Fort Worth family-owned meat packing company opening new facility near Stockyards
Fort Worth-based Standard Meat Company is planning to renovate a nearly 70-year-old cold storage facility near the Stockyards to convert it into a specialized packing plant.
The 166,000-square-foot facility at 1101 NE 23rd St. will house a sous vide cooking line, which is the French method that involves vacuum-sealing meat in bags and cooking it under water at a consistent temperature.
The plant is located just outside the Historic Stockyards District, but not far from the restaurants that have sprung up since the area began its redevelopment in 2014.
The plant will have the capacity to house new packing and processing technologies to help meet the needs of commercial customers, the company says.
“At Standard Meat, we don’t demand that our clients choose from a fixed menu of products and services,” said CEO Ben Rosenthal in a statement. He emphasized the company’s focus on coming up with “out of the box solutions” to provide tailored services for each of its clients.
“It’s literally feeding the demand,” said Fort Worth city council member Carlos Flores, whose district includes the Stockyards.
Nearly all the restaurants that have opened in the Stockyards have a need for high-quality beef, so it’s a good thing to have Standard’s plant so close by, Flores said.
The new plant also aims to restore an important piece of Fort Worth’s historic industrial legacy, Rosenthal said.
The two largest meat packing plants, Armour and Swift, closed in 1962 and 1971, respectively. Their former site on the mostly vacant east end of Exchange Avenue will soon be home to an Arlington-based oil and gas company’s new headquarters, in the renovated Armour & Co. building, as well as new apartments developed by San Antonio-based Kairoi Residential.
“At Standard Meat, we’re all-in on Fort Worth and on bringing new investment and jobs to the place we’ve always called home,” he said.
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