SANTEE – Calhoun County farmer Joe Haigler has great hopes for the state's first-of-its-kind peanut-shelling plant.
Ground was broken Nov. 16 on the Premium Peanut plant in Santee.
“It will allow the farmer to take his raw product to the next level and be able to get some added revenue from his crop,” Haigler said of the plant.
“I have always wanted to see it happen and it has finally come to fruition,” he said.
Premium Peanut is building its shelling facility in the 1,324-acre South Carolina Gateway Logistics Park in Santee on property it has purchased from DP World Americas, a subsidiary of Dubai World.
Haigler, along with other local growers like Danny Mixon, helped develop the Palmetto Peanut buying point in Cameron in 2005.
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“We had to have a place to sell peanuts and we built a facility to do that,” Haigler said. “I never thought a shelling plant would come and we always dreamed about it.”
Haigler thinks the shelling plant will prompt more farmers to grow peanuts.
“It is a good crop. It benefits the other crops that you grow. It is a good rotation crop,” he said.
Premium Peanut is building its own facilities. It plans to invest $27.5 million in buildings and $36.8 million in equipment in Orangeburg County over the next five years.
The company plans to bring 130 new jobs to Orangeburg County.
The company's Santee campus will include a peanut seed treatment facility, to be constructed by March 2023, and the shelling facility. There’s a potential for future expansion.
The shelling plant is currently in the design and planning phase and will most likely not open in 2023. An exact timeline for the shelling plant's opening is uncertain at this time, company officials say.
“We are trying to make sure we do it right,” Premium Peanut Director of Sales and Industry Relations Rachel Santos said.
Premium Peanut President and CEO Karl Zimmer acknowledged the project has perhaps taken a little longer than originally anticipated.
“We are glad to be here and we are glad to see the progress,” he said. “We have made some progress, but now it is really going to accelerate. We are going to get moving on grading the land here, very quickly pouring the concrete and getting the buildings up.”
Premium Peanut was founded in 2014. The company began shelling peanuts in 2016 with about 140,000 tons in shelling capacity at its Douglas, Georgia, facility.
The company has grown to a plant capacity of 300,000 tons, which is about 10% of the nation's peanut crop.
It has also operated an oil mill since 2018 in Georgia.
The company's customers include major snack, candy and peanut butter manufacturers domestically, as well as customers in more than 30 countries around the world.
Premium Peanut is a grower-owned company with over 400 grower-owners in Georgia and South Carolina.
Zimmer said over 30,000 shares in the company have been sold to peanut growers in South Carolina.
“We work every day to create value for our growers and those growers are now South Carolinians and very, very proud of that,” he said.
As part of its arrival in Orangeburg County, Premium Peanut has received a 30-year fee-in-lieu of taxes incentive.
It’s also been placed in a multicounty industrial park with Dorchester County. A multicounty industrial park is an incentive mechanism and is not a physical park. The company also will receive job development tax credits.
