This year’s MEAT+POULTRY Operations Executive of the Year, Rick Sappington, vice president and general manager at Seaboard Foods, Guymon, Okla., approaches life with a strong work ethic and honesty. That honesty and work ethic, along with an innate aptitude for mechanics and electronics propelled him through multiple phases of his career and into his current position with Seaboard Foods.

The journey

After graduating from high school in Spearville, Kan., Sappington attended Dodge City Community College and received a degree in Automotive and Diesel Technology. Sappington then worked for a Chevrolet dealership as a technician before moving on to work at Caterpillar as a technician. At age 21, he decided to move on from there, and found himself at the Cargill beef plant in Dodge City, Kan., applying for a position with the facility’s maintenance team.

During the application process at Cargill, Sappington interviewed with the engineer who had him take a test for the maintenance team opening. The engineer told Sappington he had the highest score he’d ever seen. Sappington was hired to the ASRS (automated storage and retrieval system) programming team. He was asked to take another test, for electrical, and again achieved a high score.

“I went to electricity and really liked it,” Sappington said. “I had zero background in it, but I really enjoyed it.”

He enjoyed it enough that in 1996 he left Cargill and went to work for Young Electric in Wichita, Kan., running multiple crews for the company. While at Young, Corey and John Young mentored Sappington and helped shape the way he still approaches work today.

He worked at Young Electric for a year. During that time, the Cargill facility hired Young Electric as a full-time, on-site crew, and Sappington was nominated to be the leader on that crew. He worked in that role for a year and then went back to work for Cargill full time, then went to work at National Beef before moving to Seaboard’s pork processing plant in Guymon as an electrician in February of 2001.

Seaboard wasted no time recognizing his work ethic and talent.

“Within about six months, I was promoted to supervisor on the day shift,” he said.

Seaboard promoted him again, this time to general maintenance supervisor on the night shift. He spent several years on the night shift in that position.

“I finally made it to days,” Sappington said. “I was on days for about a week and got promoted to superintendent and went back to nights.”

After roughly two years back on the night shift, Sappington made it back to the day shift, then the plant engineer left. In the interim of hiring a new plant engineer, Sappington was asked to cover projects and instrumentation, and all the electrical for the facility.

“So, I broke away from maintenance and started a whole new group with automation and electrical and taking care of all the projects with the plant,” Sappington said. “I did that for a few years while they were looking for a new engineer. I was doing engineering and still my old job for about a year, and then they finally said, ‘Hey, just take it all over.’”

Sappington spent a year as operations manager/plant engineer. Once Seaboard hired an engineer, he moved to the plant manager position in 2019. In 2022, Seaboard Foods promoted Sappington, now 49, to his current role as vice president and general manager.

Sappington works hard mentoring others, following the example of those who mentored him throughout his career. (Source: Mike Collins/Collins Media & Design)

Early lessons

Sappington developed his ability to move around from job to job and place to place growing up. His father worked for IBP and then Swift for roughly 20 years and moved the family around often.

“By the time I graduated, I think I moved like 24 times,” Sappington said. “He believed in wherever the company wanted to send him, he would go, never told them no. If he was going to be somewhere longer than six months, then he would move the family. That’s just how life was.”

While Sappington didn’t find this ideal, it taught him how to adapt to new people and new environments at a young age, something he’s used to his advantage throughout his career. It also exposed him to the different ways things are done in different places and cultures.

“There’s little differences about location and people, so you get a different setting and perspective of different things,” he said.

The people skills Sappington learned from his experiences have given him the ability to build relationships quickly and to both manage others and learn from those that mentored him throughout his career. Sappington has had people important to his success along the way to help him fine tune his natural abilities and steer him toward his successes.

Early on at Cargill, a planning engineer, Neil Sheldon, helped Sappington, in his early 20s, discover how much he was truly capable of accomplishing.

“He really pushed me to deliver more than what I was probably giving them at the time,” Sappington said.

Another important mentor to Sappington came during his tenure as the plant engineer at Seaboard. At that time, Sappington worked for the vice president of operations, Marty Hast. Along with plant manager Stan Scott, Hast gave Sappington opportunities to do new things and manage complete projects with a team he put together. He let Sappington make decisions and make mistakes and have successes.

