Tyson Still Tops Among Area?s Poultry Big Boys

From pluckers to planes, Springdale company’s employee base is a large and diverse one

The Northwest Arkansas Business Journal poultry company rankings remain essentially unchanged for Northwest Arkansas firms from 1998 to 1999.

Tyson Foods, the world’s largest poultry company, is, naturally, the region’s largest poultry company. The company employed some 7,500 people in Northwest Arkansas — Washington and Benton counties — in 1999.

Tyson operations in the two-county region include seven poultry plants, two Mexican Original Plants — but no rendering plants. The largest concentration of workers is at the company’s Springdale corporate headquarters, where nearly 1,200 people work.

Second-largest among Tyson’s Northwest Arkansas operations is its Berry Street plant in Springdale, where about 973 people work.

But not everyone at Tyson works either in corporate offices or with chickens or tortillas. The company also has 11 employers in aviation, 88 people work at the employment center and 43 people work in the corporate lab at Springdale. Tyson even has its own gas operation, which employs eight people in the region. Another 55 people work in the company’s Springdale garage

And Tyson still has its pork group, which employs 335 people locally and two people in the pork lab. Tyson had hoped to sell The Pork Group Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary, but a deal with Smithfield Foods Inc. of Smithfield, Va., fell through late last year.

Most of the other companies on the Business Journal list differ from Tyson in two ways: They’re significantly smaller and they’re privately owned.

Fort Smith’s OK Foods Inc., one of those privately owned companies, remains second with 4,250 employees. Simmons Foods Inc., owned by the Simmons family of Siloam Springs, is third with 2,500 employees in Northwest Arkansas.

Poultry Magazine, an industry publication, ranked OK Foods the ninth-largest poultry company with estimated 1998 sales of $569 million. Simmons ranked 17th with an estimated $420 million in sales.

OK Foods is a subsidiary of OK Industries Inc., which is owned by the Wenderoth family. It was listed as the largest privately held food processing company in Arkansas in 1998.

Peterson Farms Inc., based in Decatur and owned by the Peterson family, ranked fifth on the Business Journal listing with 1,400 employees. The company was ranked 29th by Poultry Magazine with estimated sales of $173 million in 1998. Peterson operates a poultry processing plant but is known primarily for its breeding stock.

Another family owned poultry business from Northwest Arkansas, George’s Inc., was ranked 22nd by the magazine with estimated sales of $314 million in 1998. George’s was fourth in the Business Journal rankings with 1,500 employees.

The only turkey processing company on the list is Cargill Inc., which is a much more diverse company worldwide. The company employs about 1,200 people in Northwest Arkansas in its turkey processing company. Cargill sells turkey products in the United States under the Honeysuckle White and Riverside brand names.

Internationally, Cargill has poultry processing operations in Honduras and Thailand and sells turkeys and chickens under the Sun Valley Foods name in the United Kingdom and in France.