It began with a 15-liter hand-cranked stuffer.
That’s where Maarten Van Zoeren of Simla Frozen Food Locker in southeastern Colorado pins the birth of his meat processing business.
Maarten came to the United States in 1990 at the age of 15 when his parents immigrated from the Netherlands to the small eastern Colorado community of Simla. They bought a frozen food locker there and began processing local meat.
A 78-year-old processing business in Millen, Georgia is taking on new life, thanks to Jarrod and Becca Creasy.
Jarrod grew up on a farm not far from Millen, where Fries Frozen Food meat processing had been operating since 1948, while Becca grew up in central Florida in an agricultural family. After getting married on September 20, 2014, they began using Fries to process the beef they stocked in their own freezers and sold to others. As they dropped off an animal for processing one day, the owner said, “You two ought to buy this business.”
