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Cocoa processing plant to bring up to 1,000 jobs to Commerce
COMMERCE — Commerce leaders are celebrating the sweet smell of success — the smell of processed cocoa and coffee beans — that will soon fill the town’s Industrial Park.
The Commerce Economic Development Corporation (CEDC) hosted community, county and state leaders as well as representatives of the Premium Cocoa Corporation Thursday to announce a new cocoa processing plant that will be built in the city’s Industrial Park.
Premium executives said the plant, which will import cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast, will initially employ between 350 and 500 workers. Further expansion into cocoa byproduct processing and coffee processing will push the employment figure above 1,000 newly created jobs by 2013.
Premium president Gabriel Nguessan said the plant’s groundbreaking will be within 120 days, followed by two to three months to install equipment and he hopes to begin processing by early 2010.
“I believe we can have the first shift running by February. We already have a huge demand from 24 countries. What we need is quality and that is what locating here in Texas will allow us to have,” Nguessan said. “This is part of a bigger plan for us. We want to have a whole industrial complex here where we are processing the byproduct into fertilizer and cocoa oil. By 2013 we want to move into coffee processing as well.”
Premium board of directors’ chairperson Betty Mitchell said she was honored to be in Commerce. “We’ve been working on this for years and we’re proud to have gotten this accomplished,” she said. “There is a high demand for cocoa. It’s the new gold; this is a growth industry.”
CEDC director Jeanette Burnett said the plant is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from many different agencies. “We worked on this for 18 months and I’m proud it has happened. (Premium) had a lot of opportunities to go elsewhere, but the openness of the community, the university, the State of Texas has led them to agree to come to Commerce. Premium Cocoa Company will be a part of Commerce, Texas, for a long time, God willing,” she said.
Company vice-president Pascol Yao explained that the company will import the cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast to the shipping port at Beaumont; the beans will then be transported to Commerce for processing. Yao said that the openness of Commerce and Texas officials made the city a good fit for their plans, and that the assurances from Texas A&M-Commerce; of agricultural partnership and research made the decision a good one. “We are also going to be working with the university to find natural insecticides to kill insects that eat the trees,” Yao added.
A&M-Commerce; president Dan Jones said the partnership will also benefit the university. “We have world class agricultural researchers that can be tapped. This will open up great research opportunities for us,” he said.
According to Dick Latson, with CEDC, the development corporation will build the plant and then lease it back to Premium. The details of the agreement have not been released as final contracts have not been signed.
An investor from the Ivory Coast, Jean N’Dory, speaking through an interpreter, said there are agricultural cooperatives in the Ivory Coast “standing ready to get this project started. With this agreement we can fight against third world poverty. I came here to say, let’s get together and get this thing done.”
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