Heavy machinery was humming last week as workers in hardhats covered a 10,000 square-foot warehouse on Clematis Avenue, the future site of a Moody’s Deli meat processing plant.

What is currently home to concrete, dirt and drywall, will soon house more than 55,000 pounds of meat.

“Waltham has never seen anything like it,” said Joshua Smith, the owner of Moody’s Deli and The Backroom at Moody’s at 468 Moody St.

Smith, 39, said he fell in love with the business at the age of 19, while working in a French restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina. One day when the butcher didn’t come in for work, the chef had Smith fill in and taught him the basics of charcuterie and how to utilize every scrap of meat.

“The rest is history,” Smith said.

A Waltham resident, Smith opened up Moody’s Deli in late 2013 and added The Backroom at Moody’s last March. The success he has had brings an increase in demand, and Smith wants his operation to get bigger, better and faster.

Smith currently cures, ages and cooks his meat in just over 700 square feet of space. The increase to 10,000 square feet will allow him to do things such as cook 3,000 pounds of meat at a time, when currently he can only do 300 pounds.

Smith has designed the plant, located near the Bentley University campus and close to the border of both Belmont and Watertown, in an assembly-line style, where the meat will come into a loading area and move counter-clockwise around the warehouse. After being processed, the meat gets washed down, cooked in the ovens, placed in a walk-in cooler and then either packaged or cured.

The middle of the warehouse will house the crown jewel of the plant, 1,200 square feet of curing racks for 55,000 pounds of meat.

But while Smith will be able to produce far more meat than before, he plans to keep the same number of employees (five) and focus on quality.

“The whole idea of this is not to speed up curing, it’s to speed up production,” Smith said. “We’ll still be artisanal, we’re just going to be much faster.”

While it’s a big step up in size, Smith said it’s still small on the overall scale. He said Daniele Foods in Rhode Island, for a nearby example, has a 600,000 square-foot plant.

“This would be the smallest USDA certified facility dedicated to small, hand-crafted meats in the country,” Smith said.

He hopes the plant will be up and running by April and was pleased he was able to find a space in Waltham to operate out of.

“I drew this all up last May, and to see it come to fruition is great,” he said. “We couldn’t find a place that could provide [the infrastructure] for us so we’re building it ourselves. It’s a long term investment in Waltham.”