Fremont, Neb. — Walt Shafer grabs a freshly picked chicken bone, examines it, and says he’s pleased with the looks of it. Sure, there are some pink meat scraps left on it, but by his way of thinking the minimal loss of yield that comes with an automated deboning line is worth a human’s happiness. After all, doing that work by hand all day is, well, not all that enjoyable.
Here at Costco Wholesale Corp.’s ultra high-tech chicken processing plant in Fremont, Neb., the idea is that manual labor is meant to support a leading cast of automated machines — from lairage to shipping —whose jobs kick in even before the birds get to the plant (they’re gathered at the barns by automatic pickers, too).
Having shopped the world over for the industry’s most advanced toys and put them all under one roof, Costco and its processing operator, Lincoln Premium Poultry, have cut labor needs nearly in half from the original projection of 1,600 workers.
More than a quarter of the way into a 45-week ramp-up period, Shafer, a calm, cool and collected Virginian chicken grower and industry veteran who’s leading the LPP processing operation, says he’s impressed with how everything has come together and is working so far.
It’s been four years since Costco decided to eliminate the variability of relying on various suppliers that couldn’t always keep up with demand and do that work itself. It’s been a huge undertaking that included starting a grower network from scratch in a state almost entirely absent chicken production, not to mention construction of a 408,000-bushel capacity feed mill, an 85,000-square-foot hatchery and soon a chemistry and microbiology lab on the 400-acre complex.
Then, of course, there’s the $400 million processing plant. Shafer has been putting in about 20,000 steps per day while walking the 400,000-square-foot behemoth — which houses a dizzying eight miles of chain — and trying to help optimize its maze of processes. It’s going well enough so far that Costco stores nationwide are reporting back noticeable improvements in the product, he says, noting how impressed he has been with the birds in terms of performance, conformity and quality.
As of early October, the plant was running two lines with one shift and slaughtering about 500,000 birds per week, all going to Costco primarily in the form of deli WOGs (whole birds without giblets) and six-partition saddle packs of breasts, thighs, drumsticks, tenders and other cuts. The goal is to start a third line on Dec. 1, and add a second shift on Feb. 1 on the way to quadrupling slaughter to 2 million birds per week.
Check out our feature on the new Costco plant in the November issue of Meatingplace magazine.