Note. What is left of The Stockyards is just a small fraction of what is used to once be. learn how over 7,000 companies got started! Also, ConAgra's premier, Pacific-Rim beef processing business headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, also fell under the managerial control of Swift & Company in Greeley and its staff, headed by John Simons, president and COO of the enterprise. Swift devoted a great deal of time to indoctrinating employees and teaching them the company's methods and policies. By 1890, the figure had grown to nine million, and the city had been transformed into the largest hog and beef holding pen in the country. Two years later, in 1855, he opened his own cattle and pork butchering business with the help of one of his uncles who gave him $400. You can see a chute about a third of the way in from the right that would shove the blocks down into a car's ice bunker. Not only did the industry lack an adequate distribution system to ship fresh meat to widespread markets, it had no means to prevent the meat from spoiling. All rights reserved. The first consignment of dressed beef to leave the Chicago stockyards was in 1857, and was carried in ordinary boxcars retrofitted with bins filled with ice. WLKY News Louisville 3,698 views. Swift—Simply Better Beef Serve only the best. Meat packing plants began to move closer to larger feed lots within rural areas and making an inner-city livestock center no longer needed. Still, the live shipment of cattle from the stockyard was a poor system that was inimical to the cattlemen's interests. During the same period Swift experimented by moving cut meat using a string of ten boxcars which ran with their doors removed, and made a few test shipments to New York City during the winter months over the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR). Within a year the Line's roster had risen to nearly 200 units, and Swift was transporting an average of 3,000 carcasses a week to Boston. His parents were descendants of British settlers who went to New England in the 17th century. (502) 582-0011. 1200 Story Ave. Louisville, KY 40206. As a young boy, Swift took little interest in his studies and left the nearby country school after eight years. Verl Thompson. Driving cattle across the plains led to tremendous weight loss, and a number of animals died in transit. Swift & Company photo, cropped [I like the "billboard" refers. Swift and a few others helped change the system by slaughtering beef and hogs and packing their meat in Chicago before shipping it to points East. Despite being legally required to divest some of its sidelines, in 1920 the company still had sales exceeding $1.1 billion, and by 1922 its branch houses were still selling fresh, cured, and smoked meats, meat specialties, poultry, eggs, butter, cheese, oleomargarine, lard, shortening, cooking and salad oils, and soaps. And Verl Thompson was in on all the action. 12.6 x 25.9 cm. The company became ConAgra (from Latin roots meaning "with" and "land") in 1971, selecting the name to reflect its focus on agricultural products. Swift Armour Meat Packing Plant. Swift & Company, founded in Chicago in 1869, came to this location in 1897 when Alpheus B. Stickney, a prominent businessman and President of the Chicago Great Western Railroad, negotiated a 999 year lease with Gustavus Swift of Chicago to take over a small meat packing … Although he faced rigorous opposition from railroad officials, Swift finally got permission for use of cars on a railroad that permitted them on a roundabout route. Situated on 14 acres, the Swift & Company plant was adjacent to tracks of the Fort Worth Western Railroad, which carried the plant's products to the East. Description. With headquarters in Greeley, Colorado, and a 265,000 square-foot flagship processing plant in Worthington, Minnesota, Swift & Company is a leading processor of beef, pork, and lamb in both domestic and foreign markets. Swift's attempts to sell this design to the major railroads were unanimously rebuffed as the companies feared that they would jeopardize their considerable investments in stock cars and animal pens if refrigerated meat transport gained wide acceptance. Cooking the meat beyond the USDA guideline of 160 degrees F renders out the fat and tenderizes the meat. It was located on the South Omaha Terminal Railway, and next to the Omaha Stockyards, making Swift one of the "Big Four" packing companies in Omaha. This practice led to the wide scale commercial production of such diverse products as oleomargarine, soap, glue, fertilizer, hairbrushes, buttons, knife handles, and pharmaceutical preparations such as pepsin and insulin. Source: International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. Until then, he had been working as a butcher in his brother's business, but he had bigger plans for himself and had wanted to try them out in New York City. 2 of 15. The industry also garnered infamy during this time, however, for deplorable working conditions, as portrayed in the Upton Sinclair novel The Jungle. JBS USA Headquarters 1770 Promontory Circle Greeley, CO 80634 970.506.8000 His father, hoping to keep young Gustavus at home, cut a deal with the lad by offering to buy him his own steer if the new entrepreneur would stay on Cape Cod. Using an instant-read meat