The world’s largest mozzarella cheese maker is closing one of its factories in the Central Valley, leaving about 300 people out of work.
Leprino Foods’ Lemoore East plant will lay off 268 workers on Jan. 9 due to the permanent closure, according to records filed with the California Employment Development Department. An additional 100 employees are expected to lose their jobs by December 30, 2026.
Attempts to contact Leprino Foods on Friday were unsuccessful.
The company announced the layoffs in November 2024, citing the age and equipment of the Lemoore East plant and higher operating costs in California, the Hanford Sentinel reported.
“This decision was influenced by a number of factors, including the age of the facility, anticipated capital requirements to improve the facility and add or replace equipment and systems, high operating costs in California, long-term milk supply prospects and increased capacity resulting from the opening of the Lubbock, Texas, facility,” a Leprino spokesperson told the Journal Sentinel.
The company is a major employer in Kings County, with two plants in Lemoore, East Lemoore and West Lemoore. Lemoore West is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world, with more than 11 football fields of cheese production capacity, while Lemoore East has been a continuously operating dairy business since 1910, according to the company’s website. According to SF Gate, Leprino took over the eastern plant in the 1980s.
The two Leprino plants in Lemoore process about 14 million pounds of milk per day and produce an average of 1.5 million pounds of mozzarella cheese and related products, according to state water board records.
The company’s Lemore West plant is not expected to be affected, according to media reports. The company also has a facility in Tracy, San Joaquin County.
In 2021, the company announced the opening of a new $870 million, 850,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art dairy manufacturing facility in Lubbock, Texas, that will provide 600 jobs. Construction is expected to be completed in early 2026.
Leprino Foods in Lemoore.
Founded in 1950 and headquartered in Denver, Leprino Foods supplies cheese to food manufacturers and large pizza chains. The company has more than 5,500 employees worldwide and has processing facilities in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Michigan, New York and Texas.
Another Valley food processor has relocated from California to Texas in recent years.
In 2023, frozen food manufacturer Ruiz Foods announced it would move its Tulare County corporate headquarters to Frisco, Texas. The company said it made the decision because the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is centrally located to reach customers nationwide and has an abundance of talent.
A series of legal troubles in California
The company’s operations in California have faced a series of employee-related legal and regulatory scrutiny over the past two decades.
In 2015, Leprino’s Lemoore plant was the subject of a federal class action lawsuit accusing the company of violating wage and hour laws. Several others followed.
According to the Business Journal, in 2023, the company successfully defeated a $100 million class action lawsuit filed in 2017 after a four-week jury trial in federal court.
But employees appealed and won a $3.5 million class-action settlement in 2024.
Prior to that, in 2011, Leprino Foods paid $550,000 in back wages, interest and benefits to 253 black, Latino and Asian workers who were denied on-call labor positions as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor.
