Thirty-one years ago, Burke Corp. was truly a small business, with one customer, one employee and one cooking kettle. After 20 expansions in the past 19 years, the family-owned meat topping and filling manufacturer boasts a presence in 24 countries and estimates that its products can be found in at least 250,000 locations each day.

“Every time I turn around, there’s a new crane on site,” joked Bill Burke Jr., the company’s president. “We’ve added onto four corners of our building since 2003.”

Burke Corp. recently completed a two-year, 80,000-square-foot expansion to its Nevada headquarters, which now contains a total of 239,000 square feet of office and production space. The company has reported steady, double-digit sales growth each year since it began, Burke said, and has used much of its profits for plant improvements.

“We’ve been a company that has a 30-year history of continually reinvesting its profits back into the company and the community,” Burke said. “We have always been focused on growth, and we have been content to let the business grow instead of our personal lifestyles.”

Burke remembers the company’s early days well. His father, Bill Burke Sr., was operating a frozen pizza manufacturing company whose growth was limited by consumers’ preference for less expensive pizzas. To supplement his income, the elder Burke delivered his pizza ingredients to restaurants, and it was during one of these deliveries that the idea for the meat topping company was born.

“In 1972, one of our trucks was driving down the street in Bettendorf when a man named ‘Happy Joe’ Whitty saw our truck with its picture of sausage on it and ran down to the corner to meet the truck and find out how he could get our sausage,” Bill Burke Jr. explained. “He was ready to franchise his pizza business, but he knew that he couldn’t make the sausage himself for all the different restaurants that he was hoping to start over the years.”

Joe Whitty’s Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream Parlors Inc. was Burke Corp.’s first customer, and the business relationship between the two companies continues today. When Bill Burke Jr. joined his dad in the business in 1978, it was up to him to find more customers like Happy Joe’s.

“My job was to find the second customer,” Burke said. “I signed the Valentino’s chain out of Lincoln, Neb. Since then, we’ve had incredible growth, and we’ve kept our original customers. When you keep the customers you had as you sign on more to your list, that makes it a lot easier to grow.”

Burke Corp. produces 60 million pounds of fully cooked meats each year, ranging from pizza toppings to fajita strips to shredded meats. About 60 percent of the company’s 350 employees work in production, a dramatic increase over the company’s production capabilities in its early years.

“I like to tell the story about when we started, a great day of operation would mean producing about 2,000 pounds of meat, and that was after a couple of years of being in business,” Burke said. “Now, we produce 400,000 pounds of meat per day.”

Burke said the company is known for creating custom products for clients who want to be known for meats with a distinct taste.

“Our customers are not me-too customers,” Burke said. “Our company specializes in providing a different type of flavor line for people who have more discerning tastes and are trying to separate themselves out from the others.”

Burke’s product development team works with clients to “home in on the exact flavor that they want to present on their pie,” Burke said. The company manufactures about 2,000 products, and recently began selling its meatballs and taco meat on a retail basis at Iowa’s Fareway and Hy-Vee Inc. supermarket chains. grocery stores. The company hopes its expansion into the retail market will lead to more opportunities in the near future.

“There seems to be a real collegial attitude amongst Iowa companies willing to help each other out,” Burke said.

The company also operates a small plant in Ames, where Burke Corp. was based until 1986, when it moved to Nevada, and a small plant in Kansas City, which is a joint venture with another company.

Several members of Burke’s family are among the company’s Nevada employees. His brother, Tim, works in purchasing and operations, his sister, Kris Holmes, handles credits and paid invoices, and his brother-in-law is involved with developing labels and doing government relations work. His father still keeps tabs on the business, too, though he has been in “semi-retirement” since 1991.

With his company’s continued sales growth, Burke said he expects more construction to follow this most recent round of improvements, which included a new wastewater facility and corporate headquarters and additional freezer space and a larger production area with more efficient equipment.

“We have a nice capital expenditure plan in place for ’05 and ’06,” Burke said. “We don’t get used to anything around here; Change is a constant.”