Cooper Farms is proud to announce the completion of a 15,000 square foot expansion of the Cooked Meats Plant in Van Wert, Ohio. The expansion provides a 20 percent increase in capacity for the plant, which produces cooked deli products.

Director of Production, Tom Wisvari, believes this expansion was necessary to keep up with the increased customer demand of Cooper Farms products.

“We needed this additional 20 percent to keep up with the growing demands of our customers,” Wisvari said. “We want to have this plant in the best possible position to serve our customers with whatever their needs may be.”

The expansion includes the addition of two new ovens, two new rapid cooling cells, additional processing space, team member welfare area, maintenance space and dry storage.

Due to the location’s current configuration, expansion in certain directions was limited, making it difficult for Cooper Farms to pull off this expansion without some creative thinking. Therefore, the plant had to do some innovative rearranging. COO Gary Cooper was happy with what they were able to accomplish.

“We had to get creative with the space we had available to us,” said COO Gary Cooper. “Business is booming and we did what we could to accommodate our customers’ demands for more product.”

With the addition of the two ovens, the Cooked Meats Plant can now cook 90 million pounds of meat each year. When the plant was reconstructed after tornado damage in 2002, it was expected they could max out at 1 million pounds cooked per week. After many expansion projects since, the Cooked Meats Plant has far exceeded those numbers and can now reach an average of more than 1.7 million pounds of meat cooked per week.