SC chicken plant has seen shutdowns, furloughs after ‘equipment failure’
House of Raeford, a North Carolina-based chicken plant with operations across the Southeast, has temporarily furloughed workers in Williamsburg County, S.C., as a result of “unforeseen equipment failure” at its plant.
The company, which is one of Williamsburg County’s top employers, has been experiencing “on and off shutdowns of operations” at the Hemingway, S.C., plant, it told the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce (DEW) in a letter submitted Nov. 24, 2025. The company told DEW it anticipated that approximately 216 employees at the plant would be impacted.
“At this time, we cannot definitively determine whether the shutdown will be short-term or extend into long-term, and we are working to assess the full extent of the repair timeline,” the company wrote in a notification letter to DEW, which is required of companies when laying off or furloughing workers.
The state’s employment and workforce department typically requires companies that have more than 100 employees to give a warning to workers and the state before layoffs or furloughs happen.
“Since we were not certain about the amount of time it would take to complete the maintenance, we decided to inform the SC Department of Employment and Workforce,” Dave Witter, a company spokesperson, told The State in an email.
Witter said the production facility had encountered unexpected maintenance issues that needed immediate attention. The temporary shutdown has impacted production of the company’s cooked products, Witter said in an email, but the plant’s mechanically separated chicken department has continued to operate.
“From the beginning, we saw this as a temporary halt in production. In fact, we are hopeful that the ready-to-cook operation will be running again next week and employees will be back to work,” Witter said Tuesday.
House of Raeford is in the top 20 largest employers in Williamsburg County, a rural county of around 30,000 people not far from the state’s coast. The company employs manufacturing workers across the state including in West Columbia and Greenville. Witter said the layoffs in Williamsburg have not impacted other company locations.
