Creswell Poultry Processor Closing
US - Foster Farms, the largest chicken processor in the Western United States, will shut down the remnants of its Creswell operations on Saturday. The move will idle the final 15 local employees from a work force that numbered more than 250 as recently as six years ago, and will close the book on an industry that has been part of this town for at least 48 years.
27 April 2007
2 minute read
"We have a lot of good feelings about Creswell, and it was a really good community," said Frank Panarra, human resources manager for Foster Farms' Northwest Division in Kelso, Wash. "We hated to leave, but the business dictated it."
It was not immediately clear what will become of the Foster Farms plant - about 35,000 square feet of production space on a 16.6-acre parcel.
"We don't have any plans in place to sell it, although that may be a possibility," Panarra said. "We get calls (about the facility), but to my knowledge we haven't made any arrangements ... or talked with anybody."
California-based Foster Farms eliminated more than 50 local production jobs last October, shifting them to a mammoth chicken processing plant that was built in Kelso eight years ago with the idea of consolidating the company's regional operations at one site.
Source: The Register-Guard
