Made in Valdosta: CJB Industries
December 28, 2014
Valdosta Daily Times, Sunday, December 28, 2014
Stuart Taylor
VALDOSTA — CJB Industries — started by Clinton Beeland in 1997 and quickly joined by his wife, Jeana — got its start in a small way, assembling termite spikes.
That process — joined together small plastic tubes with a wooden placebo to attract termites — pales in comparison to the work the company does today.
“That’s what we began doing,” said Clinton. “Not long after that we went back into our roots. I’m a chemical engineer; Jeana is an industrial engineer.”
They start looking into packaging and formulating turf protection products.
From there, they started making litter amendments for poultry houses and white paper board coatings for corrugated cardboard, as well as other industrial blending and packaging products.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, CJB did some work for the automotive industry, working on automotive undercoatings for Nissan and headliner adhesives for Ford.
CJB Industries also worked on crop protection products, such as deer and snake repellent and pest control.
“Around 2007, we made a decision to focus more on the agricultural economy and provide crop protection products in a much bigger way.”
Today, agricultural products — from crop protection to animal health — are an important component of CJB Industries.
A wide variety of products are produced between CJB’s Cypress Street and Gil Harbin Avenue facilities, with new products being added every year.
Those products can be split into two general categories: dry and wet.
For dry products, ingredients are blended together to form the final product.
The process for making wet products is a little more complicated.
After all the raw materials are mixed together in tanks, they’re run through a mill.
The mill is a rotary shaft filled with blades and tiny glass beads that grind the mixed raw materials down to as small a size as four microns.
From there, the finished product is pumped into packaging tanks, which can range from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons.
Formula recipes can vary greatly from company to company.
When moving from producing one product to another, the tanks, pipes and other production equipment are cleaned and washed out, and water is run through the system and tested to ensure that no ingredients from one product recipe get into another.
Along with productions, CJB offers laboratory services, working with companies on everything from formulation and packaging to problem solving and trouble shooting.
Through the years, CJB has grown greatly since those early days of termite spike assembly; 100,000 square feet were added to the Cypress Street facility in 2000, with laboratory facilities in 2002-2003.
The late 2000s saw more growth, when the Cypress Street facility expanded even more and the Gil Harbin facility expanded in 2009.
Clinton and Jeana credit their company’s success to a number of things: company culture, a workforce that’s flexible and quick learning, a willingness to expand, and, as Clinton puts it, “a little bit of faith and a little bit of fate.”
They also credit the local community as playing a big role in their success.
“You end up where you are because of the support you had.”
