TYLER, Texas — One year after a fire shut business down completely, a Texas company that supplies holiday dinner turkeys is back open.

Workers at Greenberg Smoked Turkeys in Tyler have started preparing their popular turkey dinners to ship out to families across the state and country in the coming weeks.

“We’re running about 2,500 turkeys a day,” said owner Sam Greenberg as he checked some of the birds hanging in one of their large smoke houses.

Greenberg said orders have been pouring in for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's a welcomed surprise in a year where they weren’t quite sure what to expect. After becoming a tradition at many family holiday dinners for decades, Greenberg’s turkeys didn’t make it to any tables in 2020. The family owned business lost the entire season. The pandemic was a factor, but for Greenberg, the real business killer was a very poorly timed fire at its Tyler production facility.

“It was the exact worst time. It was unbelievable,” Greenberg said.

The Friday before his team was to start shipping their 2020 holiday orders, a massive fire tore through their facility that held all of their packaging, shipping operations and all of its cooked turkeys. Greenberg said about 87,000 turkeys burned along with the facility that day.

“It had to be one of the refrigeration units because that’s the only thing in there that would have the means of causing a fire,” Greenberg added.

There was nothing more the northeast Texas company could do but file insurance claims, call 2020 a total loss and refund customers who already paid for their turkeys. However, ending the tradition all together was not an option, Greenberg said.

The company started more than 80 years ago when Greenberg’s grandfather started using his smokehouse on his dairy farm, where its production facility now stands. He made Thanksgiving turkeys for his neighbors using a signature family recipe. Greenberg said his father took over the business, then handed it to him, and he’s now training his son to continue the business into the next generation.

Greenberg wasn’t about to let the fire end their legacy.

“We knew we needed to get back up and running and I had a very limited amount of time to do it,” he said. “I pulled in every favor I had.”

The family started a marathon rebuild of the old facility with crews working nonstop to get things running in time for the 2021 holiday season. There are still a few bells and whistles left to install, but Greenbergs is back open. The turkeys are chilling in their freezers, and soon they’ll make their way to holiday dinners.

Even on a Monday afternoon, carloads of families from around Tyler and beyond were showing up at the facility to place their orders or pick up a turkey for their upcoming celebration.

Glen Lowery made the drive all the way from Elkhart, Texas, about 65 miles away, after hearing that Greenbergs was back open. He said he couldn’t be more excited to have the turkey again. It’s been a tradition in his house for more than 30 years.

“We had [another] turkey last year, but like my son said, ‘It’s not the same,’” Lowery explained. “We’re just glad they reopened.”

Greenberg said they couldn’t be happier to be back and are happy their fans didn’t forget them during a tough year for so many reasons.

“There are people who had things a whole lot worse than we did,” Greenberg said. “We had a fire, we lost a season, but there are people that lost family members, lost everything — we’re OK.”