PROGRESS: Expansion underway at Lopez-Dorada's Cherokee plant

CHEROKEE, Iowa — Lopez-Dorada Foods, the Oklahoma-based meatpacker, in October began a roughly $40 million expansion of its Cherokee plant. 

The expansion will add a little under 24,000 square feet to the existing plant, said Lopez-Dorada Vice President John Patrick Lopez, while refurbishing another 29,000 square feet of the existing plant. The new space will consist primarily of dry storage, cooler space, freezer space, shipping and receiving. 

The plant at present produces Canadian bacon and has about 58 people on its payroll. John Lopez said the expansion and refurbishment will bring new fully cooked lines to the plant, which will add about 100 or more workers. 

"We are hoping to add approximately 32 million pounds of capacity on an annual basis," John Lopez said in October. The fully cooked lines will be "a variety of beef, pork and poultry products," he added. 

Construction should be complete in 14 to 16 months, weather permitting, John Lopez said. 

"This will be a big boom for the community, and for the county," said Cherokee Economic Development Director Bill Anderson. "And we're excited for them." 

Lopez-Dorada purchased the roughly 285,000-square-foot plant in the summer of 2019 for $9.3 million, including $5.8 million for the real estate and $3.5 million for equipment on site. 

The aging Cherokee plant changed hands several times before Lopez-Dorada purchased it. It became an IBP Inc. plant in 1997, then a Tyson plant after Tyson's acquisition of IBP in 2001. In 2014, Tyson closed the plant, citing the facility's age and the "prohibitive cost of renovation," and changing consumer demands. The closure resulted in the loss of roughly 450 jobs.

Iowa Food Group, a startup led by a group of Texans and one Iowan, purchased the plant for $2.35 million in September 2018. The company planned to initially hire 100 workers to process beef, chicken, pork and lamb slaughtered elsewhere for retail or food service, but they soon ran into trouble.

Only a few months after production at the plant was restarted, the firm announced it had temporarily suspended production to raise more capital. The temporary suspension became permanent; Iowa Food Group never resumed operations, and its workers lost their jobs.

Lopez-Dorada was originally called Anderson Meats, a spinoff of Wilson Foods, which built the oldest parts of the Cherokee plant in the mid-1960s. Anderson produced beef patties for McDonald's as early as 1968; the company takes its current name from John C. Lopez (father of John Patrick Lopez), who purchased a controlling stake in the company in 1992.