52 days, while they ate the company's own corn and soybean meals. Throughout the 1980s, Foster Farms began to make commercials, with one winning a Clio Award in 1988. By the mid-1980s, their sales had continued to improve, and they expanded again, purchasing Oregon's largest poultry producer, Fircrest Farms in Creswell, in 1987. In 1988, the company leadership decided to increase production capacity. They created a new fryer ranch with one million square feet of poultry housing in Merced, California, upgraded their feed mill in Ceres, California, and built a new distribution facility and sales office for Northern California in Livingston. In November 1989, Foster Farms obtained a turkey processing plant in Fresno, California, from Roxford Foods. The turkey processing plant was converted into a chicken processing plant; new equipment was added that enabled the plant to process 80 million more chickens a year. With the discovery that saturated fat intake was linked to heart disease, Americans began to eat less red meat and more chicken. This change dramatically increased sales for Foster Farms. Sales began to drop in 1987, after a report broadcast on the television newsmagazine show 60 Minutes claimed that a high percentage of chicken was infected with salmonella. In response, the company invited the media to visit its processing centers so that customers could see that Foster Farms chickens were not harmful. 1990s In 1992, brothers George and Tom gave up their roles as president and chief executive to a non-family member, Robert Fox. The Foster brothers remained on the company's board. Sales began to expand once again and so did the company, purchasing Lynden Farms for approximately $8.2 million in 1994. By 1996 annual sales totaled around $900 million. The company had become the largest poultry producer on the entire West Coast and the eighth largest in the nation. In 1997, the company bought the leading poultry producer in Washington, Pederson's Fryer Farms, for approximately $7 million. The company opened a $45 million, 500-job processing facility in South Kelso, Washington in 1998. It also acquired the Butterball Turkey Company's turkey processing plant and feed mill in Turlock, California, along with a hatchery in Fresno, California, and purchased Griffith Foods, an Alabama producer of corn dogs. In 1999 Tom Foster died; George Foster remained active in the company. That same year Foster Farms produced over 750 million pounds of poultry and was the second-largest corn dog