Fournier Foods has dropped its plans to build a new USDA-inspected poultry processing plant in East Concord, New Hampshire.
Despite receiving most of the necessary approvals to make the plant a reality, the company recently informed the community by way of a letter that building a new plant would not be economically sensible, according to a report in the Concord Monitor.
“From the beginning, we were willing to accept a less than market-competitive rates of return, because we hoped to make a contribution to stimulating small-scale agriculture. While our motivation was not purely financial, the project still needed to make economic sense. It recently became clear that the project would require a lot more capital with lower returns than what we were willing to accept,” Fournier Foods owners Craig Fournier and Omar Khudari wrote.
The company’s owners also expressed a concern for the poultry farmers in the area that will not have a plant for their chickens to be processed.
“We are very concerned about the New Hampshire farmers who have given us immense support, and who now will not have the opportunities that our plant would have provided for them. We will endeavor to see if there is anything we can do for the farmers, but we wanted to be forthright and share our decision as we had made it,” Fournier and Khudari wrote.
Neighborhood opposition to the plant was also a factor in the company’s decision not to build.
The initial plans for the poultry plant were that it would be able to process 2,000 birds per eight-hour shift, or 6,000 birds in up to three shifts.
