Meat&Poultry - April 2012 - 26

HENRY MORRIS

of his favorite cities. “I love Chicago. I’ve loved it ever since the fi rst time I came here.” His stint with ConAgra would span about a decade before he stepped away to work as an independent engineering consultant. He then heard in 2004 that Smithfield planned to build an $85 million ham plant in Kinston, NC, as part of a supplier agreement with Subway. “Larry [Pope] called me and said ‘What are you doing?’” The two would agree to a three-month consulting arrangement to get that facility up and run-

a strong work ethic. As he ponders more the like-minded contemporaries, he adds Lee Lochman, and Tim Harris from his days at ConAgra Meats. He also expresses his admiration for George Richter, who joined Smithfield when it acquired Farmland Foods and now holds the position of COO of the Pork Group. “He has that same drive for results and a strong work ethic.” “They expected results; they expected you to know your business and they expected that if you’d say you would do it, then you do it. To me, that’s a good, strong, Midwestern work ethic and something we need to preserve as a country.”

“One of the nicest men I’ve ever known,” he says of Robert Langford.
what would be the largest hog plant in the country. “It turned into two years,” he says. Starting up that city-size plant, training thousands of workers, satisfying the demands of Smithfield Packing and Gwaltney was a mammoth undertaking. “I was mayor of that little city,” he says. “It was one of the most interesting times of my entire life.” Part of that process involved meeting the extreme demands of the Japanese market and their expectations of consistency in their products and the processes used to manufacture the product. Since then, the plant has grown to a workforce of more than 4,000 and is one of the most productive plants in the world. “That was probably one of the highlights of my life,” Morris says of his time at the Tar Heel plant. Morris would work at Smithfield from 1979 until the summer of 1995. It was then that he had an opportunity to pack his bags again and go to work for ConAgra. A huge lure for this position was that he would be based in one

ning. “Those three months ended seven years ago,” he smirks, “and that’s kind of how I got where I am today.”

Influential impact
Looking back, Morris says he learned some of his early core beliefs and developed a career path based on working for people like Robert Langford at Owens. “One of the nicest men I’ve ever known in my entire life,” he says of Langford, who he also labels as smart, intelligent and gifted at doing his job. Langford taught Morris that “you can be successful in business and have fun at the same time.” Other mentors Morris mentions include George Hamilton and Joe Luter, who he says gave him the ability to succeed by achieving results, while expecting accountability along the way. He also considers Smithfield President and CEO Larry Pope a key person in his successful career path in addition to being a game opponent on the racquetball court and a personal friend. Pope and Morris both started their careers at Smithfield at about the same time. “We kind of grew up together, he and I; and Bo Manly.” The people he’s bonded with over the years share a sense of high values and

Meeting challenges
Morris notes how the company’s strategic initiatives over the past several years require him to be nimble in his operational focus. Since 2007, Larry Pope’s mandate has included an emphasis on growing the company’s consumer packaged meats business. In this new era for Smithfield, overall capacity utilization has gone from less than 80 percent to more than 90 percent. The company consolidated its packaged meat plants from 36 to 30; independent operating companies went from seven to three; brands were slashed from 50 to 12; 10 retail sales divisions were cut to three; and the 20-plus computer systems utilized to keep track of it all were funneled to one. The mission now is to “look at all of our operations and improve the level of technology to the point that we really have a competitive advantage.” An example is when the company made the decision to build a new facility in North Carolina to manufacture coextruded hot dogs, just behind its processed ham plant. The new plant allows Smithfield to pasteurize

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Meat&Poultry - April 2012

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