Bowling Green and Tyson Foods are bringing home the bacon. And it’s quite tasty news for local economic development efforts.

Tyson Foods, the global food processor with 139,000 employees worldwide and 2020 revenue of $43 billion, broke ground last week on a new plant at Bowling Green’s Transpark. Located on a 69-acre site that is near the new Ball Corp. plant on Production Avenue, Tyson plans to invest $355 million in the plant by the time it opens in 2023.

The 450 employees at Tyson will take pork bellies and process them into about 100 million pounds of bacon each year, according to Tyson Senior Vice President for Prepared Foods Gregg Uecker, the Daily News’ Don Sergent reported.

“This plant will be a showcase,” Uecker said. “It will be our most advanced plant, with robotics and automation that will allow us to have the most efficient bacon plant in the world.”

The jobs at the 400,000-square-foot plant will pay on average $28 per hour in salary and benefits, which is certainly welcome news, but there will be other benefits as well.

Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles offered hope to Kentucky’s 1,600 pork producers. “A facility of this size will be pulling in hogs from a regional area,” he said. “This will help pork producers in Kentucky, and it will help all pork producers, whether they’re in Kentucky or not.”

Tyson has already made noteworthy investments in our state, including a chicken processing plant in Albany and a feed mill in Franklin. It employs more than 3,900 people across Kentucky and has an annual payroll in the state of more than $168 million.

In Bowling Green, Tyson is locating on a tract of land that is part of a recent expansion of the industrial park, which got its start with the 2002 rezoning to industrial of 153 acres of farmland and has steadily grown since then. The 2020 purchase of 83 acres by the Inter-Modal Transportation Authority that oversees the Transpark from the James Wilson family “positioned us to even have this conversation” with Tyson, Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Ron Bunch said.

The Transpark has seen an abundance of success stories since its rancorous beginnings, and we certainly welcome its role in bringing needed jobs to Bowling Green and southcentral Kentucky.

“Bowling Green is surging. Day in and day out there are new opportunities. It’s one of the fastest-growing areas of the state,’ Gov. Andy Beshear said at the groundbreaking.

Thanks to Tyson Foods, the menu of job opportunities and our economic development outlook have gotten even better.