Manea's Meats Breaks Ground On Major Expansion Project

SAUK RAPIDS (WJON News) -- Manea's Meats has broken ground on a major expansion project in downtown Sauk Rapids.

They are adding 12,000 square feet of production and storage space to their current building. The new space will be on the east side of the property creating an L-shaped building. The addition will be in the same style as their current building.

Owner Juan Castellanos says they've outgrown their current production facility as they continue to add more customers.

They provide a lot of meat products for a number of grocery stores like Coborn's, Cashwise, and Cub Foods.

So if you go into Coborn's, for example, you're going to see most of the smoked products come out of here, there are very few items that you'll see that we don't make. We do everything from bacon to hotdogs, to meat sticks, you name it.

The meats are mostly sold under the store brand name like "Four Brothers", but if you look closely Castellanos says you will find a small label with their name on it. With the help of J & B in St. Michael, their meat products are distributed to grocery stores in nine states.

Castellanos says besides making a majority of the meat products for grocery stores in nine states, you may have also sampled their products if you've been to Target Field, Allianz Field, or U.S. Bank Stadium recently.

At U.S. Bank Stadium they just had the Taylor Swift concert last weekend so they sold quite a bit of stuff. We make the hotdogs for their corndogs.

The meats at the stadiums aren't obvious that they are from Manea's Meats, but there is usually some small logo on their products.

On any given day Manea's Meats has 30 to 40 different products being made.

Right now they have 82 employees and they expect to add 15 to 20 new employees once the expansion is done.

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Work on the new building will begin on July 10th and will take about eight months to complete.

Manea's Meats has been in downtown Sauk Rapids for 48 years. Juan Castellanos is the second generation in his family to run the business, he says the third and fourth generations are also a part of the operations.

Sauk Rapids City Administrator Ross Olson says the expansion project is incredibly important to the city.

Going back 20 years when we were locating businesses for the Sauk Rapids bridge project, it was important that Manea's stay in our downtown as an anchor. When we heard they wanted to expand, there was no way we were going to walk away.