Tyson Foods announced it has opened its new, $300 million, fully cooked food processing plant in Danville, Va., in a news release posted today on its web site. The 325,000-square-foot facility is one of the company’s most automated plants in its network, Tyson Foods said in the release.
Tyson expects the plant to produce about four million pounds of fully cooked poultry products per week for the Tyson brand in retail and foodservice channels.
The facility, which was announced some two years ago, has created nearly 400 new jobs in the southeast Virginia region, despite its heavy focus on automation and innovative technologies. The plant features 13 high-speed automated case-packing lines and five high-speed robotic case palletizing units on the back end of operations. The company also boasts that its product inspection process incorporates metal detection, X-ray and vision grading into one to advance product quality for customers and consumers.
Danville employees are the first in Tyson’s network to use wearable armband devices that aim to improve worker health, safety and productivity by relaying environmental data to safety managers who can better monitor and identify exposure to risk.
