Year-in-Review 2023: Industrial clients have plenty to celebrate
With members of the CANCO project team, left, Greater Burlington Partnership officials, Burlington Chamber of Commerce Ambassadors and Chief Product Officer Doug Hankes, right, looking on, Western Smokehouse Partners CEO Matt Bormann cuts the ribbon in April to celebrate completion of the meat snack stick maker’s new production facility in Burlington, Iowa. (CANCO photo)
1 year ago
Among celebrations for CANCO industrial projects, Western Smokehouse Partners’ ribbon-cutting was a highlight of 2023.
By Craig T. Neises
Carl A. Nelson & Company
For Carl A. Nelson & Company (CANCO), 2023 will be looked back on as a year of celebration. Of ribbons cut and ground broken. Of projects ending and projects beginning.
Among industrial clients, the CANCO team helped to open a new and much-needed truck scale, semi parking and traffic separation project for Climax Molybdenum in Fort Madison, Iowa. We joined company officials from Iowa and Germany to turn dirt in August on an expansion of production and warehouse capacity at Allied Blending in Keokuk, Iowa. And for a confidential food industry client, we were on-hand over the summer when company officials used ceremonial scissors on a loaf of bread to mark completion of another CANCO-led expansion project.
The biggest celebration of them all, though, took place in April. That was when Western Smokehouse Partners, based in Galesburg, Illinois, cut the ribbon on completion of a year-long design and construction effort that resulted in the meat snack-maker’s expansion of production into Iowa. Western Smokehouse Partners (WSP) was formed in 2019 through the coming together of three family-owned companies: First Western’s Smokehouse in Greentop, Missouri, and Thrushwood Farms Quality Meats in Galesburg, with Prairie Sky Snacks of Springfield, Illinois, later being brought into the fold.
The firms joined forces, said CEO Matthew Bormann, who came to Western’s Smokehouse prior to the mergers, to “build a more scaled, better-for-you protein snack manufacturer.” Products include company and co-branded meat snack sticks and other products. Chief Product Officer Doug Hankes, whose family owned Thrushwood Farms, said WSP products are sold in the fast-growing market for meat-based snacks that are low- or zero-sugar, grass-fed and antibiotic-free.
Scaling up was necessary due to the company’s success during the previous four years, Bormann said. Adding production capacity was necessary not only to continue meeting demand from existing customers, but also to have the ability to continue growing. To achieve that, the company began looking for room to expand and settled on a 96,000 SF building in Burlington where Siemens Gamesa tested steam turbines before shuttering the facility in 2019. When the plant started production in May, it’s as-built capacity was about 50,000 pounds of daily meat stick production.
Smokers are at the heart — literally — of the operation at Western Smokehouse Partners in Burlington, Iowa. The smokers mark the transition from raw to cooked sides of the plant. (CANCO photo)
Production equipment is shown inside the former Siemens Gamesa steam turbine plant in Burlington, Iowa, that was converted by Western Smokehouse Partners for use as a food-grade production facility for its healthier-for-you line of company and co-branded meat stick snack products. Carl A. Nelson & Company led the project in the design-build role, completing the renovation within the owner’s aggressive one-year timeline. (CANCO photo)
Getting there meant finding a construction partner that could support the company’s aim to be online with the new plant in about a year. While Bormann described finding the former Siemens building as a “pleasant, pleasant surprise,” retrofitting it for food-grade production was going to be a significant challenge. On the recommendation of an electrical contractor that worked in the Galesburg plant, WSP reached out to CANCO. Less than a year later, the plant was in production.
“It was in that first meeting with Carl A. Nelson that we realized right away this was the right contractor for us,” Hankes said. “Their team saw the vision.”
Working as WSP’s design-build contractor, CANCO led the design and self-performed much of the construction, working with mechanical and electrical subcontractors to deliver the finished plant, which is effectively a new plant with raw and cooked operations and a series of smokers in between, built inside the shell of an older, larger building.
“It was in that first meeting with Carl A. Nelson that we realized right away this was the right contractor for us. Their team saw the vision.”
Western Smokehouse Partners
Achieving the one-year turn-around, considering the complexity of the build and the cleanliness standards required, should have been impossible, Bormann said during the ribbon-cutting and Hankes reiterated.
“No one really believed it could happen,” Hankes said. “I don’t know if we really believed it could happen.”
Going with a design-build approach was known to be crucial in achieving success on WSP’s aggressive timeline, and having a contractor that was able to execute it would be key. CANCO’s ability to have answers when the Western Smokehouse team had questions, while also maintaining a safe and clean job site, Hankes said, allowed the company’s management to focus on doing business.
“We had such an optimistic deadline,” Bormann said. “It had to be executed perfectly.”
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Carl A. Nelson & Company has been providing design-build, construction management and general contracting services since 1913, with industrial projects completed across Iowa, elsewhere in the Midwest and across the United States. To learn more about our services to food, process, manufacturing, seed and grain and other industrial clients, visit www.carlanelsonco.com, or call (319) 754-8415.