Hormel Foods recently purchased a former distribution center for defunct discount retail chain Shopko, with the intent of converting the facility to a food processing plant.
The facility is located in Papillion, Nebraska, which is a suburb of Omaha.
“We are excited to expand our manufacturing footprint with this project in the greater Omaha/Council Bluffs area and are targeting a November 2020 opening for this first phase,” the company said in a statement.
The property was officially acquired by Papillion Foods, a legal entity under Hormel Foods, for a price of about $25 million.
According to Hormel, the company expects to employ about 200 people with the first phase of the expansion of the facility, and it plans to recruit the majority of the staff at the plant through the local workforce.
“The company will be making additional investments to completely remodel the facility and convert it to a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant for our value-added portfolio of world-class food brands,” the Hormel statement said.
Hormel said it will be working with local and state economic development authorities as it transitions the space to meet its future capacity needs.
The company in its statement emailed to WATT Global Media did not identify which brands would be processed at the Nebraska facility, but KETV reported Spam, Jennie-O Turkey Store and Skippy products would be produced there.
Hormel subsidiary Jennie-O Turkey Store is the second largest poultry company in the United States, according to the WATTAgNet Top Poultry Companies Database.
Shopko, according to Wikipedia, was a retail discount chain that was founded in 1962 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The chain grew and eventually acquired rival chain Pamida in 1999. It would go on to purchase 20 stores previously operated by the bankrupt Alco chain in 2015, before filing for bankruptcy itself in 2019 and closing all of its stores. At the time Shopko went out of business, it was operating 363 stores in 24 states, primarily in the midwestern and western United States.
