Hormel Foods, audited.
25 of ~30 facilities (NA scope)731 dock doors1,566 trailer spots5 rail-served
We core-sampled 25 of ~30 plants and DCs, The 25 audited US plants represent Hormel's 30-plus US production facilities running the Spam, Skippy, and Planters network.
Network size: Hormel Foods corporate Our Locations page: 30+ production facilities in the United States. https://www.hormelfoods.com/careers/career-center/our-locations/ (accessed 2026-06-19; FY2025 10-K, fiscal year ended Oct 26, 2025, reports the owned/leased footprint by state). (2026-06-19)
Public audit. Not affiliated with Hormel Foods. Data from satellite imagery + public records.
We audited Hormel Foods’s yards from satellite.
Click any site for its gate, docks, and drop yards. No badge, no NDA, just what a driver sees.
Hormel Foods’s stack is connected. The yards never were.
Your TMS runs the road. Your WMS runs the building. The yards are the tier between them, and they were never on the network.
Every truck gets re-keyed, re-queued, and re-found at each step. The lost time lives between the steps, which is why no single tool ever fixed it. The audit below is that gap, measured on your real yards.
A real audited site, played gate→dock→exit on the true yard geometry. Switch sites with the picker.
Hormel Fort Smith Plant - Fort Smith AR
Driver rolls past the gate, looks for instructions on where to drop.
Movement durations are honest floors set by yard geometry; the uplift lands on the wait fields (queue + dispatch + secondary checkpoints). “Today” timings reflect the radios-and-clipboards world; “With YardFlow” reflects the protocol acting end-to-end. We may be wrong about parts of this, your actual numbers will tell us where.
What the handoffs cost across your network, and what removing them is worth
Read from satellite + Street View across all 25 facilities. At a comparable network, Primo Brands cut drop-and-hook turns from ~48 to ~24 min. Set your real volumes and margins in the calculator to put a number on it.
What surprised us reading Hormel Foods’s network
Three patterns held across the sites we sampled. None of them show up on a facility list. All of them change how the yard runs.
- 01
Austin MN is 120 acres of Spam. Hormel has been making the same SKU on the same site since 1937.
- 02
5 of the 25 audited sites are rail-served. Inbound pork moves on rail; outbound canned meat ships on trucks.
- 03
1,566 trailer spots across the 25 audited sites. Hormel runs heavy trailer density for shelf-stable CPG.
Turn what you saw into a number for finance
This audit is the evidence. The model is the math. Open the calculator seeded with Hormel Foods’s audited yards, set your real volumes and margins, and it sizes the opportunity to the dollar.
This deep-dive is the evidence behind the /for/hormel-foods memo.
Are these your yards?
Tell us where we got it wrong, or see what 15 minutes of orchestration looks like on your worst site.
We are not asking for a pilot. We are asking for a conversation.
A 30-minute call, direct with Casey. We show you what we found across your yards, you tell us straight where it fits and where it does not. If the call goes well, we talk pilot. If not, you keep the analysis.
None of these times work? Email me at casey@freightroll.com or call or text me at 410-236-7434, and we’ll find one.
Casey Larkin, YardFlow. Jake, our founder, joins when it helps.
