Case Farms is planning a $126 million expansion project at its poultry processing facility in Winesburg, Ohio.
According to a report from the Daily Record, company representatives Charles Rigdon, Sammy Caudle and Sam Jackson met with the Holmes County Commission to discuss Case Farms’ plans. The project would involve the construction of a 26,000-square-foot addition to the existing facility and a 154,000-square-foot cold storage facility with a capacity to hold 20 million pounds of poultry. The project would also involve replacing equipment and renovations to the existing building to handle birds of different sizes.
The chickens currently processed there weigh around nine pounds.
“The new facility would be outfitted to process small birds,” Holmes County Economic Development Director Mark Leininger said at the commission meeting.
Once the expansion project is completed, a second shift and close to 200 new full-time employees would be added.
An estimated 840,000 pounds of chicken could be processed weekly at the facility when it reaches full production.
The commission approved an enterprise zone agreement at its meeting to enable the project to move forward.
Rigdon told commissioners there were three other Case Farms facilities that had the space to expand, but the Ohio location was in the best geographic region to help Case Farms meet the needs of a particular customer he did not identify.
The company hopes to break ground on the project soon, but no specific date has been decided at this point.
Case Farms, according to the WATTAgNet Top Poultry Companies Database, processed 19.6 million pounds of ready-to-cook chicken on a weekly basis in 2018, which was a 0.5% increase from its 2017 production figures. The company, headquartered in Troutman, North Carolina, has four slaughter plants, one further-processing plant, four hatcheries and three feed mills. It ranks as the 13th largest poultry company in the United States.
