New poultry plant opens in Americus

AMERICUS, Ga. (WALB) - A new poultry plant opened Thursday in Americus, bringing job opportunities with it.

Tamarack will be used for packaging food that will go out to stores across south Georgia and all around the world.

Having Georgia as a home for poultry is what drove Tamarack to be in the Southeast.

“Well, one thing is to get on the East Coast. And of course, Georgia is the Poultry Capital, where you have a lot of poultry industry, as well as a lot of exports, as well as industry that you can purchase product from cheaper than having to ship it all the way across the country. So, it was more or less to get open to customers, as well as have accessibility to the East Coast market as well,” Robert Fleet, plant manager, said.

The key difference between BandD and Tamarack is the efficiency of their equipment.

“Tamarack will do many of the same things and for delivery on the East Coast. And we’ve also automated a lot of the functions that we do manually in Idaho. We have automated here in America. So, it will help us geographically because we source much of our chicken, our protein from the southeast, and the automation will help put out product more quickly,” Tim Andersen, president of Tamarack Americus, said.

In order to attract employees, Tamarack managers said they did a wage study to be sure their employees were taken care of.

Tamarack Foods expects to hire 150-200 more employees.

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