In 1933 Bronislaw and Katarzyna Jurgielewicz founded one of the first duck farms in the United States in Long Island, NY. Bronislaw and Katarzyna’s sons, three brothers, took over the farm. One of those brothers was Joe Jurgielewicz Sr., who eventually sold his shares of the farm and retired.

“During that time my father, ‘Doctor Joe’ [Joe Jurgielewicz II], was in veterinary school at Cornell University and after he graduated, he had duck in his blood,” said Joey Jurgielewicz III, head of business development at Joe Jurgielewicz & Son LTD (JJS Duck), Hamburg, Pa. “The only thing he wanted to do was become a duck farmer again. So that’s how he and my grandfather restarted the Jurgielewicz farm here in Pennsylvania.”

Always a family business, the current generation includes Jim Jurgielewicz (Doctor Jim), DVM, president; Joey Jurgielewicz III, head of business development and Michael Jurgielewicz, business development and marketing.

Niche poultry processing

The JJS slaughter facility covers 30,000 square feet after multiple expansions over the years, with the latest occurring in September 2023 that nearly doubled capacity. The Hamburg facility employs about 250 people with a cut-up plant and distribution center about 20 minutes away in Leesport, Pa. The two locations can process 35,000 ducks (250,000 lbs) a day in one shift equaling about 9 million ducks a year. With another plant in Indiana, the company processes about 15 million ducks a year.

Ducks arrive at the JJS slaughter facility like most poultry facilities, by truck. The birds walk off the trailer and employees hang them by hand after which they go through a Marel water bath electric stunner. Necks are cut by hand with precision to meet the strict requirements of the heavy Asian trade and markets.

The ducks are checked for insensibility as they move through the bleed line on their way to the scalder. Once weighed, ducks move to the customized in-house drum pickers. With the help of a machine shop and a computer programmer, JJS set up the standard poultry feather pickers to water temperatures and weights per drum to match the specifications for JJS ducks. The process is similar but not exactly like the techniques and equipment used to process traditional poultry.

“We do have to go get a lot of chicken and turkey equipment retrofitted to our own needs,” Joey Jurgielewicz said. “When my dad started, he would go to old plants that were closing down, to their auctions, and buy their scalders or their feather equipment and then bring it back here with my grandfather and they’d have to work on it for days and test it. They’d change this feather picker out and stuff like that. And so that’s kind of how we got started with some of our own custom equipment.”

Ducks are waterfowl, which makes the nature of their feathers different. Once the birds pass through the drum pickers to remove the feathers, some down feathers and pinned feathers remain. Before evisceration, the carcasses receive a hot wax coating and then go through a cool water bath before wax removal. Each carcass goes through the waxing process three times to ensure all the feathers are removed.

Once waxed carcasses move from the slaughter line to one of three, federally inspected, evisceration lines. Each team member on a line has one job with 90% of evisceration done by hand and every part of the duck is used. The birds then move through an inline chill for about an hour to lower temperatures from roughly 100°F to approximately 30°F. Some product will then be packaged, depending on the style, and some will go to the Leesport facility for cut up and distribution. JJS uses a typical cone type cut up, because knife skills are different relative to duck.

From left: Joey Jurgielewicz and brother Jim Jurgielewicz, DVM, operate the family business along with their brother Michael Jurgielewicz, in California. (Source: Bob Sims/Sosland Publishing Co.)

Supply chain

JJS is vertically integrated, for the most part. The company operates its own breeder program picking up its own eggs and hatching them. Contract growers raise most of the ducks, although there are still family farms personally owned by Jurgielewicz family members.

“Those contract growers still have to go by our standards of raising ducks, so we’ll have people there about three times a week,” Jurgielewicz said. “Different grower techs still use our formula, so they have to use our blueprint of the duck house design, feed, etc. It’s like a franchise kind of model.”

He added, “The only thing we don’t do is feed. We’ve left that to the experts.”

The hatchery is on the same grounds as the Hamburg facility and eggs come from breeder ducks from within five miles of the hatchery to as far as Maryland and upstate New York.

Originally the breeding was onsite along with the processing facility and hatchery in Hamburg, but to protect themselves from avian influenza and enhance biosecurity, JJS protected the ducks with the move to off-site breeding.

“That was our internal insurance policy to make sure that we’re protected enough, bio secure enough and don’t have any cross contamination and keep everything safe,” Jurgielewicz said.

JJS has kept the genetics of its ducks the same as the original ducks the first generation raised in Long Island 91 years ago. Jurgielewicz explained the importance of the skin-to-meat ratio in the ducks JJS produces. Many poultry breeders began to steer away from fattier birds in the 1980s to appeal to demand for leaner meats from consumers, but JJS made it a point to keep its ducks the same.

“We did that for two different reasons,” Jurgielewicz said. “It’s for our Asian trade. When they barbecue it, one of the most important parts is the skin quality. When you see ducks hanging in an Asian barbecue in Philadelphia or San Francisco, they want to make sure that skin is absolutely perfect, and you have to have that thicker skin for the cooking technique. The other reason is flavor. We definitely invest a lot in our ducks to make sure that we have this perfect meat-to-fat ratio.”

