The goal of MEAT+POULTRY’s annual Top 100 listing is to provide an overview of the meat and poultry processing industry’s leading companies doing business in North America based on annual sales and to include any changes among them resulting from mergers, acquisitions or closures. It is a challenging task requiring preparation and countless hours of emailing, faxing and follow-up phone calls followed by many hours of compiling and analyzing the data. Slight position shifts are typical, based on sales as reported by the company or alternatively, as estimated by in-house research of the company’s sales.
Companies featured in this year’s Top 100 ranking range from $42.3 billion in annual sales at the top of the list (JBS USA) down to $185 million in sales (Mountain States Rosen LLC). The Top 10 spots in the 2016 ranking were occupied by the same 10 companies as 2015,
with most of them staying in the same ranking positions regardless of sales increases during the year.
The Top 10 spots belong to JBS USA ($42.3 billion); Tyson Foods, Inc. ($40.60 billion); Cargill Meat Solutions ($23 billion); Smithfield Foods Inc. ($15 billion); Sysco Corp. ($13.90 billion); Hormel Foods Corp. ($9.3 billion); ConAgra Foods Inc. ($8.2 billion); National Beef Packing Co. LLC ($7.4 billion); OSI Group, LLC ($6.13 billion); and Perdue Inc. ($4.6 billion).
The total sales for all 100 companies in this year’s Top 100 listing represents more than $251 billion, up $21.6 billion from the year prior. Not surprisingly, 68 percent of those sales come from the Top 10 companies (the combined sales figures equal $170.43 billion, up from $152.8 billion). The Top 25 companies’ sales total $207.92 billion, up from $190.6 billion (that’s 83 percent of the total sales of the Top 100); and the Top 50 companies make up 93 percent of the Top 100 sales numbers (totaling $233.04 billion, up from $214.4 billion).
The majority of the companies in the Top 100 list (46 companies) report having between 1,000 and 10,000 employees. Thirteen companies reported having more than 10,000 employees (six companies of which have more than 20,000 employees). And 42 of those in the Top 100 list have less than 1,000 employees – 16 have less than 500 people employed. (Note: not all 100 companies in this listing reported
their number of employees.)
Of the companies featured in this year’s list, 17 have more than 10 plants (six of those 17 companies have between 30 and 95 plants). The Top 100 companies process chicken, beef, pork, turkey, lamb and veal – many companies of which process more than one species in their meat operations. The majority of the facilities listed process chicken (70 plants), followed by 65 plants processing beef, 59
plants processing pork and 51 processing turkey. Lamb and veal are processed in 10 plants, each.
