MOULTRIE, Ga. — Local and corporate dignitaries celebrated an expansion of National Beef Monday with a groundbreaking for a 40,000-square-foot addition to the meat processor’s Moultrie plant.

“This expansion we’re about to undertake will transform this facility into one of the premium consumer-ready facilities in the country,” National Beef CEO and President Tim Klein said during the ceremony.

The expansion is expected to add 100 jobs to the 300 people already employed there, company officials said. The work force numbered 450 at its peak in 2013.

Klein mentioned “lean times” that started that year, when Wal-Mart did not renew its contract for meat from the company. “But you stayed with us,” he gratefully told representatives of plant employees as well as leaders of the community.

Hiring is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2018, with the new part of the plant to come on-line in the fourth quarter.

This expansion will involve an investment of more than $30 million to include a physical plant expansion as well as new processing and packaging equipment, David Davidson, vice president of case ready operations, told The Observer when the expansion was announced two weeks ago.

Darrell Moore, president of the Moultrie-Colquitt County Development Authority, recounted the history of meat packing in Colquitt County. Moultrie Packing Company — opened in 1914 and was bought by Swift and Co. in 1917 — is responsible for the mascot of the high school football team, the Colquitt County Packers, he said. Swift and Co. employed more than 700 people at its peak in the 1950s.

Swift and Co. was bought out by Premium Pork, which eventually closed the plant in 1996, and Moore said economic development officials immediately started trying to market the facility with little success.

He said they were trying to get a hamburger plant to expand there from out of town in 1999, but the company kept putting them off. When he asked them why, they told him they were watching a competitor that was considering a move to Middle Florida. They didn’t want to act until they saw what the competitor was going to do. He asked who the competitor was, and they said, “Farmland-National Beef.”

“Thirty minutes later I was on the phone with Farmland-National Beef,” Moore said.

The facility opened in 2001, the first beneficiary of the state’s One Georgia EDGE Grant, which continues to use proceeds from the tobacco settlement of the late 1990s to help create jobs throughout the state.

“Moultrie and Colquitt County definitely got the right company,” Moore said. “… I know National Beef is committed to Moultrie. I know we’re committed to National Beef. I only hope they’re here for 82 years like the first one (Swift and Co.).”