Construction is on schedule for the planned summer opening of a large pork processing plant in Sioux City that will employ 2,000 workers.
The $264-million Seaboard Triumph factory is scheduled to open in late July.
Company spokesman Irving Jensen says the 600,000 square-foot plant is walled in now.
“The construction site is quite busy, there’s several hundred workers over there,” Jensen says. “I’m not sure what today’s count is. Every day it changes and it’s not shrinking, it’s going up. There’s a lot of activity from a lot of different trades. The building, as it stands, is all enclosed except for a few access points.”
Once the plant is operational, he says they intend to sell pork products to both domestic and foreign customers.
“Seaboard Foods does the marketing and they market under several brands, Prairie Fresh and Seaboard brand and then bacon under Bailey’s Bacon,” Jensen says. “Probably, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-to-35 percent of our product will be for export.”
Plant officials planned to initally open with 11-hundred employees and have decided to add a second shift with another 900 employees by the summer of 2018.
“First shift, just to put it in perspective, will start July 31st, which happens to be a Monday,” Jensen says. “The plant, in terms of the cut floor and in terms of the majority of the plant operation, is already built for two shifts.”
Once the second shift is at capacity, the plant will process 22,000 head of hogs per day. Jensen says they’ll buy hogs from a 150-mile radius.
Reporting by Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton