No yolks about it: 400 applicants tour Cal-Maine facility in Dexter

DEXTER — The Cal-Maine Foods egg facility in Dexter is ready to get crackin’.

When Tyson Foods shuttered its processing plant, hatchery and feed mill in the city in 2023, hundreds of jobs were impacted. The Ridgeland, Mississippi-based Cal-Maine acquired the locations in March 2024.

“It was a giant hole left in this community when Tyson left and we’re excited to get back in there, provide some relief and give them a bright spot where things were a little bit meek not too long ago,” Cal-Maine Dexter general manager Trent Vinci said.

Cal-Maine is the country’s largest distributor and producer of fresh shell eggs. According to its website, the company has three breeding facilities and hatcheries, six distribution centers, 27 feed mills, 37 pullet growing facilities and 49 shell egg production and packaging facilities. These span from New Jersey to Utah.

“It’s a large company but we pride ourselves on running things family-style,” Vinci said. “… With the way things are going with the livestock production industry, everything here will be either cage-free or free-range. We will (have) what we consider specialty eggs, not just your generic white cheaper eggs.”

The Dexter plant will be an offline egg-grading facility. Hens will lay eggs on-site. These will be fed into a conveyer that runs into the processing plant. They’ll be washed, weighed and checked over there. The entire operation will employ more than 80 people. Many of them were former Tyson personnel.

“Here, we’re actually working with some local growers. They’re doing some retrofits on their broiler houses to put in a nesting system and an egg conveying system to feed small plants on their farms that will be further processed here,” Vinci said.

He estimated a late December start date for the plant to go online. Production will start to ramp up after that once the pullets, or young hens, are fully-grown.

“It’s not a magic switch we can flick and say, here we are, we’ve got 1.3 million birds in production. It’s going to take time to get there,” he said.

Cal-Maine worked with the Dexter Chamber of Commerce to set up an open house Thursday, Nov. 14, and take applications from prospective workers. More than 400 people stopped by, often with their families. Vinci said locals had been asking when the plant would be hiring for months and that he was happy to get the ball rolling for its future opening.

“We’ve been really pleased with the people who have shown up,” he said. “People are very excited and ready to get to work. There’s a lot of eagerness and we’ve met a lot of really good folks today.”

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