JBS opens new casings building

• Ribbon cutting

Brian Korthals/Daily Globe JBS product manager Wally Onnen cuts the ribbon at the ceremony dedicating their new casings building Tuesday afternoon at the plant in Worthington.

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WORTHINGTON — If you plan on eating a natural casing wiener in the coming days, chances are the casing was processed right here in Worthington.

On Tuesday afternoon, JBS celebrated the opening of its casing building, located directly south of its main hog processing facility in Worthington. The $8.5 million building project was completed earlier this year, and has been in full operation since late April. There are 24 people employed on each of two shifts.

During tours of the casing building Tuesday, JBS product manager Wally Onnen said the new facility works primarily with the small intestine of hogs. Large intestines are still rendered in the main plant, while small intestines are transported via a conveyor system into the casings building. From there, the product is fed through a series of rollers to squeeze out any undigested food in the intestines.

The end result is two specific products — the casings, which are used by hot dog and sausage makers around the world, and mucosa, a product that is extracted from the casings and used in the pharmaceutical industry as a blood-thinning product.

As the casings and the mucosa are separated, the casings are transferred to a storage room, where they are salted and hung to cure. Onnen said the facility goes through approximately 120 pounds of salt per shift, and brings in two semi loads of salt each week.

After the casings have cured, they are transferred to large barrels, where they can be stored for up to 10 years. Each barrel will hold up to 40 to 50 bundles, and each bundle consists of casings from approximately 25 hogs.

“The casings are sent to China,” said Onnen. “The longer and bigger around they are, the more they pay.”

Each 20-yard casing, called a runner is valued at approximately $2. Multiply that by the roughly 4.7 million hogs processed per year at the JBS plant in Worthington and it’s a big business, Onnen said.

The casings are further processed in China and then shipped back to the United States and marketed to hot dog and sausage makers, he said.

The mucosa is transferred into tanker trailers and shipped to Sioux City, Iowa, where a company unloads the 45,000 pounds of mucosa and processes it down into approximately 22 pounds of heparin. The heparin is shipped to Sweden for processing into blood thinner.

“They say that the hog is the closest thing to human tissue as any of the animals,” said Onnen. “There’s nothing on a pig we throw away anymore."

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