1 week Ago By TODD VON KAMPEN [email protected]
Sustainable Beef LLC is about to pick up its hiring pace now that the North Platte meatpacking plant has reached the 60-day mark Friday before its scheduled March 4 ribbon-cutting. The 2 1/2-year construction of North Platte’s Sustainable Beef meatpacking plant moved into its final 60 days Friday. This Sept.
23 photo shows external construction progress at the plant, which expects to start processing cattle in April. CEO David Briggs and two of his top plant leaders said this week that they’re about ready to take applications for 11 department superintendents to join the plant’s 20-member management team. Hiring of the first 100 rank-and-file processing workers will begin in early March as Sustainable Beef starts building toward its capacities of 800-plus workers and 1,500 head of cattle processed each working day.
People interested in working at the plant on Golden Road near Newberry Access should watch its website at sustbeef.com , Briggs said in a Telegraph interview joined by General Manager Ryan Wagnon and Ashley Henning, human resources and safety director. “We’ll add people, add cattle, add people, add cattle” in an ongoing process over the rest of 2025, Briggs said.
“We should be at capacity by Christmas.” But “we have to have a very good (physical) safety record and a very good food-safety record” before proceeding to each production upgrade, said Wagnon, the former assistant general manager of the JBS Foods plant in Cactus, Texas. “To do that, you have to have good metrics to follow.
We’ll have those in place.” Wagnon said the initial group of production workers will have about a month of training before Sustainable Beef actually starts production in April. He and Briggs said they expect to receive a permanent air-quality operating permit from the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy in time for the plant’s actual startup.
The ribbon-cutting, set for 2 p.m. March 24, will be four years and six days after Briggs’ Prairie Arts Center announcement that he and the plant’s founding organizers — primarily western Nebraska ranchers and others with ties to the region — wanted to build their plant in North Platte.
People wanting to join Sustainable Beef’s “family-friendly” production lines must be at least 18 and eligible to work in the United States, Henning said. The plant remains on track to operate a single shift each working day and pay a starting production-line wage of $50,000 per year, the three leaders said. Briggs reiterated his pledge at the $325 million-plus project’s unveiling on March 16, 2021, that employees will have to be U.
S. citizens or legal residents and must clear the federal government’s E-Verify system. “We’ve already reached out to our congressional delegation” to ensure Sustainable Beef understands and follows the most current hiring regulations, he said.
“We intentionally waited until after the (presidential) inauguration this week” to make those connections, Briggs added. Given ongoing concerns over screening out undocumented immigrants from the hiring pool, “we want advice on what to look for to make sure that they’re legal.” Briggs said Sustainable Beef’s leadership has regularly talked with the various housing contractors that are receiving city financial assistance to tackle North Platte’s current and expected housing shortages.
“We strongly encourage people to continue to build, because we will fill the bedrooms that are here,” he said. He’s also encouraged that some projects in the local pipeline, such as the renovation of North Platte’s former Elms Lodge on East Fourth Street, will be aimed at employees who will need short-term housing quickly. “We appreciate that concept that we will have people we hire who need a place to live tonight,” Briggs said.
Once settled, “they hopefully can find another place in six months and open up their (first) place for someone else.” Wagnon said residents also are about to see the start of local hiring for the first of the supporting companies long expected to follow Sustainable Beef to North Platte. Cleaning and sanitation services will be provided by QSI Sanitation, an affiliate of The Vincit Group, he said.
The Chattanooga, Tennessee-based firm is expected to hire 65 to 70 people to work at Sustainable Beef. Wagnon said Vincit Group leaders will visit North Platte Feb. 3 to start shopping for a suitable office location.
A security company also will set up a North Platte operation, he said, along with a separately run onsite laboratory and a company to provide “shag services” moving incoming and outgoing trucks at the 556,000-square-foot plant atop a filled-in sewer lagoon. In addition, as many as 10 U.S.
Department of Agriculture professionals are expected to settle in North Platte to inspect and grade Sustainable Beef’s products for project financial partner Walmart and other national and international markets. “Where they will come from, I don’t know,” Wagnon said. But “it all adds up, and it’s all dollars that support the community.
” Get local news delivered to your inbox! Special projects reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items..
