Amy's Kitchen, the organic frozen-food brand approaching $1 billion in annual retail sales, is closing the Santa Rosa manufacturing plant where its California roots run deepest, cutting roughly 260 jobs and consolidating production in two lower-cost states.
CEO Paul Schiefer confirmed the phased shutdown, which will begin with layoffs late this year and finish by next summer. About 207 positions at the Santa Rosa facility will be eliminated. Another 51 jobs at a canning operation in Pocatello, Idaho, are also on the chopping block. Production will shift to Amy's 350,000-square-foot plant in Medford, Oregon, and its 479,000-square-foot facility in Pocatello, which will be redesignated as the company's entrée hub.
The Medford plant, open since 2005, will specialize in pizza, soup, and burritos. Amy's corporate headquarters will stay in Petaluma, California, but the company's manufacturing footprint in the state where it was born is now effectively zero.
Amy's cited changing consumer demand alongside rising labor, ingredient, energy, and logistics costs. The company said it wanted to simplify its manufacturing network so each factory could specialize in the product lines it handles best. Local economist Robert Eyler echoed that assessment, saying the Sonoma County region has grown increasingly difficult for large-scale food production because of those same cost pressures.
This is not the first California exit for Amy's. In 2022, the company abruptly shut a factory in San Jose that had only begun production a year earlier. That plant was hemorrhaging roughly $1 million a month. The closure wiped out 331 jobs. The San Jose facility had been expected to eventually handle around ten percent of Amy's total manufacturing capacity, but some material costs more than doubled during the period it was operating.
And in March of a recent year, Amy's closed its last California Drive Thru restaurant. In 2024, the company scrapped long-delayed plans for a manufacturing and packaging plant in Goshen, New York, saying it no longer needed additional production capacity.
Add it up: a San Jose factory opened and shuttered within a year, a New York expansion abandoned, a restaurant concept folded, and now the Santa Rosa plant, all while the brand's retail sales keep climbing toward the billion-dollar mark. The pattern points to a company that can sell organic food nationally but cannot afford to make it in California.
Schiefer told the Daily Mail the company explored other options before settling on the closure. He described the Santa Rosa workforce as loyal and said Amy's is grateful for its contribution, though those remarks were paraphrased, not quoted directly. His only verbatim comment was brief:
"This is hard, and it should be hard."
Amy's said it will offer separation packages, job-placement assistance, and employee-assistance-program counseling to affected workers. The company did not detail the terms of those packages.
The closure comes against the backdrop of labor complaints that surfaced around 2022. Workers alleged unsafe conditions, raised concerns about production quotas, and questioned how employees were treated. Amy's denied the allegations, saying its facilities provided appropriate bathroom and water breaks and that the company respected workers' rights to unionize. Amy's has also said the labor disputes and related boycott efforts played no role in its decisions about where to manufacture.
Whether or not the disputes factored into the math, the result is the same: the workers who raised those complaints are now losing their jobs, and the production is heading to states where operating costs are lower.
Andy and Rachel Berliner started Amy's Kitchen in Petaluma in 1987. The company grew into the top organic brand in frozen entrees, frozen handheld foods, frozen pizza, and shelf-stable soup. Its story was inseparable from Northern California, the region's culture, its agricultural identity, its progressive consumer base.
Now the last California factory floor goes dark. Petaluma keeps the corporate office, but the jobs that actually make the food will sit in Oregon and Idaho. For the roughly 260 workers facing layoffs, a separation package and a counseling hotline are cold comfort when the plant that paid their wages is closing because the state priced it out of production.
California's political class has spent years piling costs onto employers, energy mandates, labor regulations, logistics burdens, and then expressing surprise when those employers leave. Amy's Kitchen is just the latest company to do the math and walk. The organic label stays on the box. The California jobs do not.