Major cheese producer closes Fresno-area facility, cuts jobs as it opens Texas site
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Leprino to close Lemoore East, affecting 268 now and 100 more by December 2026.
- Company cites aging equipment, high California costs and milk outlook for closure.
- Lemoore West remains open; Leprino expansion in Lubbock, Texas adds 600 jobs
The world’s largest mozzarella cheese producer is shuttering one if its Central Valley plants, resulting in the loss of about 300 jobs.
According to records on file with the California Employment Development Department, 268 people will be laid off at the Leprino Foods Lemoore East plant on Jan. 9 due to the facility’s permanent closure. Another 100 employees are expected to lose their jobs by Dec. 30, 2026.
Attempts to reach Leprino Foods on Friday were unsuccessful.
The company announced the layoffs in November 2024, citing the Lemoore East facility’s age and equipment and high operating costs in California, according to a report in the Hanford Sentinel.
“This decision is influenced by several factors, including the facility’s age, anticipated capital requirements to make improvements to the facility and add or replace equipment and systems, high operating costs in California, the long-term milk supply outlook, and the increased capacity due to the opening of our Lubbock, Texas, facility,” a Leprino spokesperson told The Sentinel.
The company is a major employer in Kings County and has two plants in Lemoore, Lemoore East and West. Lemoore West is one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the world — with more than 11 football fields worth of cheese-making capacity — while Lemoore East has been a continuous dairy operation since 1910, according to the company’s website. Leprino took over the East facility in the 1980s, SF Gate reported.
The two Leprino facilities in Lemoore process approximately 14 million pounds of milk and produce an average of 1.5 million pounds of mozzarella cheese and related products per day, according to state water board records.
The company’s Lemoore West plant isn’t expected to be impacted, according to media reports. The company also has a facility in the San Joaquin County city of Tracy.
In 2021, the company announced the opening of a new, $870 million state-of-the-art 850,000 square foot dairy manufacturing facility in Lubbock, Texas that will provide 600 jobs. Construction is expected to be completed in early 2026.
Founded in 1950 and headquartered in Denver, Leprino Foods supplies cheese for food manufacturers and major pizza chains. The company employs more than 5,500 people worldwide and has U.S.-based processing plants in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Michigan, New York and Texas.
Another Valley food processing business has traded California for Texas in recent years.
In 2023, frozen food manufacturer Ruiz Foods announced it was moving its Tulare County corporate headquarters to Frisco, Texas. The company said the decision was due to the central geographic location to reach customers nationwide and the availability of talent near the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.
String of legal troubles in California
The company’s California operations have faced a string of employee-related legal and regulatory scrutiny over the past two decades.
In 2015, Leprino’s Lemoore plant was hit with a federal class action lawsuit alleging the company violated wage-and-hour laws. Several others followed.
In 2023, the company successfully defeated a $100 million class action lawsuit filed in 2017 after a four-week jury trial in federal court, The Business Journal reported.
But employees appealed and in 2024 won a $3.5 million class action settlement.
Before that, in 2011, Leprino Foods paid $550,000 in back wages, interest and benefits to 253 workers of Black, Latino and Asian descent who were rejected for on-call laborer positions as part of a settlement with the U.S. Labor Department.
This story was originally published December 26, 2025 at 2:28 PM with the headline "Major cheese producer closes Fresno-area facility, cuts jobs as it opens Texas site."
