Cobb-Vantress to the core

n Company celebrates 100 years of business

Janelle Jessen/Herald-Leader
Janelle Jessen/Herald-Leader

Cobb-Vantress, the world's oldest poultry breeding company, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

Over the past century the company has grown from a single farmer trying his hand at poultry breeding to one of the world's leading suppliers of broiler breeding stock, with distribution in more than 120 countries.

The company, now headquartered in Siloam Springs, has roots that stretch back to a 167-acre farm in Littleton, Mass. On Nov. 20, 1916, Robert C. Cobb, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, decided to buy the Old Pickard Farm, located about 25 miles from Boston, and try his hand at farming. A physician had told Cobb that farming would help with his asthma, but being around cows and horses only made his condition worse, so instead Cobb turned to poultry breeding.

In 1920, Cobb purchased Barred Rock pullets -- young female chickens who haven't started laying yet -- and three kerosene incubators. The incubators had a total egg capacity of 1,400 eggs, but there was no turning device so they all had to be turned by hand. Within five years Old Pickard Farm had become the largest breeder of Barred Plymouth Rocks in the region, and by 1935 the company had produced more than a million breeders.

In 1947, Cobb began breeding a line of all white birds called White Rocks. These chickens, along with the Vantress male, built the foundations of today's pedigree Cobb lines, according to Jerry Moye, president of the company. The company's reach spread to Europe, the United Kingdom and Africa during the early 1960s.

In 1974 the family-owned company was purchased by The Upjohn Company, and Tyson Foods acquired the Vantress breeding lines. The two companies formed a joint venture in 1986 and the newly formed Cobb-Vantress moved its headquarters from Concord, Mass., to Siloam Springs to be closer to Tyson Foods. In 1994, Tyson acquired 100 percent of the company from Upjohn, becoming the full owner.

The company continued to expand, acquiring new genetic lines, and opening new research and development centers, and hatcheries around the world.

Carl McCratic has been with Cobb for nearly half of the company's 100 years. He starting working for the company in late 1964, after graduating Colcord (Okla.) High School and spending a short stint at the University of New Mexico. His first job paid just 65 cents an hour -- he started by cleaning trays in the hatchery by hand with nothing more than a scrub pad and a water hose.

In his time at Cobb, McCratic worked at various jobs in the hatchery, as a delivery driver and dispatcher in the transportation department and as a maintenance technician. In 1981 he earned the job of hatchery manager. McCratic served in the role of hatchery manager until he retired in 2014, but he couldn't stay away from the company he had spent his life working for and soon returned to work part time in the transportation department.

Over the years, McCratic has watched technology in the industry explode. Those trays that McCratic used to clean with a scrub pad and a water hose are now cleaned with high pressure hoses, hot water and disinfectant. When McCratic started working as a hatchery manager, Cobb was producing 2 million chickens a year. Now the company produces 65 million a year in the U.S. alone, he said. Computers have replaced the giant hatchery production planning book that used to spread across his desk.

Cobb's commitment to being at the forefront of research and technology has helped the company rise to the top of the industry. Modern broiler chickens, which are meat chickens, are a hybrid of four strains of chickens. Cobb develops and produces the grandparents and parents of the broiler chickens that are raised for food. Over the past 25 years, the Cobb500 has became the most popular broiler breeder in the world. In addition, the company has launched numerous other lines such as the Cobb700 and CobbAvian48 to enhance breeder performance.

Cobb currently has six research complexes in the United States and additional research complexes in the Netherlands. It's also involved in at least 20 other joint research projects with other organizations.

But it takes more than research and technology to succeed. Moye credited Cobb's achievement to the relationships the company has built with its customers and employees.

"It's beyond progress with the product," he said. "The success is related to developing and furthering the relationships with our customers and developing our team members for the future."

Working for Cobb is like being a part of a family, according to Steve Iseler, world director of production planning.

Iseler began his career with the company in 1985, when he interviewed for a summer job in the lab in Littleton, Mass. His summer job grew into general training assignment. Iseler was put into different areas of the company including research and development, hatchery, brooding, covering for farm managers who were on vacation. He went on to work in production and sales, before moving to Siloam Springs in 1997 to run the company's marketing department.

When Iseler moved to Siloam Springs, there were about 200 employees. Cobb-Vantress now has about 1,200 employees in the United States alone, he said. Iseler remembered the company kept hiring and hiring new people and sustained non-stop growth of about 10 percent annually.

"It's pretty neat to see it hit 100 years," he said.

Both McCratic and Iseler said the company has created a family culture. Their various company departments have great relationships, people spend time together after work, and the company is highly involved in the community, Iseler added.

"People truly care about each other here and our president has worked hard to maintain that environment," Iseler said.

Cobb-Vantress began celebrating its first 100 years at the company's global conference, held last November near the company's birthplace in Boston, Mass. More than 140 senior representatives from 51 Cobb grandparent distributors and customers from 34 countries attended the event.

The centennial theme continued at the International Production and Processing Expo in Atlanta, Ga., in February. Cobb unveiled a restored 1929 Ford Model A chick truck, a replica of the vehicle that delivered Cobb chicks to customers in Alabama during the late 1940s and 1950s. The celebrations are scheduled to continue at the Eurotier Show, the world's leading trade fair for animal production, in Hannover, Germany, Nov. 15-18 -- just a few days ahead of the date that Robert Cobb purchased Old Pickard Farm 100 years ago.

"I am very proud of our employees and what they've done to make Cobb so successful and such a great place to work," Moye said. "At the same time, I'm very grateful to all of our great customers and partners that helped us achieve this amazing milestone of 100 years. It is the relationships we've built over a century that keep us moving forward, and the genetic progress year-on-year and the advances in technology that help us prepare to feed the world of tomorrow."

General News on 07/27/2016