A fourth-generation Denver food distributor that has supplied buns to McDonald’s restaurants across the Rocky Mountains for nearly seven decades will pay $1.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing its top executive of ordering staff not to hire Black, female, and Afghan job applicants. Mile Hi Foods Co., headquartered on East 51st Avenue in Northern Denver, reached the settlement without admitting it broke any law, even as court filings describe a handwritten note from the company’s chief operating executive instructing staff to cap the percentage of Black hires because he considered them lazy.
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the same executive also directed employees to stop hiring women for warehouse jobs and to cut off hiring of Afghan applicants in the company’s bakery. The federal agency filed suit in September 2024 after conciliation efforts failed, and as The Denver Post reports, the company has now agreed to pay $600,000 directly to the human resources manager it allegedly fired for opposing the discriminatory directives, plus an undetermined additional amount to the Black, female, and Afghan applicants it did not hire.
Court records identify that fired HR manager as Marianne Apodaca, who filed her own intervenor lawsuit against Mile Hi Foods and its affiliated entities, alleging she faced retaliatory harassment and discharge after raising legal objections to company executives, per the same federal court record. A consent decree resolved the case, closing out litigation that began nearly two years earlier under case number 1:24-cv-02703.
A Consent Decree With Teeth
Mile Hi Foods maintains in its August consent decree that it did not violate the Civil Rights Act or any federal, state, or local law, framing the payout as a way to avoid further litigation costs rather than an admission of wrongdoing, the Post’s reporting notes. Still, the terms imposed on the company are extensive: Mile Hi must hire an outside consultant to evaluate and rewrite its hiring policies, train all employees on anti-discrimination laws, maintain detailed applicant records, and submit annual compliance reports to federal regulators for three years — a period that can be extended if the company falls short of the decree’s conditions…