Pork processor Rantoul Foods has grown quickly and somewhat quietly in six years, by setting high standards for its process and building with the future in mind.
When James Jendruczek and Alan Bressler, owners of Trim-Rite Inc., envisioned the growth of their company, never did they believe they’d need to get into the slaughter business. The independent, custom, pork-boning business was founded in 1980 in Schaumburg, Ill., and already had moved twice into larger facilities — the most recent having been a state-of-the-art facility it constructed in Carpentersville, Ill., in 2002. Yet, by the middle of the 2000s, it simply had outgrown the pork supply available from packers.
“We were buying more and more meat every day, and we got to the point where we couldn’t get all the meat we needed,” Jendruczek explains. “So we said we’d get our own source for material — we’ll get a slaughter plant. It wasn’t anything we really wanted to do, but we felt it was a very necessary thing to do.”