thermometer, check the internal temperature of the thickest part of the meat, being careful not to touch bone with the tip of the thermometer. After all, they had a lot at stake in shipping cattle live, including a great number of stock cars and excellent revenue obtained from their use. Annie gave birth to eleven children, nine of whom reached adulthood. HMTF and its venture partners, Booth Creek Management Corporation of Vail, Colorado, and George Gillet, took over the managerial reins, however. By that time, however, it had opened large plants in other locations, including, for example, a major operation in Grand Island, Nebraska, in 1965. Ford’s demand for cars was at a rate higher than they could be manufactured. Finally, we can read about how these great companies came about with Company Histories.. However, through most of the rest of the century, meat processing was pretty much limited to the cold winter months. Over the next several years ConAgra grew into a diversified food producing and marketing giant with an array of products sold under several familiar-brand names: Healthy Choice, Butterball, Banquet, Hunt's, Orville Redenbacher's, Reddi-Whip, Slim Jim, and Armour. It held its status as one of the nation's biggest beef and pork packagers. For one thing, the live cattle lost up to 15 percent of their weight in transit. By that time, the company had also developed thriving side-line businesses, and though by 1920, under a consent decree, it was forced to dispose of some of them, it still offered various meat and byproduct items at company-owned outlets across the country. Seven years later Gustavus and Annie moved the family to Brighton (near Boston), where in 1872 Swift became partner in a new venture, Hathaway and Swift. Meanwhile, Swift saw his company grow into one of the nation's main meatpacking companies, with a reach throughout the United States. Transgressions such as these were first documented in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, the publication of which shocked the nation and led to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The absence of federal inspection led to abuses. Creator. He was born in Massachusetts, USA on June 24, 1839. [6], The meat packing plants of Chicago were among the first to utilize assembly line (or in this case, disassembly-line) production techniques. Swift and Company, headquartered in Fort Worth, was a major branch of the nation's leading nineteenth-century meat-packing firm and one of the nation's Big Four meat-packers of the early 1900s. These were the points where large herds of longhorn steers, bred in Texas but fed out on the northern plains, were rounded up and driven for shipment by rail to Chicago's Union Stockyards. Through the period of the Union Stockyards' growth and decline, Swift & Company built plants in several other locales, including, for example, in the Stockyards District of Fort Worth, Texas. Swift had also diversified, branching out from beef to other meats, notably pork. During that period he was employed in several jobs, finally finding full-time work in his elder brother Noble's butcher shop at the age of fourteen. Fortune Estimated at from $7,000,000 to $10,000,000", Thomas W. Goodspeed (1921) "Gustavus Franklin Swift. Newspaper photograph of the meat packing plant. It came into existence when four, independent flour mills merged and incorporated. 55. Klann stumbled upon the Swift Meatpacking industry—located in Chicago—which was actually a disassembly line. Live cattle and dressed beef deliveries to New York (tons): The subject cars travelled on the Erie, Lackawanna, New York Central, and Pennsylvania railroads. This is where he got the idea of packing meat. Swift and a few others helped change the system by slaughtering beef and hogs and packing their meat in Chicago before shipping it to points East. In 1880, the Peninsular Car Company (subsequently purchased by American Car & Foundry) delivered to Swift the first of these units, and the Swift Refrigerator Line (SRL) was created. The General American Transportation Corporation assumed ownership of the line in 1930. View Gallery. The company became a driving force in the Chicago meat packing industry, and was incorporated in 1885 as Swift & Co. with $300,000 in capital stock and Gustavus Swift as president. In 1999, the year in which Dennis Henley was named Swift's president and chief operating officer (COO), the company's Worthington, Minnesota, plant became its second pork producing plant to earn ISO 9002 certification--the only ones with that certification in the United States. Media Type. From Maude Reid Scrapbook 5 (MR5-308). At the beginning of the new century, Swift & Co. continued to enjoy a reputation for producing high quality products and for its innovations. In 1966, Monfort reported annual sales of $85 million with a payroll of $4 million. Once acquired by ConAgra, Swift was merged with Monfort into the Monfort Pork Division, which, in 1995, was renamed Swift & Company. In their heyday, when they were in full operation, the Swift and Armour plants between them processed up to five million head of cattle per year. Efforts to focus on the Swift Premium product line, in the form of a $10 million advertising campaign, began in 2003. Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, and even medical products. Not much work unless you want to be a farmer. That same year, the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad (O&LC) began shipping butter to Boston in purpose-built freight cars, utilizing ice to cool the contents. The largest, the Swift Meat Packing Plant, which opened in 1893, has been completely demolished; the vast majority of the former site sits underneath the approaches to the new Mississippi River bridge. [4] The loads had the unfortunate tendency of swinging to one side when the car entered a curve at high speed, and the use of the units was discontinued after several derailments. The plant was opened in 1887 and closed in 1969. Despite the fact that many employees went into the military during the conflict, Swift's plants continued to operate at full capacity thanks to war-time demands. According to its own 1915 company yearbook, Swift was offering a wide variety of products, including hams, sausage, bacon, chickens, eggs, butter, lard, shortening, oleomargarine, bouillon cubes, and various soaps (including scented toilet soaps). [2] Getting the animals to market required herds to be driven distances of up to 1,200 miles to railheads in Kansas City, MO, where they were loaded into stock cars and transported live (on the hoof) to regional processing centers. Swift's profits encouraged ConAgra to invest more in its subsidiary's growth. The innovations that Swift championed not only revolutionized the meat packing industry, but also played a vital role in establishing the modern American business system, with an emphasis on mass production, functional specialization, managerial expertise, national distribution networks, and adaptation to technological innovation. Swift was born on June 24, 1839 in Sagamore, Massachusetts, the 9th of 12 offspring of William Swift and Sally Crowell. In 1982, Swift underwent another permutation in structure and name, becoming Swift Independent Packing Company (SIPCO). Gustavus Franklin Swift and the Meat Packing Revolution Gustavus Franklin Swift was an American entrepreneur who founded Swift & company, once a giant meat company. Upon ar… Right next to the Fort Worth Stockyards is a large abandoned industrial complex that used to be the Swift Meat Packing Plant. At this meat packing operation, a conveyor moved hog carcasses past meat cutters, who then removed various pieces of the animal. The work was divided into myriad specific sub-tasks, which were carried out under the direction of supervisory personnel. In response to public outcries to reduce the amount of pollutants generated by his packing plants, Swift sought innovative ways to use previously discarded portions of the animals his company butchered. St. James Press, 2003. Swift Packing will unload materials from an incoming semi-trailer truck or railroad car, and load these materials directly into outbound trucks, trailers, or rail cars. There’s not much work to be found in Lewiston, Idaho. The 1950s were a hopping time in the Ogden Stockyards/Swift Meat Packing Plant. Fort Worth, Texas USA. Swift also supplies other meat processors and the food-service industry with beef and raw pork for such products as bacon, sausage, and ham; it also offers several state-of-the-art product and information systems. Swift & Co.'s Packing Plant. Through the first half of the 1990s, ConAgra's Monfort Pork Division fared well, in part because of a widely disseminated ad campaign suggesting that as "the other white meat" pork was a healthy substitute for beef, and in part because a glutted market drove the cost of hogs down, most notably in 1995, when ConAgra's pork division, by then operating as Swift, enjoyed a very profitable year. 1938-04-29. It gradually expanded, and in 1960 opened a major meatpacking plant north of Greeley, Colorado. Competing firms such as Armour and Company quickly followed. ", Scheduled To Close: Swift & Co. Plant Was a Boon to SSF, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gustavus_Franklin_Swift&oldid=991949068, Businesspeople in the meat packing industry, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2012, Articles with dead external links from January 2020, Articles with permanently dead external links, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Swift & Company traces it origins back to 1855 when, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 16-year-old Gustavus Franklin Swift, the ninth in a family of 22 children, encouraged by his father, started in business for himself as a slaughterer, packager, and distributor of beef. The wooden platform above the cars would be the conveyor belt carrying ice blocks from the ice plant. In 1862, Swift and his new bride opened a small butcher shop and slaughterhouse. 