Candy's Tortillas Started in a Pueblo Kitchen. Mission Foods Just Killed It.

On a Friday, corporate executives walked into the tortilla plant at 2110 Santa Fe Drive in Pueblo and told 90 people to pack up and leave. Not in two weeks. Not at the end of the month. Immediately. Operations were ceasing, effective now, go clean out your locker.

Some of those workers had been making tortillas at that plant for more than forty years.

Let me back up, because this is not just some anonymous factory closing. This is Candy's.

The Estradas started this in a restaurant

Before it was a WARN notice filed with the Colorado Department of Labor, before it was line items in a Mexican conglomerate's annual report, Candy's Tortillas was two people in Pueblo who could cook.

Candelario Estrada went by Candy. His wife Cedelia went by Sadie. They opened a restaurant, and the tortillas got popular. Really popular. Popular enough that people wanted to buy them by the stack and take them home. So in 1957 the Estradas opened a plant to make Candy's Tortillas for grocery store shelves.

That is how you become a Pueblo institution. Not with a marketing budget. You just make something people drive across town for, and you keep making it, and eventually it is part of the city. For nearly seventy years, Candy's was part of Pueblo.

The workers there organized. UFCW Local 7 has represented people at that plant for more than forty years. Think about what that means. Generations of families walking through the same doors, making the same product, in a city where a steady union manufacturing job is not something you take for granted.

Then the big fish bought it

In 1994 Mission Foods bought Candy's Tortilla Factory. And Mission Foods is not some regional outfit. It is a subsidiary of Gruma, based in Mexico, one of the largest corn flour and tortilla makers on the planet. We are talking about a company that posted operating income of $890 million in its 2025 annual report.

Eight hundred and ninety million dollars.

Hold that number in your head, because here is what happened next.

What actually went down on August 14

Manufacturing at the Pueblo plant stopped on August 14, 2026. That same day, HR Director Kevin Shuman sent an email to the state confirming the full facility closure. The WARN notice went in. Ninety jobs, gone.

The layoffs are scheduled to happen between October 13 and October 27. The closure is permanent. Employees keep their pay and benefits through the closure date, so at least there is that on paper.

But the way it happened is the part that sticks in your throat. According to Local 7, there was no advance warning to the workers. Executives showed up Friday and told everybody operations would cease immediately. Pack up. Leave. After forty years for some of these folks.

Local 7 President Kim Cordova did not mince words. She pointed at years of underinvestment in the plant and said, straight up, "Mission Foods should have done better by its workers."

Mission Foods, for its part, went with the corporate script. Regional Director of Manufacturing Armando Garza said the company is "deeply grateful" to its employees and is supporting them as they transition. Deeply grateful. I mean, look, somebody has to say the words.

Some workers have a lifeline. Not all of them.

Here is a wrinkle worth knowing. Some union employees have what are called bumping rights. That means they can displace more junior workers at Mission Foods distribution centers that are staying open, one in Pueblo and one in the Aurora and Denver area. Those distribution centers keep running.

So a portion of these 90 people might land somewhere. But bumping rights are a grim kind of comfort, because for every senior worker who bumps into a job, a younger worker gets bumped out of one. It shuffles the pain around. It does not erase it.

And it does nothing for the plant itself, which goes dark for good.

Why this one hurts more than a spreadsheet says

Pueblo is not Denver. Work down there is harder to come by, manufacturing especially, and 90 jobs at once is a real hit to a real place. The building at 2110 Santa Fe Drive is now another vacant industrial property in a steel town that has been fighting to replace exactly this kind of work for decades.

But here is the thing that gets me. Candy and Sadie Estrada built something from a restaurant kitchen. Their name went on the bag. People in Pueblo grew up eating those tortillas, and workers in that plant spent their whole careers in a building that carried a local family's name.

Then a company with $890 million in operating income let it slide through years of underinvestment, and when it decided the numbers no longer worked, it sent people home on a Friday afternoon with no warning.

Candy's Tortillas outlived its founders. It outlived four decades of union contracts. What it could not outlive was being a rounding error to somebody in a boardroom.

The last tortillas already came off that line. The lockers get cleaned out by the end of October.