Mark Simmons has spent the past 31 years putting his father's vision in focus. Now the family's third generation is helping prepare Simmons Foods Inc. for the future. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this April, the Siloam Springs full-service poultry company has grown from $325 million in gross sales in 1993 to more than $400 million today. Much of that growth is due to the leadership of Chairman Mark Simmons, son of company founder Bill Simmons, who has overseen numerous acquisitions including the 1982 purchase of O'Brien Foods, which doubled the size of the company. In 1997, Mark's son, Todd, became president of sales and marketing, environmental quality, human resources and information services.
The mainstay of the company's business has always been supplying products to national fast-food and deli operations. But Mark and Todd agree the company's success reflects directly on its mission statement, which challenges all 4,500 employees to be innovative. "We want our people to understand it's not just one or two people behind what we' re doing," Mark Simmons says. "It takes the whole bunch to get the job done for our customers. All of us looking for new ways to do things is so critical.
"My dad started the company with that in mind. He was a classic entrepreneur who would dream up what people wanted before they even knew they wanted it." Creative History Bill Simmons was known as a visionary in the poultry industry. He and his wife, Mazzine, moved from southwest Nebraska to Decatur in 1949 to start Pluss Poultry with Frank Pluss. In 1951, Pluss Poultry built a Siloam Springs plant and a year later all of the company's functions moved there. Mark, now 53, was four when his parents moved to Arkansas. "Dad couldn't find a house to rent for us in Decatur," Simmons says. "I guess he got tired of driving 28 miles every day, and people in Siloam were encouraging him to build a plant here.
Our Plant One is still on the site where that original plant was built." The chamber of commerce raised $19,071.50 in pledges to attract Simmons, a relatively small investment for the impact it has had on the community. Billed at the time as the world's largest poultry plant, Pluss' first facility processed 10,000 birds per day. Now Simmons processes nearly twice that many in an hour. Thanks to the company's first employee, Joe Walenciak, Simmons literally has the first dime it ever"made." Walenciak found it in the plant's first batch of broilers processed on April 7, 1949. The coin is now mounted on the wall in the corporate headquarter's lounge. Bill Simmons saved his dollars, too, and in the early 1950s bought out Pluss and dropped an "s" to make it Plus Poultry. Around this same time, he became an industry leader by turning what was considered poultry waste - chicken feathers, heads and feet - into byproducts that could be used as livestock and pet food ingredients.
The company still processes its own line of Bolo dog and cat food as well as private label pet foods. "Dad began our rendering division because all of the live by-products coming out of the plant were too much to feed the hogs and too much to let gather on the ground," Simmons says. "The red meat industry had been recycling for a long time, and this was one of the first big poultry plants that had to find a way to recycle." There were many other innovations. In 1960, Bill Simmons created a two-pound, fried-then-frozen chicken carton that had some success. He also invented chicken hot dogs, canned whole chicken and chicken rolls, although most of the products were considered years ahead of their time. "Dad would just start producing a product and send a salesman out on the road with a van," Mark Simmons says. "He'd sell it store-to-store. That's the whole basis for how our pet food division started, and it's one of the most successful parts of our company." Expansion and Acquisition By the time the company name was changed to "Simmons" in the early 1970s, it was poised for massive growth.
Simmons developed its own vertical integration process at that time, an uncharacteristically slow transition for Bill Simmons. "Because of the industry's volatility in the '50s and '60s," Simmons says, "companies started figuring out there was a need to coordinate production schedules to keep a consistent supply of chicks and feed and to make everything efficient. "Dad was a processing and marketing fellow and wasn't originally interested in the live production side of the business. We built our hatchery here as late as 1976." But Mark quickly followed in his father's footsteps when he was elected company president in 1974 following Bill's death. And as much as the '70s were a decade of internal growth for Simmons, the '80s were a decade of acquisition. On the heels of being elected president of the Arkansas Poultry Federation in 1980, Mark oversaw the 1982 acquisition of O'Brien, which brought Simmons a feed mill in Anderson, Mo., a hatchery in Jane, Mo., and processing plants in Southwest City, Mo., and Jay, Oklahoma.
A $30 million capital improvements project helped increase the Siloam Springs hatchery's capacity to 1.6 million eggs per week and the Jane hatchery's capacity to 2.8 million eggs, believed to be the largest in the world.
Submitted by: Tom Jack
Published At: Pet insurance http://www.petsfinancial.com
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