SOUTH SIOUX CITY - Business is booming for K&B Transportation, a long-haul trucking company that keeps beef, pork and - since Tyson Foods bought IBP inc. in 2001- chicken rolling across the nation's broad mid-section.
This year K&B built an $850,000, 8,500-square-foot maintenance addition to its sizable home base at 4700 Dakota Ave. in South Sioux City.
Brock Ackerman, vice president, said that, along with the expansion, K&B added 11 employees, eight in operations and three in safety and accounting. He said no government grants were involved in the expansion.
The company also purchased land east of its facility this year, so it doesn't become land-locked. "I think we'll continue to grow," Ackerman said. That's not a hard prediction to make, given the company's track record.
K&B was founded in 1987 in Sioux City by Ackerman's father, Ken Ackerman. It ran dedicated routes serving IBP (now Tyson Fresh Meats) plants in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. It moved to South Sioux City 10 years later to be closer to IBP's flagship plant in adjacent Dakota City. And it continued to grow.
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Ken Ackerman retired from the company in 2000 but retains the title of president. Brock and his brother Kory Ackerman, also a vice president, own and run K&B. While the enterprise may appear to have been named for the brothers, it wasn't; the K is for their sister, Kyle, and the B is for their mother, Barbara.
By 2002, K&B had bought a couple smaller trucking lines, bringing its fleet to 300 tractors and 375 trailers. It employed about 350 people then.
Following trends in the industry, the company has gotten larger in order to stay competitive. It now owns 535 tractors, or "power units," and 1,050 trailers, marking the addition of 50 trucks in the past year alone. Ackerman guesses that 10 years ago, K&B had only about 100 trucks.
And K&B now employs 670 people; 545 of them are truck drivers.
The territory it serves also has grown, going far beyond the initial four states. K&B now runs trucks from Denver to the Ohio-Pennsylvania line, and from as far south as El Paso and Loredo, Texas, north to Minneapolis.
It also runs a few routes in the Southeast, where it has operational offices in Macon and Athens, Ga. Another operational office is in Rochelle, Ill. The offices handle some dispatch and freight booking duties.
More ahead
Although K&B is already at a size where it can stay competitive in the marketplace, it is still on the grow.
"We plan to continue to grow our fleet at roughly 5 to 8 percent a year," Brock Ackerman said. "There are some new business endeavors we'd like to get into that would require a little more capacity."
He declined to say what those endeavors might be, however, or where they might take K&B's trucks and drivers.
