Worker Chris Lloyd, who has been at the Heinz plant for 18 years at Girgarre, a small town in the Goulburn Valley, said workers started receiving their notices at Christmas and in the lead-up to the new year.

''We shut up shop on January 6; it's the last working day,'' Mr Lloyd said, when all but 17 employees leave at the end of the night shift. The remaining few will dispatch the last of the inventory and wind down the factory.

After the last of the Girgarre factory's stock is sold from store shelves, there will be no more Heinz tomato sauce or ketchup made in Australia. Heinz is shifting production to New Zealand.

''Heinz are flying under the radar and are just going to snake out of the country and leave all us people in limbo - with no jobs, young families and huge debts,'' Mr Lloyd said.

While he knew the closure had been foreshadowed last May, he said a clause in the redundancy agreement, which required him to work to the very end or lose his payout, meant he had to forgo other employment opportunities while the factory soldiered on in its final months.

Heinz Australia's spokeswoman Jessica Ramsden defended the way the company had handled the closure. ''A decision to close down a site like this is a very, very difficult one - it impacts the workers and the wider community,'' she said.

Ms Ramsden said the company contemplated what would need to be done to save the plant, but the small scale of the operation meant it was uneconomical to do so.

''It simply came down to the fact that the investment required to make it competitive was too great,'' she said.

But Mr Lloyd, who worked on the bottle line, said Heinz had missed the opportunity to modernise and innovate at the factory, which makes about eight tonnes of sauce an hour from local fruit.

''They never injected any money in the plant in the last 10 years; it's always just been a Band-Aid,'' he said. ''It could have been a state-of-the-art factory - and we're not.''