(Springdale, AR) — The head man at Tyson says the local plant should be a lot busier once we turn the calendar to next year.
Donnie King, CEO of Tyson Foods, addressed shareholders Monday during a quarterly earnings call. Over the past year, Tyson closed six poultry plants, but also opened a new one in Danville in late November.
Morris says the 325,000 square-foot local plant is only running one shift per day, but that will likely change in the near future. “I expect due to demand it will be double shifted by the beginning of ’25,” Morris told shareholders Monday.
Tyson got a six million dollar incentive package to build in Danville. That includes three million from the Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund, a $500,000 grant from the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Fund and $1.5 million from the Tobacco Commission.
The Tyson factory is in the Cane Creek Industrial Park and is owned jointly by Danville and Pittsylvania County. The plant makes cooked chicken nuggets and other Tyson products.
At a November ribbon cutting, local plant manager Nancy Frank said their long-term plans called for more than 400 team members producing four million pounds of fully-cooked Tyson-brand chicken products a week. “This building was designed from the ground up to include the latest innovations from automation to wearable technologies,” Frank said.
Tyson reported the financial results of the second quarter of the 2024 fiscal year on Monday. The quarter ended March 30. Net income for the quarter was $145 million, improving from a net loss of $97 million for the same quarter of 2023.
Net sales were down slightly, going from $13.13 billion for the second quarter of FY 2023 to $12.07 billion during the most recent quarter. Second-quarter sales for the chicken segment were down year-over-year 6.1% at $44.07 billion.