Darr family businesses: Born from Eggs

“The FDA changed food safety regulations and created this new category of product, inedible eggs,” ADF Board Chairman Thomas Slaight says. “Bill saw an opportunity to gather this product and market it into an industry that needed highly digestible protein.”

ADF’s first plant was in Verona. Now, there’s a plant in Social Circle, Georgia and several other states.

An inedible egg is any egg not good enough for the market or even for breaking plants, according to Gene Gregory, president of the United Egg Producers, usually because they have cracks, blood spots or some other deformation.

“Fortunately, companies like American Dehydrated Foods have been a source by which producers can move some of those eggs to market,” Gregory said.

Customers who use ADF’s egg products include high-end pet food manufacturers such as Iams.

Growth, however, found the company producing foods for both animal feed and human consumption, and a new venture – International Dehydrated Foods – was founded in 1982 in Monett.

“As time went on, (Darr) really saw the need to divvy up the two markets he was going for,” Hellweg says.

All of the company’s products for human consumption come out of facilities that are inspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Customers using those products are well-known, with brand names such as Knorr and Campbell’s on display in IDF’s Springfield offices.

Both Slaight and Hellweg are Darr’s sons-in-law, and they are always on the lookout for new products and services for the family-owned operations, which also include Food Ingredients Technology Co. LLC, founded in 1991. All of the companies have corporate offices in Springfield.

“FITCo supplies animal proteins (from chicken) to the pet food industry, supplies fat to both the pet food industry and the human food industry and supplies broth to both the pet food and the human food industry,” Hellweg says. “It is a USDA-inspected facility. All of the products produced there are fit for human consumption; it just so happens that we go certain directions with those ingredients.”

Finding new revenue sources is a continuous exercise as existing markets mature, Hellweg says.

“It’s a lot like being a sponge I think,” he added. “You’ve got your contacts out in the industry. We’re talking with a lot of customers, chefs and food technologists and really trying to understand what it is that they want. We try to attack that through purchasing, marketing and product development. We’re always trying to hit that on as many levels as we can. It is tough to be creative, but a lot of times, being creative is seeing an idea out there and tweaking it just a little bit.”

Traditionally, ADF has found growth in the high-end pet food market and in targeted nutrition aimed at specific parts of an animal’s lifecycle.

According to David Fairfield, Director of Feed Services with the National Feed and Grain Association, that market has boomed since 1978.

“I think we’ve seen a lot of expansion in terms of knowing the nutritional requirements of animals,” Fairfield says. “Twenty years ago, when you were talking about a swine-feeding program you would have had maybe three different feeds you were going to feed to that hog during its five- or six-month lifecycle. Today, with the technology that we have, you may see three different kinds of feed being fed to that pig before it reaches 15 pounds.”

Controlling costs, including those for transportation, is one of ADF’s keys to success.

“When you look at where our facilities are located, that’s essentially one of our successes,” Hellweg says. “The original facility in Verona is all about eggs. We are closely aligned with the poultry industry in using a lot of their underutilized products. We’re located close to them to minimize the cost a great deal.”

According to Slaight, the companies are constantly evaluating their transportation model. The family even owned a transportation company, Big Red Transportation, from 1986 until 1992.

“Our main reason was an attempt to isolate transportation liability from the operating companies into a separate transportation company,” Slaight says. “I’m not sure we were ever saving money by operating our own transportation company, but after some hard analysis at the end of a five- or six-year period, we decided that we hadn’t really separated the liability as we had really wanted to.”

They liquidated the company and ran their own trucks through the end of the decade, finally making the decision to push transportation outside the company. They sought out transportation suppliers and encouraged several of their drivers to take the entrepreneurial leap and start their own companies.

“We’re in the ingredient business, be it for food or feed,” Slaight says. “We’re not in the transportation business.”

Still, fuel costs and the demand for fuel are having an impact on their businesses. Both Slaight and Hellweg cite the growing demand for ethanol as a factor pushing prices up throughout their industry, and they list it among their future challenges.

The effect of ethanol is something Fairfield has seen in feed and related industries across the nation. As fuel prices rise, demand rises for ethanol and its main ingredient, corn.

“The unintended consequences is what ethanol production is doing to corn prices,” Fairfield says. “A year ago it was $2 (a bushel), and today it is $3.60. It has a huge impact on livestock production, and ultimately, it trickles through to the cost of food for the consumer.”

American Dehydrated Foods Inc.

Owner: Darr Family

Founded: 1978

Address (corporate offices): 3801 E.

Sunshine, Springfield, MO 65809

Phone: (417) 881-7755

Fax: (417) 881-4963

Web site: www.adf.com

E-mail: dbeeman@adf.com

Services/Products: Manufacturing of pet-food ingredients

Annual sales revenues: $66 million

Employees: 192

International Dehydrated Foods Inc.

Owner: Darr Family

Founded: 1982

Address (corporate offices): 3801 E.

Sunshine, Springfield, MO 65809

Phone: (417) 881-7820

Fax: (417) 881-7274

Web site: www.idf.com

E-mail: dbeeman@adf.com

Services/Products: Manufacturing of food ingredients for human consumption

Annual sales revenues: $65 million

Employees: 202

Food Ingredients Technology Co. LLC

Owner: ADF Managing Member

Founded: 1991

Address (corporate offices): 3801 E.

Sunshine, Springfield, MO 65809

Phone: (417) 881-7755

Fax: (417) 881-4963

Web site: N/A

E-mail: dbeeman@adf.com

Services/Products: Manufacturing of ingredients for pet and human food

Annual sales revenues: $42 million

Employees: 103