Cal-Maine Investing Heavily in its New Prepared Foods Businesses

Shell eggs have been very good to Cal-Maine Foods the past two years, with the company reporting record sales and profits – more than $1.2 billion in net income in its fiscal 2025. Now the country’s largest egg company is beefing up its recently acquired prepared foods platform through leadership appointments and production capacity expansions.

Johnathan Zoeller joins Cal-Maine as chief financial officer for prepared foods, bringing more than 25 years’ experience as a senior financial and corporate accounting executive, most recently as vice president, treasurer and head of investor relations for Westlake Corp., a global diversified industrial company.

Dave Jordan has been promoted internally to president of Echo Lake Foods, the Burlington, Wis., maker of ready-to-eat egg products and breakfast foods that Cal-Maine bought this past April. Jordan previously was senior vice president of operations.

In parallel, Cal-Maine is launching a $15 million network optimization and capacity-expansion project at Echo Lake Foods, expected to add 17 million lbs. of annual scrambled egg production by mid-fiscal 2027. It builds on the previously announced $14.8 million high-speed pancake line project, which is expected to add an additional 12 million lbs. of annual production through early fiscal 2027.

The $15 million project consolidates all scrambled egg manufacturing into a single, modernized facility Burlington, Wis., creating a more efficient, centralized operation, and expands capacity with a new production line at the facility to support both near-term demand and long-term organic growth.

“We believe these improvements will enhance Echo Lake Foods’ operational efficiency, increase throughput and position the network to meet rising customer demand as part of Cal-Maine Foods’ broader long-term prepared foods strategy,” said Sherman Miller, Cal-Maine’s president/CEO.

Cal-Maine warned that while these projects are underway, Echo Lake will experience a temporary reduction in production volumes and higher costs, which began late in the second fiscal quarter of 2026 and are expected to continue through the remainder of fiscal 2026.

In addition, Cal-Maine Foods said its joint venture, Crepini Foods, will invest $7 million through fiscal 2028 to add 18 million lbs. of production capacity. This growth will be achieved through a series of new equipment and line installations, which is expected to gradually increase capacity over the next two years and expand Crepini Foods’ volume by more than sevenfold.

Crepini is a prepared foods joint venture that makes egg wraps, protein pancakes and crepes.

In total, these planned investments are expected to grow Cal-Maine’s prepared foods production capacity by more than 30 percent in the next 18-24 months.