Triumph, Daily's Proceed With Growth Plans
Triumph Foods and Daily’s Premium Meats are both in the midst of their own expansion projects designed to meet the growing needs of the food service industry.
Triumph, with its pork processing plant located on the Stockyards Expressway, is working this month to complete a $1.5M investment that will enlarge its ham boning production line. The company said the project involves the installation of new machinery and equipment for the line. A total of 72 new jobs, each with average annual wages of $35,000, will occur with the expansion.
“Triumph Foods is continuously looking to improve its efficiencies and create value,” the company said. The addition will assist its role as a key supplier of raw materials to food service providers. All work is destined to finish by the end of the month, it added, with approximately eight weeks of a startup that will eventually fold into full production.
The additional staff is slated to increase the facility’s capacity by almost 25 percent. The growth will also create a spike in pork bellies produced by Triumph that will be used by the Daily’s Premium Meats — located just across the expressway — for bacon production.
Officials said the expansion is further justified by Triumph’s faith in its employees and in St. Joseph’s future. Positive ties created in the community, including with the city of St. Joseph and St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce, also have helped support the plan.
“Drawing upon these relationships and our state-of-the-art infrastructure was an obvious choice, and we are committed to continue to seek future enhancements that draw upon our capabilities and the ever-changing pork industry,” Triumph said.
The company has completed a series of multimillion-dollar production expansions since opening in 2006, helping it become a major exporter of pork. The chamber currently ranks it just behind first-place Mosaic Life Care in terms of work-force size in St. Joseph, with nearly 2,800 employees.
Word of Triumph’s plans was followed closely by an announcement from Daily’s on its own development plans. The plant opened in 2016.
“Our strategic plan to further penetrate food service markets in the Midwest and open new markets in the northeast and southeast is ahead of schedule,” said Daily’s president Kelly Hattan. “The plant continues to steadily increase production, allowing us to stay on track to achieve production and sales goals.”
Hattan said Daily’s successful growth initiative is taking root in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina.
“We are already assessing the need to enhance our bacon slicing capacity into the plant and will start staffing a second slicing production line for the plant’s second shift,” Hattan said.
Daily’s currently has 165 employees, he added, with projections for that number to increase starting in the summer and lasting through the fall.
“We’re also in the early stages of adding a retail sales management structure, which we expect to increase retail bacon sales and plant production as we move into the fall and 2018,” Hattan said.
He said the focus will allow Daily’s to promote a strategy designed to help place Daily’s bacon in numerous grocery stores across the nation.
Source: Triumph Foods