SIOUX CITY -- Seaboard Triumph Foods executives feel so confident about the Sioux City market that they're already planning an expansion of their mega pork plan under construction.
Ground was broken in fall 2015 on the company's slaughter and processing plant. Work is expected to wrap in May 2018, with production anticipated to start in July with a single shift and a workforce of about 1,100.
Last month, the company -- a joint venture between Guymon, Oklahoma-based Seaboard Foods and St. Joseph, Missouri-based Triumph Foods -- announced it would add a second shift in May 2018, growing total employment to around 2,000.
“The timing of the expansion for a second shift is a result of growing demand for the Seaboard Foods line of quality pork products as well as ongoing growth in the industry,” STF chief operation officer Mark Porter said in a release. “The support demonstrated thus far by our customers, community, city and state agencies simply gives us great confidence to grow right here in Northwest Iowa."
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Mayor Bob Scott praised the company for the additional investment, saying it "shows the confidence that Seaboard Triumph Foods has in our community."
"As one of the largest projects in Sioux City, this expansion will create the demand for further housing growth to accommodate new employees in the region,” Scott said in a statement.
With a second shift, the plant will have the capacity to slaughter and process up to 20,000 to 24,000 hogs daily, or 6 million hogs per year, double the initial projections.
The new construction, which will begin this spring, will increase the total square footage from 850,000 to 950,000, and raise the total cost from around $264 million to excess of $300 million.
To help finance the larger investment, a state economic development board last month approved an additional $3.3 million in tax incentives. The action raises to $16.5 million the total state tax credits and sales and use tax refunds awarded to the blockbuster project since it was announced in May 2015.
The city also awarded an incentive package that included waiving $7.7 million in property taxes on the sprawling complex for the first five years, based on a scale that will gradually reduce the exemption.
The Sioux City plant, the first all-new pork slaughter facility in the U.S. in a decade, is being constructed on a 250-acre site in the city's Bridgeport West Business Park, bounded roughly by Interstate 29 to the east, the Missouri River to the west and Sioux Gateway Airport to the south.
Hundreds of temporary construction workers have been deployed to the site, creating a big economic boost to the region. Epstein is the managing contractor for the project. The Chicago-based firm has extensive experience building similar meat factories, including the Triumph Foods plant in St. Joseph, Missouri. The majority of the subcontractors are based in Siouxland. So too are most of the workers assigned to the project.
The state-of-the-art Sioux City plant, designed with technologies to mitigate odors, will mirror the St. Joseph plant, which opened in 2006, and today employs about 2,800.
After the second shift begins, the Sioux City plant will have about 200 salaried positions and 1,800 hourly production positions. The company has hired a substantial number of the salaried posts and recently started job fairs and other hiring efforts for production jobs.
Hiring locally for full-time positions is a priority, said Irving Jensen III, STF director of community relations and government affairs. With local unemployment at a near-historic low, however, officials also are recruiting beyond the tri-state region.
The new factory's initial annual payroll in excess of $50 million, as well as spending on materials, supplies and services, is expected to ripple through the local economy, creating new sales for a host of ancillary businesses, from truck drivers to pallet makers to cold storage warehouses.
Triumph Foods is owned by five member-owned pork producers with operations in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas, Illinois and Oklahoma. Seaboard Foods, a unit of Seaboard Corp., a large publicly-traded diversified company, owns hog farms in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Texas and processes more than 5 million hogs a year at its Guymon, Oklahoma, plant. That facility, which opened in 1996, employs about 5,000.
Seaboard Foods and Triumph Foods have cooperated on several ventures in the past year. Seaboard, for example, markets and sells pork produced by Triumph to domestic and international markets.
If the two firms were considered a single combined entity, they would rank as the second-largest hog producer, a top 5 U.S. pork processor, and one of the nation's leading exporters of pork, according to the company.
Under the joint partnership, Seaboard and Triumph each would be responsible for supplying a third of that number, leaving about 1 million hogs to be purchased on the open market, which industry experts say will be a boon to independent producers.
The Journal's Dave Dreeszen contributed to this story.