1915-81: Swift & Company Grows into Industry Giant. Sausages might incorporate rat droppings, dead rodents, and sawdust, and meat that had spoiled or meat mixed with waste materials was sometimes packed and sold. Although he was only a high school graduate, he became a very wealthy person through hard work and shrewdness. In 1987, ConAgra Foods Inc. acquired a 50 percent interest in SIPCO. Two years later, it bought the remaining shares, adding Swift to a swelling list of subsidiaries that included Monfort, Inc., a Colorado beef packer, which ConAgra had also purchased in 1987, at a cost of $365.5 million. Detroit's William Davis patented a refrigerator car that employed metal racks to suspend the carcasses above a frozen mixture of ice and salt. Chicago and the birth of the meat-packing industry, General American Transportation Corporation, "Gustavus F. Swift Dead. The upshot was that the cattle frequently commanded only low prices in the East, where the western beef was slow to gain popularity. Swift Brands Sioux City, Iowa meat packing plant circa 1917. On his recommendation, Hathaway and Swift moved once more in 1875, this time to join the influx of meat packers setting up shop in Chicago's sprawling Union Stock Yards. By 1944, for example, approaching the end of World War II, the company could boast that 20,300 men and women of the Swift organization were in the military and auxiliary services. At its new plant in Worthington, it also introduced its Swift Brands, Swift Tender Lean, and Swift Premium products. And that wasn’t the line of work Ivan “Verl” Thompson loved to do. For example, in 1915 Swift implemented a "safety first" campaign, reducing plant-level industrial accidents by 50 percent. The company opened a meat packing plant there in 1902, next to an Armour & Co. plant that opened in that same year. As consumers, we often take for granted all the hard work that goes into building a great company. Unloading Container In order to save your overall international shipping cost, we offer containers unloading service. Certain inefficiencies were inherent in the process of transporting live animals by rail, particularly due to the fact that approximately 60% of the animal's mass is inedible. This radically altered the meat business. At JBS Australia we believe in being the best we can be. Swift & Co. was broken down organizationally into various divisions, each one responsible for conducting a different aspect of the business of "bringing meat from the ranch to the consumer". Swift Meat Packing, Fort Worth Texas. Until its 2002 spin off from its status as a division of ConAgra, Inc., most of its products, largely pork, were marketed under the Armour name, another distinguished brand of a company also owned by ConAgra. These practices symbolize the concept of "rationalized organization of work" to this day. Swift, Louis F., and Arthur Van Vlissingen, Reyes, Sonia, "Swift Sautes Plans to Meet Beefy Objectives,", Taylor, Lisa Y., "Old Swift Site in Fort Worth Proposed for Apartments,". Location. Serving Swift ® beef ensures your meal features juicy, flavorful beef. 11 (2 died before reaching adulthood): Louis, Edward Foster, Annie May, Boyle, Elizabeth and Rodolfo Estrada. The company's position in the ConAgra family certainly seemed secure. An astute cattle-buyer, Swift followed the market steadily westward. The impact of the deal on Swift was not immediately clear. Low-grade meats were canned in products like pork and beans. My great grandpa Olive Holliday is on the bottom row 4th from the left. It covered approximately eight square blocks and consisted of several brick and stone buildings, and was located in proximity to the Omaha Stockyards. The family (which included Gustavus’ brothers Noble and Edwin) lived and worked on a farm in the Cape Cod town of West Sandwich, Massachusetts where they raised and slaughtered cattle, sheep, and hogs. Driving cattle across the plains led to tremendous weight loss, and a number of animals died in transit. Swift married Annie Maria Higgins of North Eastham in 1861. 1855-1914: From Cape Cod Butcher to Chicago Meat Packer. Swift Black Angus Beef Retail Opportunities The beef that increases your bottom line. Lake Charles (La.) In response, Swift financed the initial production run on his own, then — when the American railroads refused his business — he contracted with the GTR (a railroad that derived little income from transporting live cattle) to haul them into Michigan and then eastward through Canada. Swift and partner James A. Hathaway (a renowned Boston meat dealer) initially relocated the company to Albany, then almost immediately thereafter to Buffalo. Swift also maintains plants and other operations at facilities in other locales, notably in Iowa, Kentucky, California, and Australia. A shrewd businessman, he purportedly followed the somewhat common practice of denying his herds water during the last miles of the trip so that they would drink large quantities of liquid once they reached their final destination, effectively boosting their weights. Gustavus Franklin Swift, Sr. (June 24, 1839 – March 29, 1903) was an American business executive. It was there that he first incorporated his business and bought a shed-like structure to serve as his slaughterhouse. Swift & Co. played a major role in The Fort Worth Stockyards starting in 1902. Many animals weakened by the long drive died in transit, further increasing the per-unit shipping cost. Steven Zoll, president of Zoll Foods, stayed on to manage Zoll Foods, providing the formerly independent company with a high degree of autonomy. By developing a vertically integrated company, Swift was able to control the sale of his meats from the slaughterhouse to the local butcher shop.