A worker injury at one of the state’s largest green chile producers highlights the life-threatening consequences that can occur when companies ignore safety regulations.
Young Guns Chile Co. was recently cited by the New Mexico Environment Department’s (NMED) Occupational Health and Safety Bureau (OHSB) for failing to follow safety regulations, resulting in a serious injury that reportedly landed one employee in the hospital.
According to the OHSB citation, the Hatch-based company violated a number of safety regulations, including failing to provide proper machine guarding to protect workers from rotating parts. At least one employee suffered a serious injury in August 2024 when they were “caught by machine parts.” That injury resulted in a hospital stay.
“Every New Mexico business has the responsibility to protect its workers, chiefly by following OHSB regulations,” says Bob Genoway, Deputy Director of Compliance and Enforcement at OHSB. “When businesses don’t follow the rules, employees are the ones who pay the price. This case is a prime example of that.”
Young Guns Chile is considered one of the largest players in the New Mexico green chile game, processing approximately 40 million pounds of chile during the summer harvest season out of a 60,000-square-foot facility in Hatch. The company’s fresh and frozen green chiles are a regular sight in grocery stores across the nation, and it also supplies a number of nationwide foodservice providers. Its products can be found in big-name stores like Kroger, Smith’s Food and Drug and even on Amazon.
Young Guns also co-owns Deming-based Billy the Kid Produce, a major onion provider to local grocery stores that processes over a million 50-pound bags of onions each season.
With that much experience under its belt, it may come as a surprise that the company failed to provide basic protective equipment to keep its employees from having their limbs injured, but that’s exactly what state inspectors discovered.
Worse yet, the inspection took place in October, around 66 days after the incident—and there were still no methods of machine guarding in place.
According to state regulations, the company was also required to report any accident that results in amputation, loss of an eye or inpatient hospital admission within 24 hours. But inspectors said Young Guns never reported the incident, and the state only learned about it during the October inspection.
Inspectors found two other serious violations in October as well.
Young Guns was dinged for failing to certify periodic machine inspections of equipment that utilized the state’s energy control procedures. These procedures are in place to keep equipment from accidentally release of hazardous energy during maintenance. It was also hit for failing to properly train employees on the procedures, “due to inadequate and conflicting training material and policies.”
The inspectors also found that fire extinguishers on the property were not inspected monthly, although it designated this an “other than serious” violation.
The company was hit with five citations in all, but penalties were only given for the three serious violations—each costing $14,464 for a grand total of $43,392.
Young Guns Chile did not respond to requests for comment.
