Tyson Plant in Emporia Ceasing Operations
January 25, 2008 – Springdale, Arkansas – As part of a strategy to optimize its commodity meat business, Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN) is restructuring operations at its Emporia, Kansas, beef plant, Tyson officials announced today.
Beef slaughter operations will cease within the next few weeks. However, the facility will still be used as a cold storage and distribution warehouse and will process ground beef. In addition, the Emporia facility will help enhance efficiencies at some other Tyson plants by taking over the processing of certain commodity and specialty cuts, which have typically slowed production at those other locations. The company has no present plans to use the slaughter area of the Emporia plant; however, the equipment there will be left intact.
“This is an extremely difficult decision, given the great team of people who work there and our investment in the plant,” said Dick Bond, president and CEO of Tyson Foods. “However, we must make changes to our commodity business model to effectively manage through challenging market conditions.
“There continues to be far more beef slaughter capacity than available cattle and we believe this problem will continue to afflict the industry for the foreseeable future,” said Bond. “We estimate the current slaughter overcapacity in the industry to be between 10,000 and 14,000 head of cattle per day.
“This imbalance is especially a problem for Emporia,” he said. “Cattle production has moved from eastern to western Kansas over the past twenty to thirty years, and the Emporia plant is no longer centrally located in relationship to where most of the cattle it slaughters are raised.”
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