ROGERS -- His name is Ed Fryar, he's in the chicken business, and his company is expanding rapidly as chicken raised without antibiotics moves from a niche market to a mainstream product.
The chief executive of Rogers-based Ozark Mountain Poultry said he originally set out to debone dark meat for larger poultry companies but made the transition to producing chicken raised without antibiotics in 2011.
Now the company sells directly to restaurants, to other businesses that use the poultry in their own products and to consumers under the Forester Farmer's Market brand, which is named after the defunct mill town in Scott County.
Since the change, Fryar has more than doubled his employees. His operations, which are entirely in Arkansas, employ about 1,300 people.
"My job has evolved so much. My title was CEO, but I really wasn't the CEO. I was much closer to a supervisor," he said. "I loaded trucks, unloaded trucks, moved pallet jacks. With 25 employees you do whatever you need to. Now there are several people in the company between me and the people who are doing those jobs."
The company's growth is evident in Batesville. In October 2013, Ozark Mountain Poultry bought the Pilgrim's Pride complex, which had been scheduled to close.
"If Pilgrim's Pride had closed and no one had purchased the assets and turned them into a going concern, this economy would have been devastated," said Bob Stroud, chairman of the Independence County Economic Development Board.
On March 10, Ozark Mountain Poultry said it will purchase ConAgra Foods' Batesville facility, which it will update and reopen in early 2016. Stroud said the company's expansion will have a ripple effect on construction workers and farmers who grow grain to feed the chickens.
"Dr. Fryar is definitely a dynamic leader for his company and understands the food-processing business in a way that few do in this state," Stroud said. "He did his homework, came to town, and that company has been a good employer."
Ozark Mountain Poultry also has reopened the former H&L Poultry facility in Warren, bought a grain elevator in Bay and is building a new feed mill in Magness -- all since 2014.
The company's growth wasn't inevitable. Fryar said it was the result of transferring from one niche market to another.
He said he was looking for a new challenge when he left his job as a tenured professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas in 1994.
"On campus, you were torn between teaching, research and service," he said. "I think that's part of what attracted me to business. In business, you have a lot of different stakeholders that you have to take care of, but you really have one goal, and that's to create value for your customers."
"Plus I have a low threshold for boredom," he said.
He helped found Fayetteville-based A&F Exports in 1995, but he said he saw things differently from his three partners, who bought him out.
In 2001, Fryar started Ozark Mountain Poultry. His company deboned the back half of birds for larger poultry companies -- a niche market that the companies had mostly ignored because of little demand for dark meat.
However, the companies that were contracting with Fryar and others started bringing their operations back in-house.
The change led Petit Jean to close its Arkadelphia plant at the end of 2008, when Tyson Foods didn't renew a deboning contract, and left 385 without jobs.
By 2010, Fryar knew he needed to find a new niche for his 550 employees. About 10 years after the company began operations, Ozark Mountain Poultry made the leap to antibiotic-free birds, following a trend that wasn't widely accepted at the time.
So far, the risk has paid off. In the past five years, the company has gone from 550 employees to about 1,300.
Fryar said operations will continue to grow. Last summer the company had 250 poultry houses. By summer 2016, the company will have about 500.
After McDonald's announced earlier this month that it was moving away from chicken raised with medically important antibiotics, industry watchers said the restaurants could spur a shift in chicken production.
"I think the companies are wising up to the fact that consumers don't want this done," said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch. "After all, McDonald's made this announcement at a conference about righting the ship."
Though major restaurants grab headlines when they move away from sourcing chicken grown with antibiotics, Fryar said the shift among supermarket shoppers has been as significant to his business.
"When a McDonald's or a Chick-Fil-A changes direction, that's kind of like the big bang," he said. "It's growing very, very fast, and it's rapidly become mainstream."
Major companies have noticed and are working to adapt to the changing marketplace, including Tyson.
"We support McDonald's decision, and, in fact, we worked very closely with them on this decision because we were already headed in that direction," said Dennis Leatherby, Tyson's chief financial officer, during a Consumer Analyst Group of Europe conference in London earlier this month.
Tyson offers chicken raised without antibiotics under its Nature Raised Farms brand.
Fryar hopes to stay ahead. He's starting to buy non-genetically modified organism crops to feed to his birds, a bid to appeal to consumers concerned about GMOs.
And he tracks how many pounds of chicken each employee receives, how much they output and how quickly they can do it. More-efficient employees are paid more but ultimately cost the company less.
Fryar said programs like that help him save money while producing a premium product.
"I'm an economist. Markets respond to incentives. People respond to incentives," he said. "People want to take care of their families, and if you can find a way to align the interest of the employee and their family with the interest of your customers, all you have to do is get out of the way."
SundayMonday Business on 03/29/2015