The Leslie Salt Company was a salt producing company located in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the current locations of Newark, Hayward and other parts of the bay. They produced salt using salt evaporation ponds on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. By the 1940s, Leslie Salt had become the largest private land owner in the Bay Area. By 1959, they were producing more than one million tons of salt annually, on over 26,000 acres of bay salt ponds. They were purchased by Cargill in 1978.