More jobs available as tortilla maker Mi Rancho gets closer to completing Elk Grove move
Bay Area tortilla manufacturer Mi Rancho is a step closer to completing its transition to Elk Grove after announcing that it will shutter its decades-old San Leandro plant at the end of the month.
Mi Rancho parent Berber Food Manufacturing Inc., told state Employment Development Department officials of the planned shutdown and layoff of the plant’s 51 workers in early April, the San Jose Mercury News reported and an EDD layoff notice shows.
“This is the last step of the transitioning,” Berber owner and president Manuel Berber told The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday.
The news from San Leandro comes three years after Berber’s $8.1 million purchase of the former Bimbo Bakeries site on industrial Iron Rock Way in 2018 for a second Mi Rancho manufacturing site. Family-owned Berber planned to sink another $25 million over the next two years to modernize the bakery, automate and increase production, converting it into a modern food processing facility that would eventually employ about 250 workers. Today, roughly 160 Mi Rancho employees work in Elk Grove.
Some of those are Berber employees who had relocated from Mi Rancho’s longtime San Leandro factory to Elk Grove to work at the new facility, Berber officials said in a letter to remaining workers included in the plant closure notice and cited by the Mercury News.
“We’ve done everything possible to ease the transition” of employees, Berber said Tuesday, but conceded the plant’s closure is a “sensitive” topic in San Leandro.
But Berber says Mi Rancho will need more workers to ramp up production in Elk Grove from direct labor to managers.
“We need more people now,” Berber said. “We’re in need of people currently to get us up and going — a little bit of everything, all across the board.”
The Iron Rock Way facility began production in 2019, opening in stages since. The final step in the move to Sacramento County was to come last fall but was delayed by the pandemic, Berber said.
Factory capacity and the Bay Area’s high operating and living costs ultimately spurred the move to a less-expensive Elk Grove and came as demand for the Mi Rancho brand doubled during the last decade.
By the time Mi Rancho opened its Elk Grove site in 2018, the company was producing 4.5 million tortillas a day — 1.3 billion a year — for food service, retail and international customers, according to company information.
Mi Rancho, an East Bay staple for generations, getting its start in Oakland more than 80 years ago, found a suitor for its expansion plans in Elk Grove. City economic development officials courted Mi Rancho for more than a year to lock in a deal, officials said at the time.
Meantime, Elk Grove City Council members were prepared to offer a slate of cash incentives “in exchange for accelerated project delivery and hiring, future expansion and bonus incentives for hiring Elk Grove residents.”
Berber in the past said Elk Grove’s economic incentives, skilled work force and proximity to its San Leandro home base factored in the family’s decision.
“The city has been exceptional. They made the transition pretty easy,” Berber said Tuesday.
