Pure Prairie Poultry in Charles City looks to hit 100% first shift capacity this winter

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By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Pure Prairie Poultry’s new warehouse and distribution center should be completed and ready to use in early November, the company’s president and CEO said this week.

Brian Roelofs gave a quick update on the chicken processing plant’s progress at the Charles City Area Development Corp.’s monthly meeting Wednesday morning.

“You know, when we started this, we knew that we were going to be kind of crawl, walk, run,” he said.

The concrete floor in the new warehouse and distribution center addition was poured last week, the refrigeration will be installed soon and the construction should be ready for the contractors’ punch list of final details by the end of October, he said.

By the time the warehouse and distribution center have been completed the pavement should be in place in front of the building where the company is leasing part of the old North Main Street, and in Dana Park, which the company purchased from the City Improvement Association.

“So the trucks can come in that way and we won’t be blocking traffic or anything like that,” Roelofs said.

He said a millwright company is currently putting the second processing space equipment together.

In the poultry industry, first processing includes the live receiving area where chickens are slaughtered, cleaned and chilled and are still whole birds. They can be shipped and sold that way or sent to secondary processing, where the birds are cut into parts and packaged on trays.

“The cut up and packaging area is what’s being renovated now,” Roelofs said. “That will be also ready by the end of October. … We’ve been producing just whole birds. By November we’ll be producing our branded tray pack products.”

He noted that the company website (pureprairiepoultry.com) has been updated to reflect new product marketing of tray-packed chicken breasts, tenders, drumsticks, thighs, party wings and much more that the company will be producing soon, and he encouraged people to check out the website.

“We’re going to be introducing our brand in November,” he said.

Roelofs said the company has 45 to 50 production employees now, and plans to more than double that, hiring 50 to 60 more people by the end of the year in groups of about 10 at a time as production ramps up.

“We’re running probably about 60% full right now and we hope to be 100% full by February,” he said.

‘The big thing on the people front is we’ve had enough people come into the business so far. We haven’t had a lot of turnover,” he said.

The next part of the addition project will be the office complex. The foundation for that has been laid and the steel to frame the building will be going up in the next couple of weeks.

The plan is to have that part of the building enclosed by early winter so work can continue inside, Roelofs said.

It will include the main entry, a few offices, a break room with a vending area and a shipping office, he said. “And upstairs will be our corporate offices.”

The company is currently renting corporate office space from Skyline Materials on South Grand Avenue, but plans to relocate to the new office space at the plant by next spring.

Ron Litterer, the Area Development Corp. board president, asked Roelofs about chicken suppliers for the plant.

Roelofs said he had just looked at those numbers the other day.

“We’ve got about 43 farm partners with a number of barns spaces, so we’ve got enough layer barns and breeder and pullet barns for the first shift signed up and under contract,” he said. “So that’s ready to go. We can fill up the plant in the first shift.”

He said the company has an agreement to purchase the former Larson Manufacturing windows and door plant in Lake Mills to build a hatchery. As part of that process Pure Prairie Poultry had to work with the city of Lake Mills to revise a city ordinance that didn’t allow livestock or poultry in the city.

“And of course our live animals aren’t in the city very long because they hatch and get shipped out to the farms that day,” he said. “Closing is upcoming on that building and then we’ll begin construction. That’ll be a while, but until that we’ve got custom hatching at a couple different places to make sure we have the right chicks to fill up the plant.”