The sheriff’s office in Grainger County, Tenn., is investigating the theft after shipments from a meat processing facility were loaded onto trucks and never reached their destinations.
Two tractor-trailers picked up some 80,000 pounds of beef from a slaughterhouse in northeastern Tennessee, and then vanished, the authorities said this week.
They can’t figure out where the beef is, but a fake trucking company made off with enough meat to make about 320,000 quarter-pounders, the Grainger County Sheriff’s Office said.
The meat was taken from Southeastern Provision, a processing plant in Bean Station, Tenn., a town nearly 50 miles northeast of Knoxville. It was not clear when exactly the beef was stolen, but the investigation began on Tuesday.
At least two of the customers of the meat processing plant reported that they had not received their shipments, officials said. The two approximately 40,000-pound shipments were to be sent to customers in Kentucky and Michigan, the sheriff’s office said.
The shipments, valued at $350,000, remained missing as of Friday.
Last month, in another headline-grabbing food plunder, 100,000 organic eggs were taken from a distribution trailer in Pennsylvania.
The eggs, which were estimated to be worth $40,000, were stolen at a time when grocery shoppers across the country were finding empty shelves and paying higher prices for eggs. No suspects were identified and the eggs were not recovered.
In November, two trucks with more than 24,000 bottles of tequila brought from Mexico, instead of driving to their destination, a warehouse in Pennsylvania, went to parts unknown.
In Tennessee, the company that was to make the beef deliveries, List Trucking Sales, was a subcontractor that gave false information to the trucking contractor as well as to Southeastern Provision, officials said. The drivers’ identifications were not checked at the time of the pickup, they said.
When the Tennessee-based contractor that coordinated the shipment, MDS Logistics, tried to reach List Trucking Sales, they got no response, officials said.
No genuine business listings or records could be found for List Trucking Sales.
On Friday, no one answered phone calls placed to Southeastern Provision, and the company did not appear to have an online presence.
A meat company operating under that name in the same town has made the news before.
In April 2018, nearly 100 workers were detained in an immigration enforcement raid at Southeastern Provision, leaving many families without a breadwinner. Those workers then filed a lawsuit, saying that the agents engaged in racial profiling, illegal searches and arrests.
A federal judge awarded the workers more than $1 million in a class-action settlement in 2022.
The company’s then-owner, James Brantley, pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges of tax fraud, wire fraud and bringing in and harboring illegal immigrants. In 2019, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and three years of probation.