California-based Herbalife makes weight loss, nutritional and personal care products. The global company says the Winston-Salem site will manufacture nutritional powders and liquid shakes. The products will be shipped to more than 40 countries.

Herbalife officials said they will invest more than $100-million over the next several years at the site. The company said it is in the process of buying the manufacturing plant from Dell.

Richard Goudis, chief operating officer at Herbalife, said the company will create around 500 new jobs in Forsyth County.

“You are going to see a range of employees anywhere from the plant manager all the way to people working food service in the cafeteria . We are very dietary supplement GMP and FDA oriented so there will be a lot of science oriented people as well as fork lift operators, supervisors and line operators for filling and packaging lines,” said Goudis.

Herbalife plans to partner with Forsyth Technical Community College to help train its workforce.

Goudis said the jobs will pay an average salary of around $42,000 per year. He says the company chose Winston-Salem for its new manufacturing site over Atlanta for several reasons.

“We chose Winston-Salem because of the community focus on wellness, and the great universities that are here, specifically we met with the President of Wake Forest University to understand more about their wellness program, said Goudis.

“We also chose the city because we had support from the business community and the unemployment rate. The unemployment in this area at the time we were looking was around 14 percent, in the Atlanta area it is as low as four percent. We wanted to bring this plant to an area that would welcome us and needed that type of infusion of capital,” said Goudis.

Herbalife will also receive tax incentives from state and local governments.

“We will be investing around $2-million dollars over a seven year period, but the monies that are paid by the company to the city, we return a portion of those back to the company. There are no monies coming out of the city’s general budget to pay for this. In fact, we will net over 400,000 dollars over that same seven year period,” said Allen Joines, mayor of Winston-Salem.