JJS keeps a geneticist on staff who works with universities throughout the United States to refine its duck genetics with the hopes of eventually getting duck into the curriculum as part of college poultry science programs. The company also receives great research back from the work.

Doing duck business

JJS does about 75% of its business in foodservice. Customers include Asian barbecue shops and restaurants, Michelin star restaurants and some of the best restaurants in the world, Jurgielewicz said. But the processor’s biggest growth opportunity is in the retail channel. The team at JJS, led by Jurgielewicz, works hard to get duck into the mainstream.

“That’s one of my main jobs is to really promote duck for people to cook at home,” he said.

The company does maintain partnerships with some independent and larger retail chains in Pennsylvania and has seen success at getting retailers to take a risk on duck and see the potential sales. Often, duck gets buried or overlooked in the shuffle of chicken and turkey.

“A lot of times sales are a little tougher on retail for us just because the person that wants to have duck, they have to know they want it that day and where to find it,” Jurgielewicz said. “They’re not going to stumble upon it in the case.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, JJS operated a small mail order business, but after COVID, the mail order channel has picked up significantly — not only directly to retail customers’ homes, but also direct to restaurants around the country in areas that JJS doesn’t have distribution.

Marketing starts at the grassroots level. JJS usually goes right to the proprietor of the restaurant or the chef to sample duck with them and work to get its duck on the menu. From there, a trickle-down effect usually occurs that flows from the top down. Jurgielewicz said JJS has seen great success with this method.

“A lot of our Michelin star restaurants in New York City, you could look at Jean-George’s, Daniel Boulud, they use our duck,” Jurgielewicz said. “Eventually, I call them the alumni that work for them, they experience our duck and go anywhere, open a new restaurant in new cities and use our ducks.”

JJS also markets to new customers with its duck food truck, serving items including a duck bratwurst (currently co-packed, but the company does want to get cook operations into the Hamburg facility), duck fat french fries and a duck sandwich.

Also, the company recently teamed up with Petty’s Garage to sponsor Thad Moffitt, Richard Petty’s grandson and his No. 46 truck in the Craftsman Truck Series. The exposure has introduced the niche product to a new segment of the United States — a segment with a passion for grilling and hunting.

“We were cooking duck bratwurst at the Daytona 500 and the response was absolutely amazing,” Jurgielewicz said. People were saying, ‘I forgot how good it is,’ or, ‘I’ve never had duck before, where can I buy this?’ It was very promising.”

Much of the equipment used to process the ducks at JJS was originally for other poultry species that JJS modified for duck specific processing. (Source: Bob Sims/Sosland Publishing Co.)

Duck done right

JJS sees the same kind of turnover that any poultry plant does, but also works with a core group of solid, reliable and loyal employees, many of whom have been working for the company almost as long as Joey Jurgielewicz has been alive.

At 7:45 each morning department heads meet with their teams to discuss worker and food safety, but before an employee even sees the floor, they receive an entire history of the farm and company, so they grasp their responsibilities and why they are important to the end customer.

“We are extremely sales and client focused,” Jurgielewicz said. “And that goes down from the training of every employee to understand what they do and why they do it with the safety of themselves and food safety top of mind.”

JJS believes in a sales and market driven approach to production, everything involved with processing front to back. How many eggs it hatches, how the grow out is handled, how the ducks get cut and how packaging happens and looks, all go back to what the market and customers demand.

The company feels lucky it has a market for every single part of the duck. The Asian markets often purchase whole ducks, and like other poultries, duck parts are popular, including the feet, and duck feathers are bailed and sold to a marketplace for making furniture and stuffed products with a heavier material. Down feathers are different, softer and separated from the other feathers for comforters, pillows and ski jackets.

JJS created a tube running from the drum pickers to a separate building where the feathers get washed and dried. With its generations of farmer ingenuity, the Jurgielewicz family procured textile company equipment, reworked and modified it to serve their purposes. In addition to the washing and drying of feathers, they created machines and equipment to separate the down before bailing.

Through the years in business, with multiple veterinarians in the family, the thing the Jurgielewicz family understands and believes in most is animal welfare. A happy duck is a tasty duck.

“To bring it to the human level, depending on what kind of hotel you stay at, if it’s a one-star hotel or a five-star hotel, when you leave that place the next morning, you’re definitely going to feel different,” Jurgielewicz said. “So, we do the same with our ducks.”

It starts with feed quality, air quality, water quality for drinking and water for natural preening, and bedding. JJS takes it further with human touch, walking with ducks and checking on them two to three times a day and performing hands-on veterinary care rather than monitoring them with remote cameras.

“We constantly look and recognize and respect Mother Nature, you could say, on that end of understanding that we’re dealing with a live animal,” Jurgielewicz said. “It’s here to raise and then to feed ourselves, our families and whoever else around the world, and it truly is very important to us. It’s not just a factory.”