Creighton Brothers marks 100 years in business amid challenging time for egg producers

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Ask any egg producer and they’ll tell you the biggest challenge facing them right now is the highly pathogenic avian influenza and its disruptive effect on flocks, prices and employees.

But Mindy Truex in Kosciusko County has a more circumspect approach. Truex is the president of Creighton Brothers, a Warsaw-based egg producer celebrating its 100th year in business this year. 

Born into the Creighton family, Mindy Truex watched her grandfather Hobart, and then her father Eddie, steer Creighton Brothers LLC from a family farm with 2,500 hens into a vertically integrated egg producer that boasts a flock of over 3 million chickens. 

While the avian flu concerns Truex—just days ago a few of company’s farm houses were in a control zone due to a nearby case—she’s experienced diseases threatening flocks before. That’s along with employee shortages, lean years, changing technologies and now tariffs.

“I’ve always felt like, well, what’s next? What are we going to have to deal with?” Truex said in an interview with Inside Indiana Business. ”All these things are still there: labor [shortages] is still there, disease is still there, the activists are still there. [You’re] trying to take care of your employees the best you can.”

Creighton legacy

Truex’s younger years were spent as an employee of sorts for her family’s business. Counting newly hatched chickens and documenting information about the farm’s cows were among her more memorable tasks.

A rule from her father that the children had to work elsewhere for at least a year saw Truex spend a year on a farm in Washington. But she soon found her way back to the Warsaw area to continue her family’s legacy. Her husband, Ron Truex, is also a longtime Creighton Brothers employee and was the company’s president before Mindy recently took over. 

“I don’t know how to say this, but I was born into it in a different sort of way. It’s just something I was just supposed to do,” Mindy Truex said.  

One of the keys to Creighton Brothers’ longevity was its push towards vertical integration during the early years of the business. 

When Hobart and Russell Creighton started the business in 1925, Creighton Brothers focused more on selling chickens than the eggs they laid. Over the years, Truex said her grandfather and father realized they had better results by bringing more aspects of the farm in-house. 

“Grandpa believed that if there’s something you’re having someone else do, whether that was building your chicken house, hatching your chickens…if you had the opportunity to just start doing it yourself, you did. Because we could be more efficient at it,” Truex recalled.

Creighton Brothers began hatching its own chickens and growing its own corn for chicken feed. Then the company started building its own chicken coops to make sure they were designed precisely the way the family needed them, all while cutting out the proverbial middle man. 

Creighton Brothers has its own processing plants and sells its eggs directly to stores and restaurants. 

It was only in the 21st century that Creighton Brothers stopped hatching its own hens as the sheer number of birds the farm has made it infeasible to handle it in-house. Similarly as technology advanced and coops became more complex, Creighton Brothers now brings in contractors to do that construction. 

But Truex is proud Creighton Brothers grows most of its own feed to support its core egg processing facilities.

“We still farm 10,000 acres and that usually gets us 70-75% of our corn needs for the year, give or take,” said Truex. “And then all that grain is taken to our feed mill, where we make all of our own feed. And we have our own delivery trucks that take it out to the farms. We have all of our own transportation that brings eggs in from the farm to our processing plants.”

More recently Creighton Brothers has added biosecurity measures to guard against the avian flu. The increased cost of production meant the company didn’t make money in 2019-2021, according to Truex. 

But despite those challenges, Truex is still rolling with the punches—now with 100 years of institutional knowledge to draw on.

“The more things change, the more things stay the same,” she said. “I guess it’s always going to be something.”