Mission Foods, the largest tortilla producer in the U.S., informed the state that it will close its plant at 2110 Santa Fe Drive in Pueblo and lay off 90 workers.
“The entire facility will be closed and all employees at the facility will be impacted. This closure is expected to be permanent,” Kevin Shuman, the company’s director of human resources, informed the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment in a letter dated Friday, Aug. 14.
Shuman said workers would be laid off from Oct. 13-27, which complies with the 60-day notice required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
But the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which represents most of the workers, said the plant closure was immediate.
“On Friday, with no advance warning to workers or the union, corporate executives from Mission Foods came to Pueblo to tell approximately 100 workers that the company’s Pueblo plant would cease to operate effective immediately,” Local 7 said in a news release on Monday.
Workers, including some who had been at the plant for more than four decades, were told to pack their belongings and leave immediately, resulting in both tearful and angry farewells, according to the union.
“Mission Foods should have done better by its workers,” said Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7, in the news release.
Cordova linked the closure to years of “chronic underinvestment in the Pueblo facility” and said that Local 7 would do everything in its power to provide workers with the resources they needed in the transition.
The plant traces its origins to Candelario “Candy” and Cedelia “Sadie” Estrada, who opened a popular family restaurant in Pueblo in 1956.
So many customers requested their home-style tortillas that they opened a commercial production facility a few years later and shut down the restaurant.
Their tortillas became part of Pueblo’s culinary heritage, and the plant provided stable jobs for decades.
Mission Foods, expanding rapidly, purchased the plant in 1994, integrating it into its nationwide production network and stripping away the regional recipes and ingredients.
Mission Foods is a subsidiary of Gruma S.A. in Mexico, a conglomerate with nearly $5 billion a year in revenues controlled by billionaire Juan Antonio González Moreno and his family.
Shuman said in his letter that unionized employees have “bumping” rights, meaning they could displace less senior employees at the company’s distribution centers at 600 Gruma Drive in Pueblo and at 14800 E 35th Pl. in Aurora.
Pueblo’s economy depends heavily on manufacturing, and the region has struggled to keep pace with other areas of the state because of weakness in that sector.
In June, Pueblo had a 5.6% unemployment rate, the highest of any metro area in the state and well above the 3.9% unemployment rate statewide.
