It was a banner year for the only Fortune 500 company located on Cypress Creek
By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher
Wanna see a corporate chairman cast as a chuck wagon cook on the range, bring a couple of loads of new Fortune 500 execs to the Geezerplex and watch stock prices double?
"We can do that," Dan Emery said, when asked to handle part one, getting a still shot from one of Pilgrim's Pride Corporation's 2004 TV spots featuring the company founder as a camp cook.
|
In a year during which the company made quantum leaps on a variety of fronts, a second TV spot featured Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim bailing out of a plane with a flock of chickens. "Jumping In" is a parody about delivering fresh product.
The company's just-released annual report takes up the same topic.
"Our five retail plants can serve the majority of the U.S. population with 24-hour delivery," Chairman Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim and Chief Executive Officer O.B. Goolsby said in their letter to shareholders who've seen the value of the company's stock double since 2004's acquisition of ConAgra's chicken division.
Sales doubled too, hitting $5.36 billion, making this the eighth consecutive year to set a new record. That's a ten-fold increase since 1988's $500 million. Sales first hit $1 billion in 1996.
Says Vice Chairman Cliff Butler, chalk up the long-term climb of poultry consumption to an increasing nutritional awareness, low cost compared to other meats and ease of preparation, the company's not-so-secret weapon.
In the mid-80's Pilgrim's Pride built its first prepared foods division in Mt. Pleasant. Instead of dealing in raw chicken as a commodity, the company began marketing prepared foods to franchisers and retailers.
Twenty years later, prepared foods drive the marketing strategy. For the past several years, native Georgian Clint Rivers has been commander of Mt. Pleasant's prepared foods operation.
When the Pilgrim's Pride World Headquarters Park opens, Mr. Rivers will be moving into a top floor office with windows as chief operating officer.
As compared to the days when the company sold raw chicken, since the mid 1980's, the Research and Development division with a Mt. Pleasant kitchen has developed some 10,000 cooked, partially cooked, seasoned, grill marked, breaded and otherwise "further processed" products.
Want a microwaveable Peking Style Rotisserie Chicken? Pilgrim's can lay one right on you.
"It's a thrill," said R&D Manager Dr. Jan Larsen. "Sometimes we'll be in the supermarket and my kids will say, 'Mommy, did you make that?' It feels good to say I did."
Now the nation's second largest poultry company, the objective is minimizing production of commodity products subject to market forces "largely beyond our control," said Mr. Goolsby and maximizing sales of "value-added" products.
Meanwhile, back in the Geezerplex, the home-spun story of Pilgrim's Pride took a home-town twist in 2004 when 1965 Mt. Pleasant High grad Mr. Goolsby became president and chief executive officer of the only Fortune 500 company on Cypress Creek.
Depending on perspective, this was bigger news than the Tiger season of 1964, when Mr. Goolsby's gridiron prowess caused a football scholarship to Baylor.
"He was everybody's hero," said Dr. Harry Lawler, a Tiger running back the year the team took a trip to the Cotton Bowl to watch Baylor play SMU. "When they came through the stadium tunnel, absolutely the scariest, meanest, most ferocious looking guy in the group was O.B. Goolsby."
Coming home, Mr. Goolsby disappeared into the chicken plant only to re-emerge these years later in the executive suite, sitting atop 450 offices accommodating a growing management group.
With the ConAgra deal, "we've added significant talent," Mr. Goolsby said.
Among the additions is a returning Texan, an A&M engineer arriving here as a part of the ConAgra package.
"I got to come back to Texas and I inherited a great project," said the new vice president, engineering.
At Pilgrim's Walker Creek complex between Mt. Pleasant and Pittsburg, already the setting for a ten story, 40 million pound capacity, robot technology freezer and distribution center, 32 contractors and hundreds of workers (an all East Texas cast) will have Pilgrim's World Headquarters Park ready by March.
As mission control for 40,000 employees in 71 cities in 17 states, Puerto Rico and Mexico, the office complex is a high tech vision, Mr. Lisso said.
Behind the Greek columns, beneath mosaic tile, beyond the mahogany trim, 72 miles of data cable make the engineer in Mr. Lisso beam with pride. Beyond the look and the technology, there's common sense. In the procurement and accounting area, for example, where data and communications cables are thickest, there's an 18-inch "basement" beneath a concrete paneled sub floor that provides access for maintenance or wiring upgrades.
Where office space is close, big brains as thick as the cable network - get this - audio sensors linked to computers analyze conversational sound waves, then pipe back "white noise" that softens the distraction of multiple conversations in small spaces.
"It's all about sound wave frequency," Mr. Lisso attempted explaining. "The system directs 'white noise' at a wave length, or frequency that's inaudible but interrupts audible wave lengths effectively muffling sound."
Okie, dokie.
Among company founder Bo Pilgrim's favorite gadgets will be motion detectors that turn out the lights when nobody's in the room.
Instead of using Freon, the air conditioning is an environmentally friendly water-chilled system. The way its variable frequency drive adjusts amperage to save energy gives Vice President Lisso chill bumps.
In addition to the in-house execs, the proximity of Mt. Pleasant's municipal airport makes it easy for the company's fleet of planes to ferry in brass from other facilities. Up to 250 poultry power brokers fit into the meeting room. With an industrial kitchen capable of feeding the crowd, there's no need to break up for lunch.
True to form, they say, company founder Bo Pilgrim hasn't been confined by first-edition blue prints. The story goes that one day he was looking at the structural work. Summoning his engineer he said it looked like the original specs left room to add a fifth floor. Turns out, he was right again.
The guys at the site seem to get a kick out of those days Bo Pilgrim sees fit to work as a tractor operator. There's plenty of tractor driving to do. Plans call for 40 acres of landscaping, 13 of that irrigated, ponds and fountains, the park part of the World Headquarters and Park, which overlooks a Mount Rushmore sized bust of the company founder, looming on the grounds of the distribution complex across U.S. 271.
World Headquarters - the company presently exports to 70 countries. Among those 10,000 products on the books are chicken feet shipped to the orient.
"We know who we are today, and we have an excellent idea of what we can become," says the annual report.
For the record, they say, all this began a shade over 60 years ago, when Bo Pilgrim left home with nine hogs and a hundred pounds of corn, walked the rail tracks to Pittsburg and went to work at a feed store.