Food Manufacturing - May/June 2015

In 2014, Jack Link’s purchased Unilever's meat snacks business,

including a manufacturing facility in Germany.

There is some specialization at the facilities in terms of products being produced. The Alpena facility is the primary producer of beef jerky, while Minong specializes in steaks. New Glarus produces sausage, chubs and sticks. Mankato and Bellevue specialize in sticks. The New Zealand facility can produce the full product line, as can the facilities in Brazil which ship product in bulk to Europe.

The Mankato and Bellevue facilities were both acquired by the company within the past five years to help accommodate increased product demand due to the growth of the meat snacks category.

“It was demand, and the plants were up for sale and they
seemed to fit us — small markets, long-term team members and
high quality traditions, a lot of the same standards and values that
Jack Link's has,” Smith said of the acquisitions of the Mankato
and Bellevue facilities. “We like both of those areas as far as
expansion. Great workforce, great teams and smaller plants, but
smaller plants can turn into large plants really easily.”
The company's primary warehouse and distribution center

resides in Underwood, Iowa. The Underwood facility, which was

acquired in 2011, significantly increased the company's warehouse and distribution capacities, along with providing additional shipping, receiving and product merchandising support. A second, smaller, distribution facility is located in Laurens, Iowa.

“We just outgrew Laurens, so we had to go to Underwood.

We were just out of space,” Smith said. “We try to do more full

truckloads out of Underwood and more hand (crafted)/specialty

products in Laurens. Also in Laurens, we have a large freezer and
we do tempering of frozen meat. There are certain times of the
year that we'll buy frozen, where domestic meat, there's a short-
age of fresh meat at certain times, whether it's spring (or) fall, that
we always make sure we have enough product to take care of our
customer's needs.”
Smith said further growth plans are currently in the works for
Jack Link’s, but the company is probably a couple of years away
from expansion. “There's definitely more expansion (coming) for
Jack Link’s, absolutely.”
When it comes to expansion, there is no better example than
the Alpena facility. The largest of the Jack Link’s production facili-
ties — at approximately 140,000 square feet — occupies a sig-
nificant parcel of land in a city with a population of less than 300
in rural Jerauld County.

Jack Link’s first arrived in Alpena in 1994 when it purchased a small beef jerky manufacturer that employed both Smith and current Alpena plant manager Rick Tebay. Five years later, the company built a new state-of-the-art plant on a 70-acre site along 221st Street that was formerly an alfalfa field. The facility has expanded several times since — an 80,000-square foot addition at the end of 2000, a 40,000-square-foot addition that added warehousing and packaging capacity in 2005-06, and most recently a 20,000-square-foot expansion in 2012-13 that resulted in space for six additional smokehouses and more processing and cooler space and brought the facility to its existing 140,000-square-foot dimensions.

“As sales would continue to grow, of course we had to expand
capacity,” Smith said. “Alpena was a great site for that. We have
plenty of land, great work ethic from the people and the desire to
build and to grow from the Alpena team has been fabulous. The
team has grown and capacity has grown along with sales. There’s
a lot of fun when that happens.”
The Alpena facility, which operates around the clock seven days
a week, employs approximately 900 people and produces approxi-
mately 600 SKUs. Alpena produces four types of protein products
— beef, chicken, turkey and pork — and produces more than 50
flavors of Jerky, Tender Bites, Tender Cuts, Small Batch Jerky and
MINIS Bites. Alpena features six processing lines, 20 smokehouses
and 11 packaging lines. The company points out that all the bags
packed at the Alpena facility last year would span more than
25,000 miles.

The Alpena facility also features a shelf-life room, a large space where packaged product from every lot is stored. The product is tested and tasted at three-month intervals throughout the course of its 18-month shelf life.

Focus on Sustainability

A recently completed $12 million wastewater treatment plant at the Alpena facility is the one of the company's newest sustainability efforts. The project allows the facility to emit clean wastewater and produce methane gas for use as a renewable energy source.