Dive Brief:
- Cargill has planned to invest $111 million to convert its Columbus, NE, ground beef processing plant into a cooked meats facility to better serve the needs of the company's foodservice customers.
- Cargill will relocate its ground beef operations to existing plants at Butler, WI, and Fort Worth, TX, where approximately $27 million of the total investment will go toward expanding those plants with new production lines.
- About 80 of the 250 jobs at the Columbus facility will be affected, but the company is helping those employees find positions at other Cargill plants in the region, including providing relocation support. When the cooked meats plant is fully operational in 2017, the factory's employment will return to 250 positions.
Dive Insight:
"This is being driven by customer desires for more cooked meat product," Cargill spokesman Michael Martin told Drovers CattleNetwork. "We haven't been able to meet the demand so far, and now we can."
"When completed, our Columbus plant will give us a variety of cooked meat processing capabilities we currently don’t have, and those new capabilities will provide our customers with more options to help them grow their businesses," said John Niemann, president of Cargill's turkey and cooked meats division.
Conversion will begin in December, and cooked meat production is expected to start in mid-2016.