WARN Feed · layoffs by industry

US food plant, meatpacking and agriculture layoffs — the actual WARN Act filings, rebuilt every day

1,281 food, beverage and agriculture layoff and closing notices filed with state labour agencies under the WARN Act, from 1989 to 2026, covering 173,590 reported workers at 671 employers in 43 states. Free, CC BY 4.0, rebuilt every morning from the agency portals — no login, no key, no email.

Download every sector-tagged notice (CSV) This industry as its own dataset on Hugging Face

Who is in this cut

Included: food and beverage manufacturers, meat and poultry packers, bakeries and snack plants, dairies and creameries, bottlers and brewers, seafood processors, farms, growers and packinghouses, and grain, feed and sugar mills.

What counts as food, beverage or agriculture here: the employer name reads as foods, beverage, bottling, dairy, meat or poultry packing, bakery, snack, candy, brewing, seafood, farm, produce, grain, feed, sugar or milling, or is one of ~90 named producers (Tyson, Smithfield, JBS, Cargill, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, General Mills, Kellogg, Conagra, Hormel, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, Dean Foods, Perdue, Pilgrim's, Hostess and others). Tobacco, vape and cannabis producers are in this cut too (the rule covers Philip Morris, Altria, Reynolds, JUUL, hemp and cannabis), and so are food distributors whose name carries the word — US Foods and Lipari Foods are here although they run warehouses, not plants. Filter on sector_rule and employer if you want production sites only. A packing plant trading under a family name reveals no sector and is not here; it is in the unclassified remainder of the sector dataset. Every row keeps the sector_rule that fired, so any inclusion can be disputed row by row.

Why this file exists

A meatpacking or food-plant closing is the largest employment event most rural counties will see in a decade, and it is reported town by town, if at all. The filings behind those closings — which plant, which town, how many workers, notice date, effective date, closure or layoff — sit on 48 separate state portals and are never assembled as one food-and-agriculture series. This file is that series, with the closure/layoff split the states themselves recorded.

The employers with the most food, beverage and agriculture notices on record

Counted per notice, not per event: a company that files in four states files four notices. Employer names are the resolved spelling — the raw agency spelling is kept in the download.

The 15 most recent food, beverage and agriculture notices

Date is the notice date where the agency publishes one, otherwise the layoff date. 477 of the 1,281 notices in this cut are recorded as a closure rather than a layoff.

How the industry is decided: no state WARN portal publishes an industry field, so there is no NAICS column to filter on. The sector here is assigned from the resolved employer name by a published rule table (19 sectors, 3,152 patterns, first match wins), and every row carries the pattern that fired in its sector_rule column so you can audit or re-cut it. The archive holds 61,428 notices; 61,232 of them carry a usable date and are in the sector file (196 have no date in either column), 32,168 come out with a sector, and 29,064 stay unclassified — and are still counted in every total shown anywhere on this site. Manual audit 2026-09-12: 4 of 60 sampled rows were assigned to the wrong sector. Rebuilt 2026-09-24.

How to check any of this

Every number on this page is computed at build time from notices_by_sector.csv (one row per notice, with the sector and the rule that assigned it), and the yearly series from sector_by_year.csv. The free HTTP API serves the whole archive as JSON, NDJSON and per-state CSV with no key. This industry is also published as its own Hugging Face dataset, and the full sector cut as one file. If a number here disagrees with the file, the file is right and it is a bug — tell us and it is fixed the next morning.

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