Taking over plant that was closed last summer
Oregon meat processor BrucePac brings jobs to Oklahoma
The 134,764-sq-ft plant had been home to JCP Specialty Foods until August 2014, when JCP’s parent company, Atlantic Premium Brands, ceased operations there. JCP’s departure left approximately 80 local employees looking for work.
“We hadn’t been targeting Oklahoma specifically; we just felt it was time for a strategic move,” Rick Wiser, BrucePac’s director of sales and marketing, told FoodProductionDaily. “We heard about [JCP’s] situation and started making inquiries in September.”
Based in Woodburn, Oregon, BrucePac makes pre-cooked meat, poultry and seafood products and distributes them nationwide. The family-owned company already has manufacturing plants in Woodburn and Silverton, Oregon.
Beefing up
Those two facilities employ a total of 650 employees and produce more than 1.3 million lbs of ready to eat chicken, beef, pork, turkey and salmon products each week. However, BrucePac’s business is outgrowing those plants.
“We wanted to increase our manufacturing capacity and be closer to our customers in the South and the Midwest,” Wiser said.
About 90 miles north of Dallas, Texas, the Durant facility is “centrally located for our needs,” he added. “It opens the sizable Texas market and the Southeast to us.”
The company is planning to do some renovations and landscaping at the facility over the next 7-8 months before starting production in the third quarter of this year. Even so, “the plant’s in great shape,” he said. “It won’t take nearly as much effort to get it in the shape we need as some of the other facilities we looked at.”
Products by design
BrucePac officials said they expect to hire about 75 people initially and ramp up to 200 or more employees as the business continues to grow over the next several years.
“We feel very fortunate to have located a facility that will meet our current and long-term growth strategies,” said Glen Golomski, BrucePac president and CEO.
Wiser explained that the company, which bills itself as “food product designers,” specializes in cooked proteins for retail and foodservice operations.
“Our products are used as ingredients by the majority of our customers,” he said. “We also co-pack for a lot of other companies. When I call on new clients, I tell them they may not have heard our name before, but they’ve eaten our products.”
