Lincoln Premium Poultry celebrates opening of Fremont facility

Hundreds of people gathered in southern Fremont Saturday morning to celebrate the opening of Lincoln Premium Poultry’s processing plant.

"What an amazing day for Fremont, Dodge County and eastern Nebraska," Fremont Mayor Scott Getzchman said. "Not only do we have great weather, we have an amazing project we are dedicating today."

Folks of all ages turned up for the event. Other notable guests, such as Getzchman and Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts were in attendance.

"This is a big deal," Ricketts said. "This is helping on so many fronts, and this overall project, we expect, will have an over one billion dollar impact on the state of Nebraska. That's nearly one percent of our economy. Think about that. If we had 99 more of facilities like this, we could double our economy." 

The facility currently employs about 600 people. When it is fully operational, over 1,000 people will work at the plant. The plant has the capacity to process over two million birds a week. It also has enough incubators and hatchers to hold over nine million eggs.

Lincoln Premium Poultry is the poultry supplier for Costco. Costco’s CEO Craig Jelinek says Fremont was a great place to build the facility.

"Here we landed in Nebraska, in Fremont, Nebraska, and they said, 'this is where it's going to go,'" Jelinek said. "So I said okay and I came out here and saw all this and met some of the people and I said, 'okay let's do this.'"