US-based Tyson Foods has announced the company has completed its purchase of a bacon processing facility in Omaha, Nebraska, from Millard Refrigerated Services.
The processing plant, which employs approximately 600 people and has sales of approximately $160 million (€173mn), has been primarily involved in co-packing smoked bacon for private brands for retail and foodservice. The plant will operate within Tyson's Refrigerated Processed Meats Division and the current management and production team structure will remain in place.
John Lea, Tyson group vice president of retail, said: "This acquisition provides highly-efficient production capacity within the traditional bacon category, in addition to allowing us to further expand into the growing category of pre-cooked bacon. It provides for expanding our line of Thomas E. Wilson branded products into both bacon categories while continuing our aggressive expansion of the Thomas E. Wilson brand across all major value added meat categories. And it will allow us to serve the existing customer base of the former MPS operation and provide added capacity for our foodservice customers of bacon products."
The facility, which has been completely refurbished into a state-of-the-art bacon processing plant, has approximately 329,000 square feet under roof, including the processing area and cold storage capacity.
Terms of the transaction are not being released.