Ontario's billion-dollar grocer is for sale, and the reason is a demand risk that runs through the IE's economy
Heritage Grocers Group, headquartered in Ontario, is the parent of Cardenas Markets, El Rancho Supermercado, Tony's Fresh Market, and Los Altos Ranch Market — roughly 115 stores across six states, more than $2 billion in annual revenue, and about $150 million in EBITDA. Its owner, Apollo Global Management, engaged UBS last fall to run a sale process that people familiar with it told Reuters could value the company near $1.5 billion, or about ten times earnings. Apollo and UBS have declined to comment, and as of now no buyer has been confirmed.
The company is as IE as a company gets. Cardenas opened its first store in Ontario in 1981, started by Jesús Cárdenas, a farmworker from Guadalajara. The chain grew up serving the region's Latino households, and Heritage still runs its corporate operation from Guasti Road in Ontario. Several of its California stores sit in IE cities.
What pushed Apollo toward the exit is the part that matters to operators here. Reuters reported the sale process is tied to a decline in consumer demand across Latino communities, attributed in part to fear of immigration enforcement keeping shoppers home — fewer trips, smaller baskets. Ratings agencies downgraded Heritage's credit in spring 2025 on soft consumer spending, and its term loan has traded down sharply from where it was issued.
That demand signal is not coming only from Heritage. Over the past year, executives at Constellation Brands, Keurig Dr Pepper, Boston Beer, and Colgate-Palmolive each told investors that Hispanic shoppers had cut back — fewer store trips and lower spending per trip — and several named immigration concern and job-loss fear in high-Latino industries as the cause. These are national companies describing a national pattern. The point for the IE is that the pattern has an address here.
The Inland Empire is 52% Latino, a majority of the region's 4.6 million people, according to state Department of Finance estimates. Its Latino workforce is concentrated in logistics, warehousing, and construction — the same high-Latino-employment industries the consumer-brand executives pointed to. A pullback driven by enforcement fear and job-loss worry, wherever it shows up nationally, shows up at higher intensity in a region whose population and labor force are built this way. There is no published store-level sales figure for the IE to put a number on it; the direction, not the magnitude, is what the evidence supports.
The operator takeaway is broader than groceries. The immigration story in the IE has mostly been told as a labor-supply question — who shows up to staff the dock, the site, the kitchen. The Heritage process reframes it as a demand question. Any business whose revenue rests on Latino household spending — retail, restaurants, services, the landlords leasing to them — carries an exposure that a workforce analysis alone misses, and that a credit-rating agency has now priced.