Feb. 20—SHANNON — As a worker moves a tub of meat over to the slicer, Tommie Harris is nearby, surveying the rest of the room.

Harris, the plant manager of the Raybern's plant in the Tupelo-Lee Industrial Park South, is in the sandwich-making and wrapping room, which has five production lines making a variety of sandwiches that will be frozen and shipped to retailers across the country, including Walmart, Sam's, Costco, Kroger, Dollar General and convenience stores.

Raybern's has been making frozen deli sandwiches since 1978, and it's Philly cheesesteak is the most popular selling cheesesteak in the country the company said.

"That's one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment we have," Harris said, nodding to the high-speed slicer, which takes slabs of meat and cuts them into portions that roll onto an assembly line and are soon used for a sandwich.

Workers on both sides of the conveyor belt of each line quickly fill bread with cheese and meat and wrap them, to the tune of nearly 600,000 sandwiches a week.

But Harris needs more workers.

"I'd love to be making about 800,000 sandwiches a week," he said. "But I don't have enough people."

While the plant employs some 300 workers, two-thirds of whom are full-time, it's still not enough.

"While we like to roll over those part-timers to full-time," Harris said. "That said, we still could use another 40-50 workers, based on the projections the next two to three years."

Experienced manager

Harris is no stranger to the food industry, having worked in it for nearly 25 years. He was the first Mississippi employee Raybern's hired in 2015 when it moved its sandwich operations from California.

No doubt, they liked his knowledge of the area and the facility which had been operated by Sara Lee. The plant had been a Bryan Foods plant since 1997, making cocktail sausages and sausages. But parent company Sara Lee closed the plant in March 2012, putting the last 155 workers out of work.

Harris was among them.

"I was the first plant manager for Sara Lee here," he said. "When Raybern's asked me to come aboard, I was ready."

The 146,000-square-foot plant still has room to expand. There's room to add another production line or two, and there's space other parts of the plant available for additional equipment if needed.

"We're utilizing about 80% of the facility," he said.

Harris thinks an expansion is inevitable based on the demand for Raybern's sandwiches. And the plant in Shannon is the company's only sandwich-making facility.

But finding enough help is the biggest issue, a problem that Raybern's doesn't face alone.

"We're seeing the same challenges any other manufacturer has seen," he said. "But we're sticking with our long-term strategy. We're a good place to work, and we'll give you as much or a career as you want. We're seeing challenges, but we're also seeing successes that we think works."

Among the strategies Raybern's is using is having a somewhat flexible schedule for its employees.

"We started having basically a one-shift — kind of a cookie-cutter 6 to 4 shift," he said. "But what we've seen over the past year or so is that people are more diverse in what they're looking for. So our schedule has evolved a bit."

While the plant still has a 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift, a partial second shift has been added to the bakery department. It's a 1:30 p.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. shift. The plant also has a "three-12" shift in which an employee works three 12-hour days. That shift is available Monday-Wednesday or Thursday-Saturday.

"They work 36 hours, but they get paid for 40, so we make sure everybody who's full-time is paid for 40," Harris said. "If you want to compete for the labor that's out there, it's what you have to do, which is provide some flexibility in the schedules."

Harris said a wide range of positions are available for job applicants, from general housekeeping to operating some of the most sophisticated equipment in the food industry.

"We have entry level positions, machine operators, supervising positions, you name it," Harris said. "Pretty much if there's somebody out there looking for a job, we'll find a place for you."

Making the sandwiches

Raybern's is vertically integrated, which means its supply chain is kept mostly in house. The entire sandwich-making process is all done under one roof, as the company mixes its own dough, bakes it, cooks its own meat, slices cheese, makes its own sauces, assembles the sandwiches, packages the sandwiches and sends them out, all in one location.

The bakery is the warmest part of the plant, one of three main areas of the sprawling facility. There, a giant vat holding 70,000 pounds of flour is filled three times a week as Raybern's bakery workers mix, proof and bake the rolls that the production team uses nearby.

Raybern's makes a variety of bread including white, wheat, honey wheat and pretzel.

"We go through about 140,000 pieces of bread a day," Harris said.

It takes about two days to assemble a sandwich, from the time when the bread is first made to being wrapped and placed in a box to be frozen in the vast deep freezer that's kept at 10 degrees below zero.

"We have a full meat processing area where we bring in raw meat, process it, cook it and send it over to assembly," Harris said. The plant goes though about 15,000 pounds of meat each day.

Raybern's has about 40 sandwiches of varying sizes made from 15 different sandwiches from chicken to pulled pork to beef to meatballs. While most of the sandwiches are labeled Raybern's, the plant does make some private label sandwiches for Walmart. And the plant recently began making a special chicken salad sandwich for Dollar General.

Raybern's has plenty of customers and is ready to take on more.

"We can probably sell as many sandwiches as we could make if I had the personnel," Harris said. "We're working on it."

dennis.seid@djournal.com