[8]. That was at the virtual height of the industry's development in Chicago, which, during the Great Depression, started into a decline, albeit a slow one. Three years after his death, the value of the company's capital stock topped $250 million. Getting the animals to market required herds to be driven distances of up to 1,200 miles to railheads in Kansas City, MO, where they were loaded into stock cars and transported live (on the hoof) to regional processingcenters. A pioneer in vacuum-packaging, the company has an enviable history of providing high quality, fresh meat products worldwide and claims among its international customers companies in Canada, EU (European Union), Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Taiwan. Swift stayed in the East until 1875, when he moved to Chicago to become both a cattle dealer and butcher. Head of Big Packing Company Dies from Internal Hemorrhages. (Swift once bragged that his slaughterhouses had become so sophisticated that they used "everything but the squeal.") Three years later the company went public. 5 votes. The meat was packed tightly at the bottom of the car to keep the center of gravity low and to prevent the cargo from shifting. According to a ConAgra news release, its minority stake in its meat processing business would reduce its equity in that segment of its business from over $1 billion to $150 million. Swift Meat Packing in Des Moines on YP.com. Upon arrival at the local processing facility, livestock were either slaughtered by wholesalers and delivered fresh to nearby butcher shops for retail sale, smoked, or packed for shipment in barrels of salt. Add Photo. In 2002, while still a subsidiary of ConAgra Foods, Swift employed 4,500 workers, a significant figure to be sure, but nothing on the scale it reached when the meat packing industry was in full swing. Swift & Co. Meat Packing Plant Where's the beef now? In 1998, ConAgra purchased Chicago-based Zoll Foods, a privately held processor and marketer of custom-cut pork ribs and other pork products produced for the food service industry, and made it part of Swift & Co. At the time, Zoll was logging annual sales of about $100 million. To keep Model T production up with demand, Ford engineers borrowed ideas from other industries. 1996 and Beyond: Expansion and Another Ownership Shift. ConAgra, the parent company, traced its own history back to 1919, when, in Grand Island, Nebraska, it started out as Nebraska Consolidated Mills. Fort Worth, TX. He established Northwestern University's "School of Oratory" in memory of his daughter, Annie May Swift, who died while a student there. October 9, 2011 John Rust 21 Comments. The rail service was also very poor and the cattle were often mistreated, given neither sufficient food or water. Photo of Swift Armour Meat Packing Plant. Poor railcar conditions lead Gustavus Swift to butchering and packing meat before shipping. "The House of Swift" slaughtered as many as two million cattle, four million hogs, and two million sheep a year. There, using microbiological and chemical testing, Swift's products were analyzed to safeguard against contaminants. At its 265,000 square-foot flagship plant in Minnesota, it was slaughtering up to 16,000 hogs a day, and in the process put food safety at the top of its stringent requirements for preparing its pork for the marketplace. See reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers and more for the best Meat Packers in Des Moines, IA. A number of attempts were made during the mid-19th century to ship agricultural products via rail car. By then it was experimenting with case ready beef and was producing vacuum-packed and boneless pork. He died on March 29, 1903 at his home 4848 Ellis Avenue in Chicago, Illinois.[1]. Swift's solution to these problems was to devise a method to ship dressed meats from his packing plant in Chicago to the East. By the decade's end, a significantly part of Swift & Co.'s growth involved its increasing export of pork and pork products. At home, the efforts of Swift and others helped transform Chicago into what poet Carl Sandburg styled "Hog-butcher to the World," that is, the world's largest slaughterhouse and meat-processing center. Source: Railway Review, January 29, 1887, p. 62. His father put up $20, and Gustavus was in business. Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific railways entered the area and Edmonton’s stockyard became second in size only to Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. JBS Australia is the largest meat processing company in Australia and a division of JBS, the largest animal protein processing company in the world, working in the areas of food, leather, products for pets, biodiesel, collagen, cans and cleaning products. Swift's president, David Heggestad, noted that Zoll provided a good fit with Swift's plans to increase its food service presence and grow its value-added line of products. jp2. Soon he started building his own refrigerator cars and secured patents on them, the start of a fleet of cars owned by his company. Copyright (c) 2019 Company-Histories.com. William Klann was part of a team of advisors that Ford sent out to find a better means of production. Plant-Level industrial accidents by 50 percent interest in SIPCO over which he presided his... The hard work and shrewdness it held its status as one of the meat-packing industry, General Transportation... 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