Corporate Overview
Sanderson Farms is the nation’s third largest poultry producer with Fiscal 2011 sales of $1.96
billion. In Fiscal 2012, they plan to process over 2.86 billion pounds of meat in their ten poultry
plants. The company employs over 10,000 people and has a network of more than 760
independent growers.
Kinston Facility
The company’s newest plant is located in Kinston, N.C. It is situated in an agricultural region
that produces substantial crops of corn and soybeans—two of the primary ingredients in
chicken feed. The Kinston plant is ideally located within a 24‐hour drive of all markets in the
eastern United States.
The Kinston facility consists of a hatchery, a feed mill, and a processing facility. The
hatchery receives four shipments of 300,000 eggs per week. The eggs are placed in incubators
and produce chicks in twenty‐one days. Approximately 13% of the eggs do not yield chicks for a
variety of reasons. Chicks are distributed to independent farms that grow the chicks until they
are ready for processing. The farms receive both chicks and chicken feed from the company
and are paid by the pound for their ready‐to‐process chickens.
The processing plant produces twenty‐seven truckloads (40,000 lbs. each) of processed,
packaged chicken per day. It is estimated that it takes four hours for a chicken to be processed
from arrival at the facility until it can be loaded onto a truck for shipping.
The feed mill receives corn and soybeans by rail and truck and stores these grains in
silos. Other feed ingredients are delivered by truck and stored in designated areas in the mill.
The mill produces approximately 89 tons of pellets per day which are distributed to the contract
chicken growers by company trucks. The feed mill employs twelve truck drivers.
Chicken feed is the largest controllable cost for Sanderson Farms and the company’s financial
performance is strongly linked to the price of corn and soybeans. For example, in the second
quarter of 2012, Sanderson Farms purchased 22.1 million bushels of corn. A $0.10 increase in
the price per bushel translates to $2.21 million dollars of cash to the company and increases the
cost of goods sold by $0.003/lb. Similarly, during that same period, the company purchased
191,149 tons of soybeans. A $10 increase in the price per ton translates to $1.91 million of cash
to the company and increases the cost of goods sold by $0.0026.
The Feed Mix Problem
In order to maintain their competitiveness in the industry, poultry producers must be able to
respond rapidly to the fluctuating costs of chicken feed ingredients. This has become a critically
important issue due to the severe drought conditions experienced over most of the United
States this year. The complexity of the problem is due to the number of ingredients that can be
mixed into feed, the extent to which each of these ingredients contributes to meeting each of
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