Manufacturers in Georgia: poultry, carpet, aircraft and the metro Atlanta supply base

This report is for procurement teams and engineers looking for Georgia suppliers, for site selectors, analysts and job seekers sizing the industry, and for B2B sellers planning a Georgia territory. It starts with the official count, then the clusters that make Georgia different, the counties, the public companies based here, where to find private manufacturers by name and how to prospect them.

Georgia manufacturing in numbers

From the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), all manufacturing (NAICS 31 to 33):

Ranking the state file ourselves, Georgia is eleventh by manufacturing employees, and manufacturing is 9.3% of the jobs CBP counts in the state, close to the national 8.8%. The Georgia Association of Manufacturers says its own members "employ nearly 200,000 people", roughly half the state total.

CBP counts establishments, meaning plants and other locations with paid employees, not companies. A poultry company with three processing plants counts three times, its Atlanta head office is classified as a management office, and owner-only shops are left out. Employee counts refer to the pay period including March 12, 2023.

Three clusters that set Georgia apart

The detailed industry codes show where Georgia's manufacturing jobs concentrate:

The Census Bureau published an employee figure for aircraft manufacturing but flagged it as high-noise: the noise it adds to protect confidentiality changed the value by 5% or more, so we've left it out.

Poultry. Forty-five poultry plants with an average of 691 employees each make food Georgia's largest manufacturing employer (72,868 jobs). Hall County, around Gainesville, has 236 plants averaging 102 employees, the largest of any big county, and its 14 meat and poultry processing plants employ 6,979. Carpet. Whitfield County, around Dalton, has 253 plants and 19,439 manufacturing employees, 12,100 of them at 76 textile product mills. Aircraft. Four of the state's 15 aircraft manufacturing establishments are in Chatham County (Savannah), whose 213 plants pay an average of $100,757, the highest of the large counties by our calculation.

What Georgia makes, by jobs

Fabricated metal has the most plants (1,227) but small ones, the pattern in most states. Georgia's distinctive feature is how many large plants sit in food, transportation equipment, plastics, textiles and paper.

Where the plants are

County figures are from the CBP county file, which sums to 13 fewer establishments than the state total; per-plant figures are our calculation. Metro Atlanta's four core counties hold 2,264 plants (29% of the state), mostly mid-sized suppliers and job shops. Away from Atlanta, the counties with the biggest plants (Hall, Carroll, Bartow, Chatham, Whitfield) are where a single account can mean hundreds of employees.

Public manufacturers headquartered in Georgia

SEC EDGAR lists 32 companies with a listed ticker, a manufacturing SIC code (2000 to 3999) and a Georgia business address. The largest by revenue, each checked against the cover page and income statement of its latest Form 10-K:

Blue Bird's 10-K says it builds each of its Type C and Type D school buses on its own chassis in Fort Valley, Georgia. We left out National Vision (an optical retailer) and NCR Voyix (mostly software and services), which EDGAR also codes as manufacturers. Revenue is company-wide.

Finding Georgia manufacturers by name

• Georgia Association of Manufacturers, formed in 1900, describes itself as "the only trade group in the state exclusively dedicated to manufacturers". It's the advocacy voice on energy, environment and tax.
• Georgia Manufacturing Alliance, based in Athens, runs monthly plant tours and the Georgia Manufacturing Summit and publishes a member directory. Plant tours are a fast way to see a supplier's floor.
• GaMEP at Georgia Tech is the state's NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership center, for help with improvement and supplier development rather than names.
• OSHA's Establishment Search shows federal inspections and citations by company, state and ZIP. Georgia has no OSHA state plan, so federal OSHA covers its private plants.

To confirm a company's legal entity and standing, search the Georgia Secretary of State's Corporations Division records.

Prospecting Georgia manufacturers

In the big-plant clusters, corporate buying is common: a poultry or flooring company with several Georgia plants often sets suppliers centrally and lets each plant manager choose within that list. Plant-level triggers still matter: a line expansion, a new permit, a change of plant manager.

Worked example: a wastewater pretreatment service

Illustrative example. Altamaha and its numbers are made up; the plant counts come from the Census Bureau.

Altamaha Water Services (altamahawater.example) operates and maintains wastewater pretreatment systems for plants with heavy process water, and wants Georgia plants with 50 or more employees in food, textiles, paper and chemicals.

• Georgia plants with 50 or more employees: 627 + 587 + 204 + 89 + 46 = 1,553.
• Food, textile product mills, paper and chemicals are 766 + 303 + 157 + 493 = 1,719 of 7,874 plants (22%), so about 340 fit at the state's average mix, a floor, because these industries run larger than average.
• Altamaha starts with the 45 poultry processing plants and the carpet mills around Dalton, and books one site assessment for every 12 accounts it researches: about 28 assessments from the first pass.

The research is finding which plants face a permit renewal, an expansion or a new environmental manager this year. Bebop can search for "Georgia poultry and carpet plants with more than 100 employees that announced an expansion or are hiring an environmental manager" and write a playbook for each.

Subject: Pretreatment at [Company]'s [town] plant

Hi [first name],

I saw [Company] is [adding a line / expanding] in [town]. More throughput usually means more process water, and the pretreatment system is often the last thing sized for it.

We run and maintain pretreatment systems for Georgia food and textile plants, and we start with a one-day review of loads against your permit limits. Would a visit in [month] be useful?

[Your name], Altamaha Water Services

For Georgia businesses beyond manufacturing, see companies in Georgia; for a smaller-plant state next door, compare manufacturers in Florida.

Next step: for who signs at a plant and how purchases move, read the manufacturing industry guide.