Laurel-based firm is icon in poultry industry
Dewey and Joe Frank Sanderson Sr. were ready to go all in. After closing their successful feed store in 1955 and embarking on their own poultry business, they bought half interest in an existing poultry-processing plant in Hazlehurst. When they were ready to expand, they decided to build their first poultry-processing center from the ground up, and wanted to do so in their hometown of Laurel.
In 1964, the city of Laurel passed a $3 million bond issue that paved the way for the construction of the facility within the city.
A skilled engineer was needed — someone who could get things done on time and in the right way. So the Sanderson brothers set up interviews with several from the area, and set about finding the right match.
A local firm, led by a lanky personable man, was creating a stellar reputation with its designs and attention to detail. So the brothers decided to grant an interview with the upstart engineer, whose name was Charles N. “Nimmo” Clark.
On the morning of the interview, Clark’s wife Laura carefully inspected his attire, making sure the pressed suit was perfect, as was her custom. This was a huge opportunity, and Clark would need to look his best and make an impression.
Instead of a tie clasp, Clark instead secured his necktie with a bobby pin, as a nerve-relieving test of Laura’s acumen on this day. It escaped her watchful eye, and Clark somehow forgot to make the switch prior to the interview. Clark went to the biggest interview of his life with a bobby pin securing his tie.
As Clark’s son and eventual successor, Lawrence R. “Ronnie” Clark put it, “At least they knew he was authentic.”
Clark was hired on the spot. The Sanderson brothers had their man, and shook his hand. And thus began one of the most successful and heralded partnerships in the history of the poultry industry.
In the 60 years since that first processing plant, Chas. N. Clark Associates, better known as Clark Engineers, has designed hundreds of projects for the poultry industry, including 11 greenfield projects in as many as six states. The firm has also provided contract administration for each project through its completion.
“This is where you find a large area of land and there is nothing there, and you build a total complex there,” Ronnie Clark said. “You build a processing plant, you build a hatchery, you build a feed mill and a wastewater plant.”
And while Sanderson Farms has been the primary client, with more than
$1 billion of new construction for Sanderson facilities to date, other poultry giants have used the Laurel firm to design their facilities, such as Tyson Foods, Simmons, Purdue, Koch Foods and ConAgra.
Anyone who has enjoyed a piece of chicken in the last half century, odds are it was a product processed in a facility designed by Laurel’s Clark Engineers.
“People driving up and down Hillcrest Drive really have no idea what we are accomplishing here,” Clark said. “Our biggest competitor over the years was a firm out of Atlanta — and they are out of business now.”
“A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown,” said Jeff Graves, longtime senior engineer at Clark Engineers.
“‘But Ronnie, it’s just a chicken plant, how hard can it be?’” That was the question posed by the vice president of real estate for Costco, Inc. when Clark Engineers was hired to design a processing facility in Fremont, Neb. The big-box giant needed to produce its own birds to supply their tasty rotisserie chickens nationwide.
“They are used to throwing up a big rectangle box store in three or four months,” Clark said. “And so in their mind a chicken plant can’t be complicated.”
It turns out a poultry-processing facility is one of the most intricate and complicated designs in construction. There can be absolutely no wasted product in order to remain competitive in the volatile poultry market.
“Costco has a very tight window of what their birds need to weigh and very tight specifications,” Clark said. That demands precision at every point in the process.
A hatchery, which is the facility that houses and cares for newly-hatched chicks, has to have floors that are so level, and flat, that they can be scientifically verified by laser instruments. The engineering term for them is “super flat” floors.
Think of carts of fragile eggs being transported between incubators and work stations across a factory floor. One Humpty Dumpty-like tragedy could cost thousands of dollars. It is also critical that the wheeled incubators remain stable and secured on these super flat floors.
“Today, computer technology and imaging are among the biggest advancements in the industry,” Graves said. “The monitors will take an image of each individual chicken as it is processed, and the automation will decide, based on computer analysis, the best way to cut that chicken up to get the maximum yield.”
Environmental standards have created ever stricter regulations that govern the process as well. During Clark Engineers’ tenure, the required water to process one chicken has been reduced from 10 gallons to just under 5 gallons, with some processes doing even better.
The Sanderson Farms facility Clark Engineers designed in Waco, Texas, in 2007 was nationally recognized by the American Council of Engineering Companies as “not only a positive step for the poultry industry but also a green footprint for other companies to follow.”
The award-winning design developed by Clark Engineers incorporated an environmentally friendly ultraviolet light system to disinfect the wastewater, as opposed to the previous traditional standard of using chlorine. It also included a system that removes nitrogen from the waste stream, resulting in energy savings and minimal impact on the environment.
The designs for processing facilities now being used by Clark Engineers use 3-D software, which layers all construction components such as mechanical, electrical and structural into one viewable model.
“So, if there is a water line going through an electrical closet on the drawings, it can be corrected in the design phase,” Clark said.
But… it’s just a chicken plant, right?
The partnership between Sanderson Farms and Clark Engineers resulted in the Laurel-based poultry firm growing from the 15th largest poultry producer in the nation to the third largest when it was sold to Cargill and Continental Grain Co. in 2021 for $4.5 billion.
Today, more than 15 million birds are produced every week in processing plants that were designed by Clark Engineers.
And it all started 60 years ago with a handshake and a bobby pin.
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