Laid off from Primo Brands.

What Primo Brands layoffs have meant for employees

Primo Brands is the parent company of Poland Spring, Pure Life, Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ozarka, Zephyrhills, Primo Water and Sparkletts. Its 2025 Form 10-K dates the combination of Primo Water and BlueTriton that created it to November 8, 2024, and BlueTriton was the Nestlé Waters business that One Rock Capital Partners bought, according to a 2021 Sun Journal story WGME carried. For anyone trying to place their own job in the record, California's notices from 2025 and 2026 carry Primo Brands as the employer whichever brand was on the bottle or the truck, so a search under a brand name alone can come up empty. Cuts before the merger went out under the predecessors' own names, Nestlé Waters at Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee and BlueTriton at its Maine Poland Spring plants.

Primo Brands' California cuts came in small notices, and the same street addresses turn up again across the state's 2024-25 WARN report and the report for 2025-26. For anyone matching a notice to a job, the street address and the effective date are what identify it, more than the company name or the filing date. Notices filed the same day can still carry different effective dates, as two of the March 5, 2025 closure notices did, so a coworker's timing at another site says little about yours.

Spring 2025 is when the closing notices went out, and most of that season's jobs sat on them, at sites from Livermore and Milpitas to Oxnard and San Diego. The board's post-merger cost plan, which the company expected to run through 2026, anticipated about $75.0 million to $100.0 million of charges, including $47.0 million to $55.0 million of one-time cash termination benefits and the cost of decommissioning facilities. That August the company's second-quarter release tied its second-quarter results to tornado damage at its Hawkins, Texas facility and to "service issues during the accelerated integration process." At the Sparkletts plant, one employee told The Eastsider that workers and equipment were being moved to Arrowhead plants near downtown Los Angeles and in Cabazon. If both a transfer and an exit package are on the table, the comparison runs between the new site, shift and commute and the package's terms.

Two events before the merger show what tenure-based terms looked like at the companies Primo Brands took in. When 43 Nestlé Waters employees at Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee were losing their jobs, the company said all would stay on the payroll with health benefits until February 2, 2019 and get separation packages based on their years with the company, WKRN reported. In the Poland Spring cuts in Maine in 2021, the same Sun Journal story quoted BlueTriton describing "separation benefits that recognize tenure." Both were terms for those events only. If a package is offered, whether your years of service change its amount or its benefits is the point those two turned on. In Ontario, BlueTriton brought in career counseling services for its Aberfoyle workers, according to a notice-board posting an employee shared with FlamboroughToday.

The Layoff/Closure column in California's 2025-26 report shows whether each notice was filed as a closure or as a layoff, and each row carries the date the state received the notice beside the notice date, which can differ, as it did for Lakeside's January 16, 2026 notice, received January 21. Florida has the Lakeland notice, and the 2025 Form 10-K listed Tampa as one of the company's two headquarters. The state pages on unemployment benefits in California and in Florida lay out how each state runs a claim.

A sourced history of Primo Brands layoffs

• March 2026, Santa Ana permanent layoffs

  A March 20 notice in California's WARN report set 23 permanent layoffs at Primo Brands' 1522 North Newhope Street site in Santa Ana for July 1, the address's fourth notice in a year.

• January 2026, Lakeside permanent layoffs

  Primo Brands' January 16 notice to California, in the state's WARN report, set 19 permanent layoffs at 11811 Highway 67 in Lakeside for March 17, after 4-job notices there in April and July 2025.

• December 2025, three Southern California notices

  Notices dated December 15 in California's WARN report set permanent layoffs of 2 jobs at 1363 Citrus Avenue in Riverside and 1 each at the Santa Ana and Gardena sites, all for February 13, 2026.

• July 2025, 16 California sites on one day

  On July 18 Primo Brands sent California 16 notices, one per site from Fresno to Santa Rosa, each for 1 to 4 permanent layoffs set for September 16, the state's WARN report shows.

• May 2025, four Northern California closures

  Four closure notices dated May 2 in California's WARN report set 31 jobs to end on July 1, 11 in Livermore, 8 in Sacramento and 6 each in San Francisco and Vallejo.

• April 2025, Milpitas closure notice

  An April 28 closure notice for 485 Vista Way in Milpitas, listed in California's WARN report, covered 38 jobs effective June 27. The address had drawn a 13-job closure notice on March 5.

• April 2025, Sparkletts plant closure notices

  April 18 closure notices covered 33 jobs at 4500 York Boulevard and 11 at 1449 North Avenue 46, part of the 45 jobs The Eastsider counted at the Sparkletts plant and offices in Los Angeles. Four other closure notices that day, for 3 to 13 jobs each, covered El Monte, Gardena, Oxnard and San Diego.

• March 2025, closure notices in California and Florida

  March 5 closure notices in California's WARN report covered 9 jobs in Livermore, 13 in Milpitas and 16 in Los Angeles, and our WARN tracker dates a 39-job Lakeland, Florida notice to that day. Four more notices on March 26 listed 5 jobs between them.

• January 2025, Aberfoyle, Ontario plant layoffs

  A Form 1 notice posted at BlueTriton's Aberfoyle bottling plant set layoffs for 144 of its 151 employees as of January 31, FlamboroughToday reported, with Ontario operations to wind down by then. A spokesperson had said the closing wasn't related to the merger.

• September 2021, BlueTriton Poland Spring plant layoffs

  BlueTriton eliminated positions at its Poland Spring plants in Poland and Hollis, Maine, in a reorganization, offering what it called "separation benefits that recognize tenure," the Sun Journal reported in a story WGME carried. An insider put the cuts above two dozen.

What to do if you're laid off from Primo Brands

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. Primo Brands's biggest hubs: California, Florida. 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 Primo Brands's hub states run: California, Florida, 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.