Nov. 11, 2025

A third-generation family business that specializes in traditional Taiwanese pork products will start work this week on a new Sioux Falls headquarters.

Formosa Food Company Inc. is moving and expanding its operation from northwest Iowa, where it has been in business since 1983. The company will break ground Thursday on 8 acres zoned for heavy industrial use at 3100 N. Bahnson Ave., not far from Gage Brothers Concrete Products.

The business is led by sisters Jennifer and Heather Shih, who grew up in Hull, Iowa, left for college and each decided to return to help run the business.

“We come from a traditional Taiwanese family — my dad was the oldest son of five kids, and our paternal grandparents started it in Taiwan, and Dad decided to look into the United States and found an interest for this product,” said Jennifer, the oldest of three daughters.

“They were thinking about successors and the next stage … and just really wanted me to help.”

She attended the University of Iowa and came back to the business in 2004 “just wearing a number of hats and always staying involved. … I was basically HR, QC and every single department you can think of.”

Heather, who is 18 years younger than Jennifer, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and moved back five years ago.

“Business was good, and I got married and had little ones, and it was just getting a little harder to juggle, so I asked Heather if she’d be willing to come back and continue this family business with me,” Jennifer said. “We have a close relationship and … she did it for her sister and came back, and life has gotten easier for me because now Heather is taking on a lot of the roles.”

Their parents came to the U.S. with two suitcases — their mother was the head of sales and packaging operations while their father ran the processing side.

“In Taiwan, he grew up learning everything from his parents, and I believe there was a cousin who came to America and noticed there wasn’t (anyone making) the pork product we wholesale, and my dad was the only sibling who knew how to cook and make it,” Heather Shih said. “Our grandparents told him it would be a good idea to get his foot in the market since there was no one else.”

The family legend — which they don’t doubt could be true —  is that the Shihs saw a picture of a pig on a map over the state of Iowa and chose to start the business there because of it, she said.

Their parents have mostly retired, and the sisters now are the owners of the business.

“I’m still learning a lot and have learned a lot over the years,” Heather said. “I think hopefully we’ve proven and shown we have a good work ethic, and he’s been able to slowly step away.”

Formosa Food Company specializes in pork sung and pork fu, which the Shihs describe as a traditional Taiwanese comfort food.

“People describe our product like pork cotton candy,” Heather said.

Pork fu is a juicier, stringier product that’s shredded, combined with dry ingredients and cooked on high fire for two hours until dried out. Pork Sung is cooked for four hours, so “when you eat it, it crumbles in your mouth like cotton candy,” Heather said. “The best part about running this business is when you go out and meet other Asian families. … The kids always know what this product is because it’s handed down from parents and grandparents.”

The products are used as snacks or in bakery items, put on bread or pastries.

“A popular breakfast food is rice porridge, and they put it on top, and it melts into the rice porridge,” Heather said.

The products are distributed across the U.S.

“There’s a big market in California, the West Coast,” Jennifer said. “Ranch 99 (an Asian grocery chain) started with one store — Mom and Dad got their foot in the door and brought the product to them to take a look — and they’ve grown so much they have stores all over the West Coast. We have distributors across the U.S. who distribute to Asian grocery stores and supermarkets, and we have bakeries that buy directly from us.”

In Sioux Falls, Formosa Food sells directly to Fresh Asian Market at 824 E. Rice St., and the sisters said they think the products are in other stores here through distributors.

They’re currently operating out of two facilities in northwest Iowa that are 15 miles apart — a kill facility that once was used for beef and a processing center in Hull that was a former furniture building.

“They’ve served their purpose, but everything was very manual and very labor-intensive, so the goal is a new building and better efficiency,” Jennifer said.

The new building will be about 40,000 square feet and entirely enclosed, which combined with a significant investment in HVAC for air flow inside will limit concerns about odor, the sisters said.

“Even the delivery truck is enclosed,” Heather said. “There’s very limited activity outdoors, only trucks coming in and out of a garage, but the garage is enclosed and everything happens (inside). They’re working heavily on the HVAC system to have as much air-flow circulation as possible to avoid lingering odors (inside the plant).”

The business processes an average of 40 hogs per day and is hoping to do about 50 in Sioux Falls to start. In contrast, Smithfield Foods processes about 20,000 hogs per day in Sioux Falls.

The plan is to open in the spring of 2027.

“We’ve been really fortunate with our current distributors; there’s already a demand we’re not meeting,” Heather said. “The demand is there with the existing population of customers, and the hope is to continue marketing to different communities, other Asian populations or ethnicities, and I’m sure the demand will be there.”

The sisters estimate that they will need 50 to 55 people to run the operation.

“Realistically, Heather and I are accustomed to being hands-on with limited resources, so when we start at this new facility, a lot of it is going to be a learning experience,” Jennifer said. “We’re building it to accommodate possibly two shifts, but that most likely would not be until later on down the road.”

They also plan to continue selling a limited product lineup directly to consumers through the Formosa website, including jerky, sausages and cuttlefish.

The sisters said they grew up coming to Sioux Falls and were impressed by the city’s growth.

“We’re familiar with Sioux Falls and the area, and we’re fortunate they were very welcoming and open,” Heather said. “It’s not so far that we lose a lot of our suppliers and relationships. We’re going to be able to continue that, especially our hogs. They easily can supply to Sioux Falls.”

When the Sioux Falls Development Foundation learned that the business was looking for land, vice president of economic development Dean Dziedzic also reached out Sioux Metro Growth Alliance so Formosa Food could explore all its options, he said.

“It’s meat processing, but when we think of meat processing, we think of it on an extremely large scale of thousands of hogs a day. This is not that,” he said. “It’s all enclosed, so it’s not what we think of when we think of pork processing. It’s a more niche industry, but it fits for the zoning where they’re going with heavy industrial.”

The project also looked at other metro-area communities, said Tyler Tordsen, president and CEO of Sioux Metro Growth Alliance.

“It was many months of showcasing the region … and ultimately they were really interested in being in the Sioux Falls city limits. What I love about them is they cared about finding the right site, the right vision for the future but also talked about what are the people like, the schools, the community, because they hope longtime employees will come with them and they want to hire new people and retain. So they were thinking of the whole picture,” he said.

“It was a fun process. We learned a lot about them and are excited to get them to make the leap and the next generation of leadership in their family business.”

Formosa Food is “a very successful company that saw great opportunity to expand and grow in a large metro that’s able to service their needs through the expanding workforce and growth they anticipate,” Dziedzic said. “They’re very, very great to work with, very accommodating; they love Sioux Falls and love the opportunity to expand in a larger community.”

A groundbreaking will be held at the site at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 13.