2025 Processor of the Year: Wayne-Sanderson R&D Connects Culture with Customers
Key Takeaways
- Real-time collaboration between Wayne-Sanderson Farms' R&D, operations, and QA teams enhances responsiveness and product quality, benefiting customer relationships.
- The Customer Innovation Center's location fosters transparency, culture sharing, and a comprehensive view of the company's processes and values.
- Ongoing investments in equipment and staffing at the CIC support retail-focused projects and continuous innovation.
When Wayne Farms and Sanderson Farms joined forces in 2022 to create Wayne-Sanderson Farms, many people were impressed by the companies’ natural fit together in the chicken marketplace with minimal overlap. Wayne sold its products mostly to foodservice customers, while Sanderson leaned more heavily toward the retail chicken channel.
Lesser known, however, was the ease at which interlocking the two companies’ R&D efforts would be.
“It was a pretty seamless transition, I’d say,” explains Matt Masters, director of research & development. “Sanderson had capabilities that Wayne didn’t, and vice versa.”
Beau Batchelor, corporate research chef – product development, adds, “One was focused on B2B [business to business] and the other on B2C [business to consumer], but at the end of the day, the customer’s the customer, and we’re going to take care of that customer no matter their focus.”
Wayne Farms came into the marriage with the Customer Innovation Center (CIC), a standalone R&D center located on the same property as the company’s prepared foods plant in Decatur, Ala. The CIC is a 15,000-sq.-ft. facility built in 2018, complete with a test kitchen, presentation areas, R&D workspaces and a USDA-inspected pilot plant that mirrors the processes at the plant across the parking lot.
“This facility was designed to go from meetings to cuttings to small-scale production all in one place — you can take an idea from benchtop to commercialized product,” Masters says. “What you see here is pretty much identical to what’s in the plant — on a much smaller scale — from an equipment standpoint.”
The company aimed to create a space that was welcoming and delivered a pleasant experience for customers, as many R&D showcase facilities attempt to achieve. But, one thing that stands out about the CIC, says Batchelor, is its location.
“Usually, you’ll find a facility like this at a corporate location, but here, when we bring customers in, we can show them the path from idea to full production,” he explains. “They get a full picture of not only our processes, but our people, culture and everything else that makes us a great partner.”
The CIC’s location also benefits Wayne-Sanderson when it comes to working with the operations and quality assurance (QA) teams. If adjustments to a product or process are necessary, the R&D team can react right away.
“Not doing these things over video conference or the phone, or waiting on someone to travel to the site, allows us to lend the support operations needs to win,” Batchelor adds. “We see things in real time, which makes for a more seamless process and faster reaction time, which I believe our customers also appreciate.”
The people playbook
The results have been impressive. Masters says that, in the best-case scenario, a product can go from concept to commercialization in four to six weeks. Additionally, because of the company’s due diligence process on new projects, the CIC’s commercialization success rate last year averaged slightly better than 80%.
“We ask the right questions, we dissect it and go through it as a total team — including sales, category management, R&D, operations and QA,” he says. “Because it does the company no good if we develop a product that the operations team cannot run efficiently.”
A major selling point for Wayne-Sanderson to customers, the team notes, is that visitors to the CIC get a first-hand look — during both the product-development process and through operations — at the company’s culture of teamwork and how it puts the customer first. Alexander Brown, director of operations – prepared foods, says Wayne-Sanderson makes sure the customer has a truly unique experience.
“We’re in the business of chicken, but first and foremost, we’re in the business of people and relationships,” he says. “We’re trying to create an experience that is memorable for them, without inundating them with industry jargon they’re going to hear almost everywhere else; they’re not just looking for process capability, machines and things of that nature.”
Having the CIC match up with the prepared foods production lines certainly helps customers “put two and two together” to make the leap from concept to commercialization, Masters adds. But it also empowers the operations team to be involved in that process as well, and Brown says that customers notice that from the moment they arrive.
“We had a key customer here [at the CIC] and he said in his 30 years he had never come into this type of visit where the company talked about its culture from the gate,” he explains. “He would generally have to ask about it, and that really impressed him about us, because he was looking for that culture to be invested in his product.”
On the production floor in Decatur, if employees identify something that seems out of the ordinary, they’re comfortable approaching members of the R&D team like Masters and Batchelor, among others, rather than having to file something up through the chain of command and wait for what could be a simple answer.
“Their feedback and ideas have made us very successful, because they’re the experts who see our product the very last time before it goes to the customer,” Brown says. “So, they have a big influence on how competitive and successful we are long-term as a company, and they are empowered by that.”
Building out the CIC
Wayne-Sanderson has continued to invest in the CIC, bringing in new equipment to match what the prepared foods plant uses, as well as testing other machinery and processes for the plant and its customers.
“We have to provide the operations and QA teams with as good of a starting point as we can,” Masters says. “We’re constantly adapting, and when we write a specification, we want to be able to hand that to an operator with every bit of information they need in order to run that product even without any prior experience on it.”
The CIC has expanded its staffing levels in the past year, and Masters says the facility has been working more on retail-focused projects in recent times as well. For him, it has been a busier time than ever for the R&D team, and that he’d like to have more space and more time to work on even more projects. With the company continuing to succeed as 2025 rolls along, keeping things simple, yet rooted in the teamwork culture Wayne-Sanderson has cultivated, may be the best approach.
“I tell our customers, let us be the chicken experts, and we will work together to get you the product that you need,” Masters says. “We’re here to get the customer the end product they want at the efficiencies the operations team needs, so we can grow our business and our customer’s business together.”
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.