Laid off from Kraft Heinz.

What Kraft Heinz layoffs have meant for employees

The plant closings after the 2015 merger show what the bigger cuts meant on the ground. Closing the 96-year-old Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, Wisconsin, at the start of 2017 would leave 635 hourly workers and 72 salaried staff without jobs, Fortune reported, and the president of UFCW Local 538 said Kraft Heinz was offering incentives to stay until the end but little more than standard severance beyond that. One Madison worker told the Associated Press he heard about the closing from news reports, not from the company. If you're offered money to stay through a closing date, you can ask whether leaving early forfeits it and how it sits alongside any severance.

From 2022 through 2025 the cuts were smaller and steadier, a few hundred eliminated positions a year under what the 2025 annual report calls restructuring programs "focused primarily on streamlining our organizational design." The 2024 report expected 2025's eliminations across all of the company's zones, and that year's count came in below the roughly 740 it had forecast. The eliminations still expected in mid-2026 leaned outside North America. If yours was one of the quieter cuts, it's still a job gone, and that's hard in its own right.

The breakup Kraft Heinz announced in September 2025 would have split it in two by the second half of 2026, with faster-growing sauces, spreads and seasonings such as Heinz and Kraft Mac & Cheese in one company and legacy brands such as Oscar Mayer in the other. In February 2026, weeks after Steve Cahillane took over as chief executive on January 1, the company paused that work and said it would instead invest $600 million in its U.S. business on marketing, sales and research, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

For the New Zealand staff, Heinz Wattie's March release said redundancy packages, career transition and outplacement services, and counseling and wellbeing support would be offered, and that the final number of roles would follow consultation and a look at redeployment. If you're affected by one of the phased closures, it's worth asking how redeployment is decided and what the redundancy package includes.

If you're salaried and your job is cut, the plan that may apply is Kraft Heinz's severance plan for salaried employees, restated as of January 1, 2026. It covers eligible salaried employees whose jobs end involuntarily through no fault of their own, under conditions it sets, and union-represented employees sit outside it unless their union negotiated its benefits. For those it covers, pay is figured from regular salary without overtime, bonuses or incentive pay, and below the vice president band the COBRA benefit period runs as long as the severance pay, so four months of pay means four months. It treats an equity award as eligible only if it was granted at least 12 months before the termination, or 24 months for performance awards granted through 2025. If you're covered, the eligibility, severance-amount, equity and claims-procedure sections are the ones worth asking HR to walk you through.

If you're trying to see whether a U.S. cut near you was filed, it's worth searching our WARN tracker under every name the company and its predecessors have filed under, Kraft Heinz Foods Company, Kraft Foods, Heinz and Oscar Mayer among them, then matching the city and the date. Filings made before the merger under the Kraft Foods, Heinz and Oscar Mayer names show up there too. If you're filing for unemployment, the Illinois, California and Wisconsin benefits pages cover the rules in three states where it has filed.

A sourced history of Kraft Heinz layoffs

• First half of 2026, restructuring eliminations

  Kraft Heinz's second-quarter 10-Q counted about 140 positions eliminated under its restructuring programs in the six months to June 27, 2026, and expected about 260 more under them by year-end, primarily outside North America.

• March 2026, Heinz Wattie's closures in New Zealand

  Kraft Heinz's New Zealand subsidiary proposed in a March 11 release to close its Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin factories and its Hastings frozen packing lines, putting about 350 roles at stake. After consultation it confirmed the closures later that month, with about 300 jobs to go over the year, Chris Lynch Media reported.

• 2025, about 600 positions eliminated

  The 2025 annual report counted about 600 positions eliminated during the year and, as of December 27, 2025, expected about 60 more in 2026, primarily outside the United States and Canada.

• 2022 to 2024, eliminations in each year

  Kraft Heinz's 2023 annual report counted about 575 positions eliminated in 2022 and 690 in 2023, and its 2024 annual report about 270 in 2024.

• November 2015, seven plant closings and 2,600 jobs

  Months after the merger, Kraft Heinz said it would close plants in Fullerton and San Leandro, California; Federalsburg, Maryland; Campbell, New York; Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania; St. Marys, Ontario; and Madison, Wisconsin, over two years, cutting about 14% of its North American factory workforce, the Associated Press reported.

• August 2015, 2,500 jobs cut after the merger

  Weeks after the merger closed, Kraft Heinz laid off 2,500 workers across the U.S. and Canada, 700 of them at the Kraft headquarters in Northfield, Illinois, a CNNMoney report said.

What to do if you're laid off from Kraft Heinz

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. Kraft Heinz's biggest hubs: Illinois, California, Wisconsin. Somewhere else? Every state is here.
• Apply for financial and hardship assistance. Unemployment supplements income, but food benefits, health coverage and utility help are often available as well. Here's some of what Kraft Heinz's hub states run: Illinois, California, Wisconsin, and every other state is here.
• Mind the health insurance window. Losing coverage opens a 60-day special enrollment period, and an ACA plan usually beats unsubsidized COBRA. Compare your options before the employer coverage lapses, and read how the COBRA clocks run if you are weighing it seriously.
• Get your real runway number. Severance plus savings divided by reality. The calculator takes five minutes.
• Know which clocks are already running. Severance review windows, COBRA election, visa grace periods, and 401(k) rollovers all run on federal deadlines that started at termination. All five deadlines are here.