About Mar-Jac Poultry
Mar-Jac Poultry is a fully integrated poultry production company headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia, U.S.A.
We’re located approximately 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. Our company was established in 1954 and has been supplying high quality poultry products ever since. We ship our poultry products worldwide with an emphasis on the domestic food service industry.
Company History
Mar-Jac Poultry was founded by brothers Marvin and Jack McKibbon in 1954, as a small processing plant built to serve a cooperative of growers located in Northeast Georgia.
Marvin and Jack McKibbon built the processing plant in 1954 to save local growers time and money from transporting live chickens to distant areas to sell for processing. Growers were traveling to cities as far away as Detroit and Chicago to take their birds to market.
The Early Days
In the early days, the poultry business was fragmented into several different sectors. There were local growers, hatcheries, feed mills and processing plants all operating independently of one another. Local growers would purchase chicks from a hatchery, buy feed from a local mill, raise the chicks to a desired weight and sell them to a local processing plant. The farmer commonly switched from plant to plant based on the timing of each plant’s needs. The biggest problem with this type of arrangement was a lack of protocol. There was no standard program that provided detailed instructions for growers to raise birds or hatcheries to process chicks or mills to formulate ingredients for feed. The idea behind the cooperative was to integrate the functional areas under one company, attempt to reduce costs with economies of scale and create standards that control quality from the hatching egg through the processing plant.
Expansion & Integrations
In a move to integrate their poultry operations, the Mar-Jac processing facility was purchased in 1962 by a diversified group of poultry companies. A group of growers that provided birds to the Mar-Jac processing plant formed a marketing cooperative in 1962 and purchased it from the McKibbon brothers. Under the agreement, the hatcheries, AC Smith Poultry, CWT Farms and Bruce-Wilson Poultry, would supply chicks to three different groups of cooperative growers. The feed mill, HFC Feeds, which supplied the feed, was completely rebuilt in 1969. To further cement the functional areas, the company was consolidated under our current ownership in 1984.
Continual Improvements
Since that time Mar-Jac Poultry, Inc. has undergone numerous improvements and expansions. In 1989, the company opened a state of the art hatchery in Lula, Georgia. In 1995, the company broke ground on a 40,000 square foot freezer with internal blast capabilities and in subsequent years we built a continuous freezing system. Our production has expanded from 450,000 birds per week in the 1980’s to over 1,000,000 per week in the 1990’s and 2,000,000 birds per week today. In 2005, our new state of the art feed mill was completed in Maysville, Georgia and it currently produces over 8,500 tons of feed per week.
Poultry Industry Sites
- National Chicken Council
- USA Poultry & Egg Export Council
- US Poultry & Egg Association
- Georgia Poultry Federation