HANCEVILLE — Tyson Foods will invest nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in Cullman County to build a new poultry processing facility; one that will replace the aging River Valley Ingredients plant that burned last year near Hanceville.

The company revealed plans for the new facility, touted as the largest of its kind in the world, at Wallace State Community College on Friday in an announcement event that brought together a supportive crowd of state and local officials. The older facility has remained unused since a July 30, 2021 fire that River Valley division manager Jason Spann described as “catastrophic.”

Spann said the company’s commitment to remain in Cullman County never wavered as it made plans to rebuild in the wake of last year’s fire. The new plant will retain the company’s current staff of 124 employees, while incorporating modern design and new automation processes to resume the weekly processing of more than 30 million pounds of inedible poultry byproducts.

“We are going to build back in this community better and stronger,” said Spann, noting that the company weathered the plant closure without laying off its staff. “Not a single team member lost their job” in the aftermath of the fire, he said, adding that the company has been able to divert its production to other locations over the past eight months, temporarily compensating for what otherwise would have been a gargantuan, industry-affecting loss in rendering capacity. “More than 80 percent of the poultry industry depends on what we do in Cullman County,” he said.

Known locally since its 1960s construction as the American Proteins plant, the facility is located in a rural area of southern Cullman County near the Mulberry Fork. Rather than stressing landfills with the inedible byproducts of the poultry that’s prepared for entry into the retail food chain, “we take them and convert them into salable protein and fats that we sell all over the world,” said Spann. “It’s the safest method that we know of for disposing of those non-edible animal parts.”

The Cullman County plant is a vital component of the overall $15 billion annual poultry economy in Alabama, shouldering the majority of the byproducts processing volume of the statewide poultry industry — a field that employs 86,000 Alabamians and comprises 66 percent of the state’s annual agricultural sales.

Even before the company’s decades-old facility burned beyond repair, the Hanceville-area plant already was the county’s largest consumer of electricity (along with the Louisiana-Pacific plant at Hanceville), and was the world’s single largest poultry processing site. The new facility, which is expected to generate more than $6 million in ad valorem school tax revenue over the next 10 years, will be equipped to resume the former plant’s rendering volume of more than 2 billion pounds per year — only more efficiently, and with a future-facing capacity for additional growth.

The new 121,000 square-foot plant will be built on property adjacent to the site of the old one. Construction is expected to take two years, with the new plant projected to enter operation in 2023.

Local leaders extended their appreciation to Tyson and to the local management at River Valley Ingredients for reinvesting in Cullman County, as well as for supporting local partnerships in decades past.

“They’re always ready to help the community,” said Hanceville mayor Kenneth Nail, noting the company’s ongoing financial support for the city’s yearly Kids’ Night Out program. “They have provided hundreds of jobs in Cullman County for years,” added county commission chairman Jeff Clemons, “and the new plant will continue that legacy.”

Spann thanked the many area municipal and rural volunteer fire departments who helped to subdue last year’s fire. Cullman Economic Development Agency director Dale Greer returned that gratitude in kind: “At a time when Tyson Foods was devising a plan to handle waste to allow Alabama processing plants to reopen, [the company] wrote checks for more than $258,000 for new equipment for 13 fire departments that helped extinguish the fire,” Greer said in his prepared remarks.

Joking that most of his recent appearances at statewide industry announcements have returned him repeatedly to Cullman County, Alabama Department of Commerce business development director Ted Clem extended congratulations on the mammoth new investment on behalf of Gov. Kay Ivey.

“We’re glad that we can do these [industry announcements] quite frequently up here,” said Clem. “…When a company reinvests in your community, it says a lot about you — the kind of community you are; the support you give to local industry.”

The River Valley Ingredients plant performs a complete rendering of poultry waste, producing a finished product that holds nutritional value for pet food, animal feed, and similar market-driven instances of non-human consumption. Though the new plant’s announcement comes only four months into the year, Greer said the company’s $208 million commitment singlehandedly bumps 2022 to the second-place spot of highest-investment years for industrial capital in the history of Cullman County: “That gives you an idea of the tremendous scale of the capital investment that they’re making in our community.”