Mar-Jac Poultry, Incorporated is a poultry production firm located in Gainesville, Georgia, U.S.A., 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 product worldwide with an emphasis on the domestic foodservice industry.

What is now Mar-Jac Poultry, Inc. had a very humble beginning as a small processing plant built to serve a cooperative of growers located Hall, Forsyth and surrounding counties. Marvin and Jackson McKibbon built the processing plant in 1954 to save local growers from transporting live chickens to distant areas to sell for processing. They were traveling to cities as far away as Detroit and Chicago to take their birds to market. 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.

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. To further cement the functional areas, the company was consolidated under our current management in 1984.

Since that time Mar-Jac Poultry, Inc. has undergone numerous improvements. In 1989, the company opened a state of the art hatchery in Lula, which we continue to improve and expand as our company continues to grow. In 1995, the company broke ground on a 40,000 square foot freezer with internal blast capabilities. As our sales in the foodservice industry expanded we saw the need for increased capacity and began slaughtering half capacity on third shift in 1998. In 1999, we began a three-phase operation to improve and expand facilities to ready ourselves for full double shift operations. The improvements included a new 25-degree cooler, new employee break room, expanded boning facility and new plant administration offices. By the spring of 2001, we were fully double shifted.