America's largest frozen Mexican food manufacturer is slashing nearly 200 jobs at its California plant, two years after moving its headquarters to Texas, and one year after shutting down another California facility entirely.
Ruiz Foods notified 176 employees at its manufacturing plant in Dinuba, California, on September 2 that their jobs would end on November 4, according to a WARN notice, the federal filing companies must submit before mass layoffs, obtained by SF Gate. The cuts represent 12.5% of the Dinuba plant's 1,400-person workforce.
Kimberli Carroll, the company's president and CEO, framed the decision as a business necessity in a statement:
"This difficult decision impacts valued members of our team and is necessary to better align production capacity with anticipated customer demand."
But the layoffs do not exist in a vacuum. They follow a pattern of Ruiz Foods pulling back from California, the state where the company was born, built, and headquartered for nearly six decades.
Fred Ruiz and his father Louis founded the company in 1964 in a small warehouse in Tulare, California, about 40 miles south of Dinuba. They started with two employees, a handful of appliances, and family recipes for enchiladas, burritos, and tamales credited to "Grandma Rosie." By 1990, the company had grown enough to build a full manufacturing facility and distribution warehouse in Dinuba, where it also moved its headquarters.
The growth continued. Ruiz Foods expanded into Texas and South Carolina, opening manufacturing plants in both states. During a 2021 commencement speech at UC Merced, Fred Ruiz said the company's estimated annual sales topped $1 billion and that it employed roughly 4,000 people nationwide.
Then the exits began.
In 2024, Ruiz Foods closed its original Tulare manufacturing facility, eliminating more than 200 jobs. The company said the plant, after 20 years of service, was "too small and requires substantial capital investment to meet our manufacturing needs or remain a viable part of the Ruiz Foods network." That same year, Ruiz Foods relocated its corporate headquarters from Dinuba to Frisco, Texas, a fast-growing suburb north of Dallas.
Now comes the Dinuba layoff round, with 176 more California workers losing their jobs. The company also announced that its production cycle at the Dinuba plant would be cut to five days to "better match production needs, align with operating schedules at other Ruiz Foods manufacturing facilities, and provide Dinuba employees with weekends off."
Combined with the Tulare closure, Ruiz Foods has now shed more than 375 California positions in a short span. The Dinuba plant remains open, and 1,400 workers still have jobs there. But the trajectory is hard to miss. A company that once anchored two Central Valley towns is consolidating operations elsewhere, in states with lighter regulatory loads and no state income tax.
Residents of Dinuba noticed. Members of a local Facebook group posted about the layoffs, and the comments reflected a community that saw this coming. One commenter wrote: "We knew this was coming when they announced their move to Texas a while ago. It was a matter of time before the layoffs happened."
Another pointed to the broader business climate: "Companies can lower their cost of doing business in states with lower taxes, lower wages & less regulatory burdens." A third was more blunt about the math: "They can sell their products in CA, but why be headquartered in CA where they tax you so much. Texas has 0% income tax."
These are anonymous Facebook commenters, not economists. But their instincts track with a well-documented migration of businesses out of California over the past decade. Ruiz Foods has not publicly cited California's tax or regulatory environment as a reason for its moves. Carroll's statement pointed only to aligning production with demand.
What remains unclear is whether the Dinuba cuts were driven by the new Texas headquarters, by shifting consumer demand, or by some combination. The company's official language, "anticipated customer demand", offers little specificity. Ruiz Foods has not said whether additional layoffs or facility changes are planned at any of its locations, including its Texas and South Carolina plants.
The 4,000-employee figure Fred Ruiz cited in 2021 is now several years old. The current total headcount across all Ruiz Foods facilities is not publicly known from available company statements. What is known: California's share of that workforce keeps shrinking.
For the 176 workers in Dinuba who received their notices on September 2, the corporate language about "aligning capacity" translates into something concrete: find a new job by November 4. Many of them work in a rural stretch of the San Joaquin Valley, about 40 miles south of Fresno, where replacement manufacturing jobs are not abundant.
Ruiz Foods built its name on a California story, immigrant family, small warehouse, homemade recipes, decades of growth in the Central Valley. The company still makes its products in Dinuba. But the headquarters, the decision-making, and an increasing share of the jobs now sit in Texas. The workers left behind in California are the ones absorbing the consequences of that shift.
When a company's roots are in one state and its future is in another, the people who built the place are rarely the ones who get to follow it.