Mission Foods, the largest tortilla producer in the U.S., has ended operations at its plant at 2110 Santa Fe Drive in Pueblo on Friday, but will continue to pay the 90 employees working there through mid-October.

“We recently made the difficult decision to fully close our Pueblo manufacturing facility effective Tuesday, Oct. 13. We’re deeply grateful to our employees and are supporting them as they transition to the next step in their careers. While manufacturing operations ceased on Aug. 14, affected employees will continue to receive pay and benefits through the facility’s closure date,” said Armando Garza, Mission Foods regional director of manufacturing, in a statement.

Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, employers enacting a large-scale layoff must provide workers with at least 60 days’ notice. Mission Foods said it will continue to pay its plant workers through October 13, even though the plant isn’t operating.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which represents most of the workers, was critical of how the closure was handled.

“On Friday, with no advance warning to workers or the union, corporate executives from Mission Foods came to Pueblo to tell approximately 100 workers that the company’s Pueblo plant would cease to operate effective immediately,” Local 7 said in a news release on Monday.

Workers, including some who had been at the plant for more than four decades, were told to pack their belongings and leave immediately, resulting in both tearful and angry farewells, according to the union.

“Mission Foods should have done better by its workers,” said Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7, in the news release.

Cordova linked the closure to years of “chronic underinvestment in the Pueblo facility” and said that Local 7 would do everything in its power to provide workers with the resources they needed in the transition.

Garza said the company is encouraging all employees affected by the plant closure who would like to continue working with Mission Foods to apply for openings available on the company’s website. The company has distribution centers at 600 Gruma Drive in Pueblo and at 14800 E 35th Pl. in Aurora, and laid-off plant workers will have “bumping rights” allowing them to displace more junior employees at those locations.

“Mission Foods has been part of the Pueblo community since purchasing the manufacturing facility in 1995. We’ll continue to be a proud and supportive part of the region with our distribution centers in Pueblo and Denver,” he said.

The plant traces its origins to Candelario “Candy” and Cedelia “Sadie” Estrada, who opened a popular family restaurant in Pueblo in 1956.

So many customers requested their home-style tortillas that they opened a commercial production facility a few years later and shut down the restaurant.

Their tortillas became part of Pueblo’s culinary heritage, and the plant provided stable jobs for decades.

Mission Foods, expanding rapidly, purchased the plant in 1995, integrating it into its nationwide production network and stripping away the regional recipes and ingredients.

Mission Foods is a subsidiary of Gruma S.A. in Mexico, a conglomerate with nearly $5 billion a year in revenues controlled by billionaire Juan Antonio González Moreno and his family.

Pueblo’s economy depends heavily on manufacturing, and the region has struggled to keep pace with other areas of the state because of weakness in that sector.

In June, Pueblo had a 5.6% unemployment rate, the highest of any metro area in the state and well above the 3.9% unemployment rate statewide.

This story was updated at 4 p.m. Aug. 19 to include further comments from Mission Foods.

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