Photos courtesy of Nikki Richardson

A Colorado-based company is looking to build a meatpacking facility in the Perry area.

According to JBS USA Head of Communications Nikki Richardson, the company is one of the world’s leaders in the food industry. She reveals that they are planning to invest $135 million in Perry to create a sausage production facility that would provide up to 500 jobs. Richardson states that 250 of those jobs would be available on opening day, which would ramp up to a two-shift facility for the additional 250 vacancies. 

She shares that the plant would produce approximately 130 million pounds of sausage per year and about 500,000 sows processed annually. Richardson details that JBS USA operates a few facilities in the state of Iowa and outlines that Perry was another great community that understood food production.

“There’s a lot of geographic benefits to being here, and the opportunity for producers and many of our supplier partners is very good being in this location. But ultimately it was really about coming here, boots on ground, meeting many of the community members, and really feeling like this is a great place for us to be. We feel like our company and the community share a lot of the same values and that this is a very mutually beneficial project.”

Richardson notes that JBS USA is issuing a re-zoning request for land in the area as well as bringing its Hometown Strong and Better Futures programs to Perry, which invest over $100 million in rural communities to support local projects. She adds that construction is slated to begin in late 2025 with expectations to open in late 2026.