A growing company that crafts premium meat snacks has opened a 300,000 square foot production plant in mid-Missouri’s Mexico.
Western Smokehouse Partners chief executive officer Matt Bormann, a Mizzou graduate, spoke Saturday morning on 939 the Eagle’s “CEO Roundtable”:
“In the old Soft Surroundings building. And it was just a warehouse. It had been vacated several months ago, and the community had lost those jobs,” Bormann says.
He tells listeners that the company has invested $60-million in the Mexico plant. It is the largest of the company’s eight plants.
Mid-Missouri’s Mexico and Audrain County have seen plant closings and a hospital closure in the past decade. Mr. Bormann tells listeners that Mexico needs jobs:
“I think the stats I was given was 3,000 people everyday leave (mid-Missouri’s) Audrain County to go to work. So you had people commuting to Jefferson City, Fulton, Columbia … for work,” Mr. Bormann says.
Then-Missouri Governor Mike Parson traveled to Mexico to make the plant announcement in October 2024, saying jobs like the ones at Western Smokehouse Partners are what keeps small towns like Mexico together. The company’s website says they “strive to delight consumers as the preferred manufacturer of premium, crafted meat snacks.”