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After nearly five years, state and company leaders, as well as employees and community members, gathered Oct. 19 at the Fremont, Neb. site of the new state-of-the-art poultry complex to celebrate the grand opening.
Since operations began in July, the feed mill has received 184 trucks or 5,500 tons of soybean meal from local soybean processing plants. It has also already received just over 700 trucks, or 722,000 bushels of yellow corn, with all of it coming from Dodge, Saunders, and Washington counties in Nebraska. The company will convert local corn and soy into 1 of 7 types of poultry feed.
Collectively, growers will invest another $350 million in the project. Approximately 100 farm families will be supplying the plant. Lincoln Premium Poultry said it has already started processing birds and collecting eggs from its first farmers.
The new plant has three processing lines that will run two shifts, each operating at 140 birds/minute. At full production, it will provide Costco with approximately 800,000 rotisserie chickens per week.
State-of-the-art air fill chamber will aid plant in processing 2 million chickens/week, or about 100 million a year, to supply one-third of Costco’s demand for both roasted and fresh chicken.
The Shaner family is just one of many family farmers in the region providing eggs to be hatched at the facility to supply broilers for growing operations.
When all single-stage incubators are filled, Lincoln Premium Poultry will incubate 7.4 million eggs at once that were collected from breeder farms. Approximately one-third of the grower chicken barns are currently producing birds hatched at the Costco plant.
Over 600 team members are currently being employed by the complex, with over 1,000 expected once fully staffed. About 98% of employees are from Nebraska, and 51% of those are from Fremont itself. The rest are from other communities in the region, and 2% moved in from out of state.
Plant manager Tim Peters shows final product to Costco partners Jeff Lyons and Ron Vachris.
Costco chief executive officer Craig Jelinek tours facility during the recent open house weekend. An economic impact of approximately $1 billion annually is expected, which is approximately 1% of Nebraska’s GDP.
During the ribbon cutting ceremony, Lincoln Premium Poultry chief operating officer Walt Shafer thanked the farmers as well as the many stakeholders who contributed to the success of the project. The complex is expected to impact over 20 counties in Nebraska and several in Iowa, as the dollars generated through income on farms turn over across the region. Additionally, Lincoln Premium Poultry and Costco will continue to utilize local vendors, suppliers, and service providers for many years to come.
First rotisserie chickens from the new poultry complex are now for sale in some warehouses. It has been reported that Costco sells approximately 60 million birds every year under its private Kirkland brand.
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