Epstein's Top 100 Projects: #9: Triumph Foods

Coming in at #9 in our Centennial Year Countdown of our Top 100 Projects, is a massive food processing facility completed for Triumph Foods in St. Joseph, Missouri; a plant that helped Epstein reestablish ourselves as the preeminent DesignBuild firm in the meat industry.

In 2004, 40 large Midwestern hog farmers formed Triumph Foods and invested $130M to build this 625,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility on 56-acre site. At the time of completion in 2005, the facility processed 1,100 hogs per hour and employed 200 administrative and 800 production workers.

The plant was designed to incorporate the latest thinking in production equipment, systems and facility design and offered improved health and safety of its employees, as well as increases efficiency in production. In addition to producing pork for domestic sales, having the industry's most modern plant gave Triumph a leading edge in the more discerning export markets, which Triumph was targeting with this plant.

The Triumph Foods Pork Processing Facility also contained a 10,000 square foot R&D area which provided space for testing and inspection. Within this R&D wing the USDA had 3,500 square feet of inspection offices and plant inspection, 1,500 square feet of retention area for inspection, genetics offices, an 1,800 square foot micro lab and bio manager, a Q/A office and an 1,800 new product showroom.

This first facility also serves as the corporate headquarters for Triumph Foods.

Since 2005, Epstein has been hired by Triumph to complete a number of expansions and facility improvements to increase the size of the facility to 800,000 square feet and the output to 21,000 hogs per day.

This Triumph Foods facility is one of the most well-run plants in the country having won a number of safety awards from the North American Meat Institute and the facility recently hosted a tour of OSHA employees to see Triumph’s facility and safety-first culture in person.