Cooper Farms is a re-born business that weathered the destruction of a tornado to operate on the same ground with a brand new facility.
Features include the following:
•Total separation of raw production and cooked, ready-to-eat areas
•Separate drain systems and the ability to sanitize individual drains
•Pasteurization system for added food-safety assurance •Radio frequency collection of real-time data for process, yield, and quality tracking
•Dedicated staff with the right attitude to embrace change, which is necessary to meet changing customer expectations

Undoubtedly, Americans with few exceptions, recall Tuesday, September 11, 2001 with the utmost clarity. Eric Ludwig, general manager, at Cooper Farms’ Van Wert, OH, plant, encountered an up-close-and-personal tragedy the next year — thankfully without loss of life. Nonetheless, Sunday, November 10, 2002, is an indelible date for him and everybody associated with the cooked-meats plant in his charge. About 4 p.m. that Sunday, a monstrous tornado that destroyed parts of Ohio and Indiana leveled the plant. “The facility changed forever in a matter of five minutes,” Ludwig recalls.

Although the plant lay in ruins, the building had been empty of people.

“Any other day, the shifts would be staffed and the building would have been full of people,” he says. “Luckily, we never lost a life or a customer. They all stuck with us through our reopening.”

The second-most memorable day for the cooked-meats team was June 16, 2003. “That day we resumed production in a brand new, state-of-the art facility,” Ludwig concludes.