US poultry firm Sanderson Farms has opened a new $155 million processing plant and wastewater treatment facility in St Pauls, North Carolina.
The new 180,000-square-foot plant will work with an existing 65,000-square-foot hatchery and a feed mill in the state, making it the company’s eleventh fully integrated poultry processing facility nationwide.
The firm said the new deboning facility would provide greater accessibility to the East Coast market as well as employ 1,100 workers in the local community, with an additional 100 contract growers.
The facility features the latest technology in the poultry industry, including food safety, employee welfare and environmental conservation. The St Pauls facility, which was built on a greenfield site, will utilise a mechanical wastewater treatment system for recycling wastewater to be used on a neighbouring 1,500-acre plot of land owned by the company.
The state-of-the-art poultry complex will be able to process 1.25 million birds per week for the big bird deboning market and will sell approximately 500 million pounds of poultry meat annually.
Sanderson Farms was founded in 1947, and is the third largest poultry producer in the United States.