Founded in 1945 as Willmar Poultry and Egg Company, Albert Huisinga, Herman Nelson, and Albin Norling set out to improve the turkey processing and hatching industries through doing things better. This established a successive pattern of focus on technological, process and personnel improvement for future generations of businesses and employees to follow. Our business is founded on a single word: Innovation.

Today Willmar Poultry Company (WPC) represents more than 60 years of industry leadership in poultry genetics, biotechnology, agriculture, and engineering. We use our expertise in these areas to provide the highest quality eggs and poults at the greatest value to integrated food marketing companies, our own commercial production farms, and independent turkey growers.

Our visceral commitment to innovation has helped WPC confront the challenges that we have faced over the past six decades. Following a devastating fire in 1978 that could have easily ended the company's existence, our leaders persevered and built from the ashes a state of the art hatchery that utilized computer technology to produce the best hatching results of any major turkey hatchery in the U.S. This hatchery was then and remains today the largest turkey hatchery in the world and continues on the leading edge of the development and implementation of turkey hatching and poult delivery technology.

In 1983, Willmar Poultry Company partnered with Marc Gorans to develop new and innovative technology to provide significant value added to turkey poult customers though automation of poult processing procedures. The end result of 9 years of research and development was the creation of ground breaking robotic technology and the formation of Nova-Tech Engineering. Nova-Tech has since become a leader in the conceptualization, engineering, production and marketing of computer and robotic processing machinery. A fellow affiliate of Life-Science Innovations, Willmar Poultry Company continues to collaborate closely with the Nova-Tech team in developing cutting edge technology of the poultry industry.

In 1986, Willmar Poultry Company began to seek innovative ways to improve the health of their breeding stock. A select team of scientists was formed to develop new vaccine technology. Through many years of research and development, they developed ground breaking technology in the form of Siderophore Receptor and Porin (SRP®) Technology. This revolutionary vaccine immunizes against bacterial infections utilizing SRP® proteins. Subsequently, Epitopix was formed in the year 2002 to continue this same scientific discovery and develop and market those discoveries. Today, Epitopix markets its products across animal species and is constantly striving to discover new technology that improve animal health. Epitopix has intellectual property rights to all of its findings and has cross-licensed this technology for application to humans as well.

In order to better utilize the hatching and vaccine technology that Nova-Tech, Epitopix and Willmar Poultry have developed, Willmar Poultry Company partnered with Rick VanderSpek in the year 2000 to form Ag Forte. Ag Forte expanded its genetics and hatchery operations into Missouri, Virginia, and Kansas through the acquisition of Butterball and Pilgrim's Pride assets in those states. Combined WPC and Ag Forte now represent 30% of the United State's turkey hatchery business. Furthermore, this acquisition provided the companies with a grand-parent level genetics operation allowing the companies to further expand their innovation of the health and quality of turkeys.

Moving forward, Willmar Poultry Company's passion for innovation continues as we seek out and discover new technology that will provide us with the distinct competitive advantages necessary to continue providing the highest quality poultry at the greatest value to our customers and consumers. We recognize that the future is only a day away and are always considering new ideas and technology as we continue our relentless commitment to innovation.