OLATHE, Kan. (KNS/KCUR) — Walmart is spending a quarter of a billion dollars on a beef packaging plant in Olathe. That will bring hundreds of jobs and signal a big change in the way beef gets to your shopping cart.
Walmart’s Olathe packaging plant will take big cuts of beef from a slaughterhouse in Nebraska and turn them into small cuts, packaged and priced for Midwestern Walmart stores. It’s the kind of work that grocery store butchers do, except at a much larger scale.
The company says it will hire about 600 people at the $257 million plant. Company officials say the plant will be built later this year near the southern edge of Olathe.
Walmart is far and away the largest food retailer in the United States. It and other giants, like Costco, are doing more of their own food processing to hold down costs. Beef prices are up about 15% in the last two years. And a sharp decline in production will likely drive prices higher through 2025.
