Clemens Food Group & Gray Honored with Food Engineering Magazine’s Plant of the Year Award

Clemens Food Group is a sixth-generation family-owned business founded in Hatfield, PA, that has provided quality pork products since 1895. With such brands as Hatfield, Farm Promise, and Prima Porta, Clemens is the country’s fifth largest domestic fresh pork processor.

This 308,000 s.f. greenfield facility was designed and built by Gray. The plant sits on a 32-acre plot on the Hatfield campus and increases production efficiency and capacity to 6,000 pounds per hour—good for 100 million pounds of cooked and smoked meat products per year.

In addition to managing the facility’s design and construction, Gray provided extensive process & packaging systems design and engineering for multiple raw and ready-to-eat meat products.

“This efficient and integrated facility is a testament to the hard work of two teams coming together to form one,” says Brian Jones, president & CEO, Gray Construction. “Clemens and Gray should be proud of this facility that both increases production for the company and sets a new standard of excellence within the industry.”

This is the second award-winning project for this partnership. Gray also designed and built the company’s first greenfield operation, a state-of-the-art production facility in Coldwater, Michigan. That facility won the ProFood World Magazine Manufacturing Innovation Award in 2018.

“It’s been great to work with Clemens through the years,” says Tyler Cundiff, president, food & beverage group, Gray, Inc. “Together, our teams have collaborated for nearly a decade. It’s been a true honor to play a role in two exciting and award-winning facilities.”

“Our ongoing partnership with Gray has allowed our organization to grow and expand in a way that honors our core values of ethics, integrity, and stewardship. We are thankful that our aligned business practices, and attention to detail, have resulted in not one, but two, best-in-class quality and food-safe facilities,” said Brad Clemens, president of Clemens Food Group.

The new operation’s fully hygienic design separates incoming raw ingredients from finished ready-to-eat products and includes a 4,800-ton ammonia refrigeration system and an isolated viewing corridor for customers of the RTE process lines.

The facility will be featured in the April cover story of FOOD ENGINEERING, and the award will be presented at the annual Food Automation & Manufacturing Symposium and Expo, held in October.

About Gray:

Consistently ranked among the top industrial contractors in the U.S. and internationally, Gray focuses on the following markets for domestic and international customers: Food & Beverage, Manufacturing, Automotive, Distribution, Mission Critical, and Commercial, with nearly 30 offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Founded in 1960, Gray’s dedicated team operates cohesively to deliver scalable solutions from process improvement to plant design and construction. Our experienced teams offer unique service platforms to help you implement smart manufacturing initiatives, maximize ROI through process improvement, provide a streamlined source for system design and integration, and deliver top-tier custom contract-manufacturing and fabrication, all while delivering unmatched precision and partnership to some of the world’s most sophisticated organizations.

For more information on Gray, visit gray.com and follow us @Gray.

About Clemens Food Group:

Founded in 1895, Clemens Food Group is a sixth-generation, family-owned vertically coordinated pork production operation that includes feed milling, farming, processing, transportation and logistics. As the fifth largest fresh pork processing company in the U.S., the business focuses on supplying the highest quality products to our partners via a responsive and sustainable system, while also providing advanced solutions that simplify our partners’ operations. Founded on the family values of ethics, integrity and stewardship, Clemens Food Group is deeply committed to animal care, our team members and the communities in which we operate.

For more information, visit https://clemensfoodgroup.com/.