After several months of planning and construction, the Tacketts opened Heartland Catfish Company, a 34,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art, catfish processing plant located on Highway 82 in Itta Bena, MS. This location put the plant right on the major regional highway, with most of the catfish production farms nearby. This new plant utilized the best available fish-processing equipment, along with the latest technology for grading product and monitoring process flow. Heartland Catfish Company’s fundamental goal was to provide the freshest, highest quality catfish products more efficiently than anyone else in the industry. In its first year of operation, Heartland Catfish Company processed 12 million pounds of live catfish.