Daily's History

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Daily's Premium Meats

History

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Daily's^®History

In 1893, John R. Daily, with his business partner, James Walsh, opened the Union Market, a local retail meat market in Missoula, Mont. Located on Higgins Avenue, Missoula's Main Street, the market supplied local residents with fresh meat.

This was the beginning of Daily'sPremium Meats. In 1899, Daily's partner retired, and Daily became the sole proprietor of the meat market and slaughterhouse. He would purchase animals from local farmers and process beef, pork, lamb, veal, poultry and buffalo.

John R. Daily Co. Forms

In 1910, the company name changed officially to the John R. Daily Co. and the business became the prominent wholesale meat processing business in the city.

The retail side of the business grew, too, and eventually included six Missoula markets, including the Union Market, Montana Market, Model Market, Palace Market, Missoula Market and the headquarters' store.

By the 1920s, the John R. Daily Co. began to focus more on wholesale business and closed four retail markets. The slaughterhouse, a big brick building two miles west of Missoula, was located on Mullan Road. The same street where one of the division's three plants is located today.

Since beginning in 1893, the Daily's brand had built a reputation in western Montana as a premium supplier of processed meats including bacon, hams and sausages. In 1931, John R. Daily died, and he left behind a company that would continue to bear his name and a legacy of fine meat products.

Focus moves to wholesale products

Eventually, the John R. Daily Co. closed all retail stores. In 1967, the company moved its operations to a new plant on Mullan Road in Missoula, and in 1981, the company closed the slaughterhouse operations to focus solely on processing premium meats. Also, in the 1980s the company strategically focused on building its expertise in bacon and built the reputation as "The bacon specialists," supplying premium bacon throughout the Northwest. In 1992, a second bacon plant was opened in Salt Lake City.

Daily's and Seaboard Farms begin a relationship

Just a few years later in 1995, a new company, called Seaboard Farms, began operations as a connected food system controlling every step of the way from raising the pigs to processing the pork, and quickly built its reputation as a premium supplier of pork bellies. As one of Seaboard Farms' earliest customers, the John R. Daily Co. began to purchase zero-scribe, center-cut bellies from Seaboard Farms Guymon, Okla., fresh pork plant to produce Daily's^® Premium Bacon.

Throughout the next decade the relationship between the two companies grew stronger as Seaboard Farms established itself as a leading premium pork company. In 2005, Seaboard Farms purchased Daily's^®Premium Meats and Seaboard Farms changed its name to Seaboard Foods.

The next year, Seaboard Foods began to market and sell fresh pork products produced at a new pork processing plant located in St. Joseph, Mo. The plant is owned and operated by Triumph Foods and the plant's producer-owners aligned with Seaboard Foods' connected food system to ensure product consistency. In 2014, Triumph Foods purchased a 50 percent ownership in Daily's^® Premium Meats, and Daily's announced it will build a third bacon plant in St. Joseph, Mo., and the third bacon processing plant opened August 2016.

Both the Guymon and St. Joseph plants supply Daily's^® with dimensionally trimmed pork bellies for its premium bacon products. In 2015, Seaboard Foods and Triumph Foods announced a joint venture to build a third fresh pork processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa. Since this plant opened in 2017, it has supplied Daily's^®Premium Meats with pork bellies, too.

Daily's^®Premium Meats remains committed to producing premium bacon products using raw materials from the Seaboard Foods connected food system. And just as the John R. Daily Co. offered premium ham and sausage many years ago, these products are now part of the Daily's^®Premium Meats product line in addition to its premium bacon products.