Mississippi ICE raids hit Koch Foods, a large suburban Chicago-based poultry processo

Mississippi ICE raids hit Koch Foods, a large suburban Chicago-based poultry processor that mostly flies under the radar


August 8, 2019

Robert Channick




The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids Wednesday on agricultural plants in Mississippi hit close to home in Chicago, with nearly a quarter of the arrested workers employed by Koch Foods, a large Park Ridge-based poultry processor whose billionaire owner, Joseph Grendys, mostly flies under the radar.


As many as 200 of the 680 people allegedly living in the country illegally, who were detained by authorities, worked at the Koch plant in Morton, Miss., according to an initial estimate by ICE spokesman Bryan Cox.


The raids represent the largest workplace immigration sting operation of the Trump administration, with more than 600 agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations executing multiple federal criminal search warrants at seven Mississippi agricultural facilities.


“This is the largest single-state worksite enforcement action in the agency’s history,” Cox said.


Koch Foods did not respond to a request for comment Thursday, and efforts to reach owner Joseph Grendys were unsuccessful.


Five things to know about Koch Foods and its owner:


Koch has humble Chicago beginnings


Launched as a one-room chicken deboning and cutting operation, Koch has grown into one of the largest poultry processors in the U.S. The privately owned company has more than 13,000 employees, with locations across Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee. Annual sales top $3 billion, according to reports.


Koch Foods processes chickens for national restaurant chains, schools and other locations, and its products are sold in grocery stores under the Oven Cravers and Koch Foods brands.


It’s not that Koch


Koch Foods is not affiliated with the Koch brothers or Koch Industries, the Kansas-based energy and manufacturing conglomerate.


The billionaire owner keeps a low profile


Grendys, 57, who grew up in a Chicago bungalow, is worth $2.5 billion, making him the 328th richest man in America, according to the 2018 Forbes 400 ranking. That ties him with Groupon founder and well-known Chicago tech entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, according to the Forbes list.


Grendys, whose grandparents emigrated from Poland, began working for the company’s original owner, Fred Koch, while he was still a student at Holy Cross High School in River Grove. Grendys bought out Koch’s interest in the company in 1992, eight years after he graduated from Loyola University. The company took off from there, growing in large measure through the acquisition of feed mills and slaughterhouses.


The feds are familiar with that plant


In 2018, Koch Foods agreed to pay $3.75 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for alleged racial discrimination and sexual harassment at the Morton plant. According to the lawsuit, Koch allegedly subjected Hispanic and female employees to a “hostile work environment” and supervisors allegedly “touched and/or made sexually suggestive comments” to female Hispanic employees, among other allegations.


ICE raided Ohio Koch plant in 2007


In 2007, Koch’s Fairfield, Ohio, plant was raided by U.S. immigration agents, resulting in the arrest of 161 alleged illegal immigrants. Koch reportedly paid a $536,046 fine for violating immigration laws in February 2010.



https://www.courant.com/ct-biz-cb-ic...ulq-story.html

Immigration raid to cost Koch Foods 'millions'

August 8, 2019

Claire Bushey



ICE agents raided a Mississippi processing plant owned by the Park Ridge company, leaving some workers in federal custody, thousands of half-butchered chickens and likely costing the firm “millions” before business returns to normal.



The immigration raid that swept through a Koch Foods plant yesterday left the company with some workers in federal custody, thousands of half-butchered chickens and likely will cost “millions” before business returns to normal, said a poultry industry consultant.


U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement raided seven plants operated by several companies in Mississippi, arresting 680 workers. The roundup included a Morton, Miss., plant owned by Park Ridge-based Koch, one of metro Chicago’s largest private companies with $3.2 billion in revenue last year. CEO Joseph Grendys is estimated to be worth $2.5 billion.

Koch Foods did not return a message seeking comment. The company’s customer-facing website appeared to have crashed this morning.
More than 2,400 workers staff the Morton plant, which was partly shut down today because of a lack of workers, according to reports from the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger.

The daytime raid means the plant was operating when immigration officials began arresting people, said Storrs, Conn.-based poultry consultant Paul Aho.

“What a nightmare for a plant manager,” he said. “That is a big mess because you get thousands of chickens half-processed. ICE can cause a big hassle just to clean it up.”

The disruption to Koch’s supply chain will cost money for every day the plant can’t operate, Aho said. There’s lost sales: A big chicken processing plant butchers about 1.3 million birds a week, each worth a couple of dollars. Then there’s the logistics problem. Birds arrive daily to the plant and will need to be diverted to another facility, which won’t pay much because the seller is under duress.


“It will cost them millions of dollars in a week’s time,” Aho said. “It’s a vertically integrated process with lots of moving pieces, and they all have to work, and you pull one out, and it’s chaos.”


When the Northwest Side’s Cloverhill Bakery lost a third of its workers in an immigration crackdown two years ago, the bakery’s then-owners reported more than $19 million in losses over two months. Swiss conglomerate Aryzta sold the bakery to Hostess Brands.


It won’t necessarily be easy to replace the workers who were arrested, either, Aho said. Workers may hesitate to apply at a place so recently targeted by ICE, and unemployment is low, giving people other options.




https://www.chicagobusiness.com/manu...foods-millions

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