Laid off from Bumble Bee Foods.

What Bumble Bee Foods layoffs have meant for employees

At Santa Fe Springs, the job losses come in stages. The October 2025 notice came 63 days before its layoffs took effect in December. The August 2026 notice gave a second, larger group about 100 days before its Nov. 19 date, and the rest of the staff is expected to keep the plant running until it closes in 2027, the Los Cerritos Community News wrote. Both notices are permanent layoffs in California's records, the 2025-26 WARN report plus the WARN workbook, and through early November 2026 neither file shows a third notice for the people kept on to the end. If you're in that last group, the closing estimate the Los Angeles Times reported is, for now, the clearest sign of when your job ends.

For Santa Fe Springs, Bumble Bee spokesperson Arielle Schechtman told the Los Angeles Times the decision is part of an effort "to streamline our supply chain and production network by reducing the number of processing points in the value stream," and the company has called the move a consolidation. That's close to how Bumble Bee explained Mayagüez in 2012, when Jan Tharp, a senior operations executive, said it keeps evaluating its supply network to ensure its operations are run in the most efficient and effective way and stay competitive in the global market, NotiCel reported. Prospect Harbor's closing in 2010 was pinned on something else, a substantial cut in the allowed herring catch off New England, according to Bumble Bee's 2010 SEC filing.

Bumble Bee's Maine cannery had a possible buyer too. When Prospect Harbor, the nation's last sardine cannery, closed in 2010, its equipment was being moved to Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, where Bumble Bee planned to keep producing its Beech Cliff sardines. With a deal close to turn the building into a plant for lobsters and other seafood, officials there hoped its new owner could employ as many as 100 people, fewer than the 127 working at the cannery at the end, the Bangor Daily News reported. One of those workers, Donna Eklund, a trained forklift driver who had also worked as a certified nursing assistant, told the paper she'd heard a buyer might take over by mid-May and reopen by August, but she wasn't sure she could wait that long and would at least consider a job elsewhere first.

Santa Fe Springs' buyer has described a different plan. Juanita's Foods plans to bring the staff it already has to the 120,000-square-foot plant and is working on arrangements for employees who can't relocate, its human resources executive told Just Food. When Food Processing asked about the future of the workforce there, Juanita's hadn't answered by press time, and the timeline for its move wasn't final, the same executive said.

Mayagüez ran on a single schedule. Its whole staff, 181 people, got the news on one day, and the plant was to keep producing until the end of June, NotiCel reported, while Santa Fe Springs' notices give its groups separate dates, with a smaller crew expected to run the plant until the closing.

The closing is expected to eliminate more than 230 local jobs, the Cerritos paper said, in a heavily industrial city where manufacturing, distribution and food processing make up an important part of the local economy. If your job at the plant ends, you can apply for unemployment benefits in California.