2025 Processor of the Year: Wayne-Sanderson's Plant Ops Embraces Customer-Centric Culture
Key Takeaways
- Wayne-Sanderson Farms' culture, rooted in merger strengths, is central to its success and customer loyalty efforts.
- Automation has improved safety, reduced manual labor, and increased production speed without job losses, enhancing employee roles and workplace safety.
- Safety initiatives like weekly walkthroughs and employee roundtables foster engagement and continuous improvement.
For any food or beverage processor, having a long-tenured roster of customers is a feather in the cap — and at the least can help stave off significant downturns in times of trouble. Earning the loyalty of a foodservice or retail customer can be achieved in numerous ways, and our 2025 Processor of the Year, Wayne-Sanderson Farms, relies on its customer focus and company culture to meet that challenge.
“We want to be able to produce what’s needed for our customers, and we marry that with the culture and leadership that we have in operations,” says Alexander Brown, director of operations – prepared foods. “That’s how we become a partner of choice.”
With 23 different processing facilities across the South and Southeast U.S. — many of them vertically integrated complexes from hatchery to processing plant — the challenge may sound daunting. But Wayne-Sanderson wears its culture on its sleeves and makes it the star of the show for customers.
In fact, the company points out the importance of company culture that has been in existence since the merger of Wayne Farms with Sanderson Farms in 2022. Both companies brought good, strong cultural traits to the new organization.
One of those cultures embedded in both separate companies was process efficiency, which meant the new company could lean on positive culture and efficient operations to address most day-to-day hurdles that arose due to the geographically wider and more diverse plants and workforces.
Now, any time a business partner visits Wayne-Sanderson, they’re treated to a deep dive into the company’s culture along with its capabilities. And if they dig deeper into how the chicken processor treats its employees and runs its plants, they quickly realize that Wayne-Sanderson backs up its claims of also being an employer of choice.
Assembling the puzzle
After the merger that created Wayne-Sanderson, the operations side was divided up based on product output, resulting in processing lines and facilities dedicated to fresh (big bird/small bird), retail (medium bird) and prepared foods products. However, the operations and sales teams interact daily, the company says, to stay out of operational silos and also to serve all its customers holistically.
The Decatur, Ala., prepared foods facility has a great example of that cooperative spirit in the form of a production line that creates a valuable product out of what was a low-value byproduct of fresh processing.
Wayne-Sanderson is able to convert some of its various trim from fresh operations and portioning lines into safe, ground product for its chopped and formed products — a segment of the market where the company is looking to expand its business. The line stands out in the prepared foods plant compared to the rest of the further-processing lines around it, but it is helping Wayne-Sanderson’s different divisions work together to meet customer demands more efficiently.
As the company has grown, creating redundancy within each operational division has become a bit easier to achieve, says Brown. And the company has embraced automation where it has made the most sense to improve efficiency.
“Redundancy is always in the back of our minds, so we can meet customer needs on time,” he explains. “As lines are getting faster and larger, we need to make sure we can stay competitive, and we’re looking to expand into more automation.”
Automation as an assistant
The poultry industry, at least, has reached a level beyond the early days where any mention of automation and robotics in plants led to hand-wringing over potential layoffs on the plant floor. In particular, the chicken industry has embraced cutting-edge technology that has taken the most difficult, repetitive and hard-to-fill jobs out of the hands of manual labor.
Wayne-Sanderson has been able to reap the benefits of automation particularly on the fresh chicken processing side, where turnover is an industry-wide issue. Automated evisceration, deboning and cut-up lines have taken over for the old, manual cone lines, where dozens of employees manned stations along the chicken “disassembly” line. But automation isn’t reserved for fresh operations and first processing.
“One of the biggest expansions we completed was implementing a high-speed wing line, and we installed robotics at the packaging end of it as well,” Brown says. “We’ve got forward-thinking plans to incorporate robotics not only to save on labor costs but also to help us keep up with the needs of the customers.”
All that automation hasn’t cost employees their jobs; in fact, Wayne-Sanderson employees have seen upgrades to their roles and a safer environment in which to work.
“The other selling point to the employees was that it would help them not have to work as many days per week, because we get to our intended production targets sooner,” Brown explains. “They understood it would be a huge benefit to get back some of their weekends to spend with their families.”
The worker safety benefits mesh nicely with the company culture at Wayne-Sanderson, which prioritizes being an employer of choice. Employee engagement on safety is critical, Brown explains, and the company has instituted weekly plant walkthroughs where employees from all over the facility bring a fresh set of eyes to the production floor and potential safety issues. Any questionable points are categorized by priority, and the company follows up and gauges its progress on each.
Safety is also on the minds of “The Link,” a roundtable group that connects the ideas and concerns of the production floor directly to the senior leadership, helping drive the initiatives and safety strategies in both directions. The Link comprises members of maintenance, quality assurance, shipping & receiving and production at each complex. They keep the facility workers engaged in the process, which results in those employees feeling empowered to take care of the products going out the door.
That, in turn, bolsters the culture Wayne-Sanderson has done well to create in just three years of combined existence. And that culture is evident to the company’s partners up and down the chain.
“People come here and they feel really good about us producing their products, because we’re selling the whole team and experience, not just our equipment and capabilities,” Brown concludes. “Customers feel really good knowing that we are going to show up every time for them and their products.”
About the Author
Andy Hanacek
Senior Editor
Andy Hanacek has covered meat, poultry, bakery and snack foods as a B2B editor for nearly 20 years, and has toured hundreds of processing plants and food companies, sharing stories of innovation and technological advancement throughout the food supply chain. In 2018, he won a Folio:Eddie Award for his unique "From the Editor's Desk" video blogs, and he has brought home additional awards from Folio and ASBPE over the years. In addition, Hanacek led the Meat Industry Hall of Fame for several years and was vice president of communications for We R Food Safety, a food safety software and consulting company.