A Denver-area food and paper products distributor has agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a federal hiring-discrimination suit. The EEOC alleged that Mile Hi Foods turned away qualified Black, female and Afghan job applicants, a pattern it said dated to 2015. The agreement, announced Sept. 25, 2026, takes the form of a three-year consent decree.
What the EEOC said the company did
The agency’s October 2024 lawsuit announcement describes a company where hiring limits came from the top. According to the complaint as the EEOC summarized it, the chief executive wrote that Black workers were “lazy” and directed managers not to hire beyond a certain number of Black applicants. Women, the EEOC said, were kept out of warehouse jobs on the belief that they were not effective at manual labor. In the bakery, the agency said, Afghan hiring was restricted because the company saw too many “Afghanistans” there.
Those quotations come from the EEOC’s account of the complaint, not from findings by a judge. The suit was brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which covers race, sex and national origin, and it was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado as EEOC v. Mile Hi Foods, Co., et al., Case No. 1-24-cv-02703. The EEOC’s Phoenix District Office, whose territory includes Colorado, handled it.
The retaliation claim covers a person inside the company
Not every alleged victim in the case was an applicant. The EEOC said the company’s human resources manager, Marianne Apodaca, opposed the hiring directives and was harassed and ultimately fired for it. Mary Jo O’Neill, the EEOC’s regional attorney in Phoenix, said in the settlement announcement that federal law prohibits retaliation against workers who refuse to take part in unlawful discrimination.
That framing matters for how the money is described. The EEOC lists monetary compensation for the affected HR manager and for job applicants as part of the decree’s relief, so the $1.5 million is not a payment to a single person or to a single class. How it divides among them is not stated in the release.
A consent decree is a settlement, not a verdict
The EEOC’s release calls the agreement a consent decree, and it does not report any finding of liability or any admission of wrongdoing by the company. Mile Hi Foods will pay under the decree. The lawsuit’s allegations remain allegations in the public record…