“He gave me a lot of different opportunities,” Sappington said. “He moved me over to all projects, and I pushed for the automation and instrumentation group. I started that group because he gave me the opportunity to go do it.”

He added, “He let me learn at a different pace. He was always easy going and easy to work with.”

During that time, Sappington and his team installed a bank of split saws, as well as a CO₂ stunning system as two of their early projects.

“Marty allowing us to do that, taking the chance, it was impactful,” Sappington said. “The automation team now is way more advanced because of that. One hundred percent of that group can now take a remote that controls a five-axis robot and they can control it and make changes on the fly to the program. That’s what that has evolved into today. The biggest thing I have taken away from that experience, is making sure I give my team that same kind of freedom and experience.”

Managing people

Sappington offers the same freedoms and opportunities to those who report to him now that he received from his mentors throughout his career. He hired Reinaldo Gonzalez as the first member of a CI (continuous improvement) team at the plant. Gonzalez spent a year on the CI team before Sappington moved him to superintendent of the Food Safety and Quality Assurance (FSQA) department to challenge him and give him some different experience.

“He had to make decisions on the fly as part of the operation,” Sappington said.

Gonzalez worked in FSQA for a little over a year, then Sappington brought him back into operations. Today, Gonzalez is the senior director of operations and Sappington’s right-hand man. The CI team has grown and evolved.

“They’re a much larger group now and much smarter than Reinaldo and me,” Sappington said. “So, we got to be able to give those guys in that group the same kind of opportunities, have them take some risk, let them take some chances.”

The most important attributes to Sappington, for himself, for those who work for him, for those he works for and in life, are honesty and trust. He believes those characteristics supersede anything that can be done in a processing plant. Those two things include owning your own mistakes.

“I’d rather you to come to me and tell me, ‘Hey, we messed it up,’” he said. “Well, good. I mean, at least now we know we can learn from it. If you don’t want to admit you made the mistake, you can’t learn and then there’s not going to be trust.”

Sappington also knows that trust and honesty applies to him as well, especially if it means having to tell someone something they might not want to hear. He’s earned that trust from others, both those that report to him and those he reports to, over his 23 years at Seaboard.

“No matter who you are or what position you are, I want an honest person who’s going to be truthful,” he said. “That’s what’s helped me at Seaboard the most. I think because of the relationships I’ve built, most people trust me. If I tell somebody, I believe we can do it, I will spend 24 hours a day if necessary to make it happen. I believe in myself and the team enough that we can do it.”

However, as Sappington’s first mentor at Cargill, Neil Sheldon, encouraged him to dig deeper than he was at the time, Sappington does the same with his team members. But while he challenges them to do more, he also encourages that extra effort be done in manageable ways.

“I would tell you from my perspective and my team would tell you that I push pretty hard with them,” he said. “But when we have conversations about product shows and things of that nature, we just want to look at changing a small part of the process, just a technique of how we do something.

“The beauty of what we do here, and for any type of manufacturing facility, is we can change whatever we want today and if it doesn’t work it’s OK, we have to do it all again tomorrow.”

Looking forward

Like many in the industry today, Sappington sees automation playing a large role, in both Seaboard’s future and in the future of the meat processing industry. While the industry continues to pursue automation, he believes the companies at the forefront of that pursuit will remain dedicated and persevere in their efforts to make it work.

“And I think Seaboard’s one of them,” he said. “That’s why I love my job.”

In Sappington’s 23 years at Seaboard, he’s observed the level of commitment and the way it’s ingrained in the company’s culture. Seaboard and Sappington trust one another. Seaboard trusts Sappington’s judgement and shows it through actions, and Sappington has delivered back to the company.

“They’re willing to take some risk and think about what that means for the future,” Sappington said. “That’s what we’ve built today, and we’ll continue to do that. So hopefully I get to continue being a part of it.”

With the consolidation of today and near past continuing, the number of processors appears to be shrinking. Plants open and refurbish, remodel and add on, but many companies also close plants and move those processes to other facilities that can handle the capacity. Sappington hopes they will all be there in the future but said some meat processing companies face more of a challenge than others.

“The lessons we learned today tell us how we’re going to play tomorrow,” he said. “That to me is the biggest thing in any type of manufacturing. You can tell your team it’s OK to fail. It is. It’s OK to try new stuff. It’s OK that it didn’t work out because tomorrow we have to do it all over again anyway.”