June 5, 2008

Taiwan pork processor Tai Shin opens plant in Missouri

A 600 hog/week processing plant for Tai Shin Foods is now open.

The Missouri-based plant will export 90 percent of its products to Asian markets.

Tai Shin Foods, owned by James Hsu and his father, Kin Po Hsu, purchased the plant from Denver Meat Packers in Colorado in November 2000, reports the Herald-Free Press.

The company had initially started its search for a processing facility in the Midwest through the Missouri Department of Agriculture's office in Taiwan. The International Marketing Program of the department helped Tai Shin find the plant and served as a liaison between Tai Shin Foods and Denver Meat Packers.

After two weeks of training, the first hogs were processed the week of Feb. 25, with just 35 hogs processed the entire week. Production now stands at about 600 hogs per week, but that is expected to increase significantly in the next few months when the company plans to begin processing 4,800 antibiotic-free hogs per week - 1,600 a day for three days.

The plant has the capacity to process 2,000 hogs per day.

Tai Shin also is buying hogs to process and export to markets such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Originally, the company planned to export all of its product to Japan, but that has seen some reduction due to a more-complicated export process.

According to the Missouri Agricultural Statistics Service Web site, Polk County's hog numbers were 30,300 in 1970. Since then, numbers have continued to drop, from 10,900 in 1992 to 6,036 in 2002.

With just 6,000 hogs in the county, Tai Shin had to purchase live pigs from other states. That could change as local producers see they have a place to sell their hogs locally.