Amy's Kitchen, the billion-dollar organic frozen-food company founded nearly four decades ago in Northern California, is shutting down its original Santa Rosa factory and eliminating 260 jobs, moving production to plants in Oregon and Idaho.
The family-owned company told employees the closure will roll out in phases, with the first round of layoffs expected late this year and a second wave scheduled for next summer. Amy's Kitchen filed a WARN notice, the federal layoff-disclosure filing required before mass job cuts, with the Idaho Department of Labor, confirming that dozens of workers at its Pocatello, Idaho canning plant will also be permanently separated by Dec. 18.
Production from the Santa Rosa plant will shift to the company's facilities in Medford, Oregon and Pocatello. Corporate headquarters will stay in Petaluma, California, about 35 miles south of the shuttered factory, but the company's California manufacturing footprint will be gone.
Amy's Kitchen is not a niche health-food startup. Shoppers spend roughly $1 billion a year on its products at retail checkouts, generating about $600 million in gross sales for the company itself. Market intelligence firm SPINS ranks Amy's Kitchen No. 1 across several organic categories, including organic frozen entrees and organic ready-to-eat soups. The company holds an 89 percent dollar share of organic frozen pizza and nearly 74 percent of organic frozen burritos and pockets.
Founded in Petaluma in 1987, Amy's Kitchen built its brand in California. The Santa Rosa plant was the company's original factory. Now, after decades of operating in the state, the company has decided its manufacturing network needs to be reorganized so that individual facilities can "concentrate on product categories where they are strongest," as the New York Post reported.
CEO Paul Schiefer addressed the decision in a statement to SFGATE:
"This is hard, and it should be hard. We looked at every alternative before landing here. We have a loyal workforce in Santa Rosa, and we're incredibly grateful for everything they've contributed."
Gratitude, however, does not pay the mortgage. Two hundred sixty workers in Sonoma County now face separation packages, job-placement assistance, and counseling services, the standard corporate soft landing that rarely feels soft to the people going through it.
The Pocatello canning plant is not simply absorbing Santa Rosa's work without pain. Amy's Kitchen filed its WARN notice with the Idaho Department of Labor listing specific job classifications being cut: 14 Cook II positions, 14 Manufacturing Operator I jobs, five Manufacturing Operator II slots, and five Manufacturing Operator IV positions. Several other classifications appeared in the filing, but employee counts for those roles were not legible in records reviewed by The Idaho State Journal.
Affected Pocatello employees are expected to be separated effective Dec. 18. The total number of workers losing jobs at that plant remains unclear, though the filing describes "dozens" of permanent layoffs by year's end.
So even the states gaining production are absorbing cuts. The restructuring is not a simple relocation, it is a consolidation, with pain spread across three states.
Amy's Kitchen has not publicly cited California's regulatory environment, energy costs, or tax burden as reasons for the move. The company's stated rationale, letting each plant specialize, is the kind of operational language that avoids naming any single factor. But the pattern is hard to miss. A company born in California, built in California, and headquartered in California looked at its options and decided its manufacturing future is in Oregon and Idaho.
The 260 workers in Santa Rosa did not set California's business climate. They showed up, ran the lines, and made the frozen burritos and soups that built a billion-dollar brand. They are the ones who pay the price when a state makes itself a harder place to operate.
Schiefer said the company "looked at every alternative." Whatever those alternatives were, none of them included staying in California.