Tulare Plant Outran Demand for Turkey

One of the most dramatic changes in American eating habits has been the increasing popularity of turkey. In the last 30 years, Americans have more than doubled the amount of turkey they eat each year, helped in part by changes in production and marketing and especially by the interest in leaner, lower-fat meats.

The surge in Americans’ appetite for turkey caught the attention of meat and poultry companies. They raced to keep up with demand and take advantage of what, by the mid-1980s, was annual double-digit growth in consumption.

Many of them greatly expanded their contracts with farmers to raise turkeys and even built new processing plants. The result was overproduction. For the Louis Rich Co., the turkeys came home to roost this past May when the company shut down its 2-year-old turkey-processing plant in Tulare in California’s Central Valley, laying off 1,400 workers.

Louis Rich is part of Oscar Mayer Foods; Oscar Mayer is owned by Kraft General Foods, which is now a subsidiary of Philip Morris. When the giant food company made the decision to build the plant, it looked as if turkey’s popularity was on an unending upward path.

In the 1960s, Americans were eating, on average, around seven pounds of turkey a year.

Most of that came from the big birds roasted at Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. By the end of 1991, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, consumption of turkey had climbed to 18 pounds per person per year.

Louis Rich and other processors now sell turkey, like chicken, in parts and whole. It’s also processed into luncheon and deli meats and even ground like hamburger.

Rich opened its state-of-the art Tulare turkey-processing plant in 1989, closing an aging processing plant in Modesto at the same time.

But by the time the 6.9-acre plant had opened, “the growth in turkey slowed down dramatically. We had too much capacity,” said Kraft General Foods spokesman Michael Mudd.

Mudd said the plant was conceived when “turkey consumption was growing at 12% to 14% every year, and there was every indication it would continue to grow at that pace. By the time the plant opened and got up to speed, the growth in turkey had tailed off considerably, to about 2% to 3% a year.”

The company would not reveal how much it spent on the plant or the cost of closing it down. The closure included a large write-down associated with a broad-based restructuring of its food business, taken by Philip Morris in 1991.

Mudd said the company chose to shut down the new Tulare plant and not one of its three others in the Midwest and East because of other costs associated with turkey production.

He said it may convert the plant to another use or, if the economy improves, find a buyer for it.