Laid off from Ajinomoto.

What Ajinomoto layoffs have meant for employees

In Fort Worth, the company gave its reasons. Paul Taylor, vice president and general counsel of Ajinomoto Foods North America, the US arm of Tokyo-based Ajinomoto Co., told The Dallas Morning News in 2019 that the food manufacturing industry is very competitive and that the competition forces the company to adapt and be as efficient as possible. The paper reported Fort Worth as the only plant Ajinomoto then planned to close, and Taylor said its equipment would go to a plant in Oakland, Mississippi, that makes similar foods.

The closing plan came after a stretch of growth elsewhere. Ajinomoto had opened facilities in Joplin, Missouri, and San Diego in the previous three years and bought Circle Foods, a frozen Mexican food maker, in March 2018, the paper reported, and the Fort Worth factory itself had come with the 2014 purchase of Houston-based Windsor Foods. Ajinomoto told the state that none of the Fort Worth workers losing jobs were union members, and Taylor said the company would help them complete transition plans and connect with local job services.

For the people on the temporary notices from Hayward and San Diego, the state's yearly reports, the 2019-20 and 2023-24 editions among them, show a type and an effective date for each notice but don't record whether anyone on a temporary list went back to work. That puts the weight on the notice itself. A return date the notice named, if it named one, is the date worth planning around, and the type is how the state recorded the layoff at the time.

The Tokyo parent, Ajinomoto Co., set its own terms for a voluntary early-retirement program. In late 2019 it said it was reorganizing its staff structure in line with its business portfolio, and its November 2019 release made Ajinomoto Co. managers 50 and over eligible to apply, with a sum added to ordinary severance and help finding work outside the group for participants it deemed eligible, and a June 30, 2020 retirement date. The company planned for about 100 applicants and got 144, according to its March 2020 results notice, which is in Japanese and puts the special payments and other costs at 6.5 billion yen. If a package ever comes up at a US unit, the Japan program is a model of structure only, an extra amount stacked on ordinary severance with help toward the next job, because its terms were written for managers in Japan.

Ajinomoto's US notices have carried several company names and one misspelling. The California food plants filed as Ajinomoto Foods North America, the 2024 San Diego notice came from Ajinomoto Bio-Pharma Services, and Texas logged the 2019 Fort Worth closing notice under a misspelling, Anjinomoto Foods. Two Ohio businesses Ajinomoto bought carry names without Ajinomoto in them, Forge Biologics in Columbus, the gene therapy maker its April 2025 share transfer notice says it acquired, and More Than Gourmet in Akron. You can look for newer notices in WARN filings under any of those names.

Some of the California notices are dated after the effective dates they list. Both 2020 notices and the 2023 Alpine Way one put the effective date three to eight days before the notice's own date, as California's 2022-23 WARN report and its 2019-20 counterpart print them, while the October 2023 and February 2025 notices gave effective dates roughly two months out. If your layoff took effect before a notice reached you, it can help to keep a record of both the notice date and the effective date, since those are the dates the state wrote down.