Largest Beef Supplier Company in the Us

Image source: Getty Images.

"Yuck."

That was my response later reading Consumer Reports' contempo basis-beefiness product safety examination. The non-profit company went crimson-meat crazy by purchasing 300 packages of beefiness from supermarkets, big-box stores, and organic nutrient retailers across the country. They then tested the meat for all way of unhealthy bacteria.

The results weren't appetizing. Tests showed a basic level of fecal contagion, the kind that can crusade blood or urinary tract infections, in 100% (!) of the ground beefiness. Furthermore, xx% of the meat tested positive for a bacteria that causes a million cases of food poisoning each year. And well-nigh i% independent salmonella, the microorganism behind 19,000 hospitalizations and 380 deaths in the U.S. per year.

Consumer Reports recommended that meat fans cook ground beef thoroughly and endeavour to buy sustainably raised beef wherever possible, since information technology has a lower prevalence of these unsafe bacteria. They too highlighted a major structural risk of the meat industry, that it'south dominated by merely four producers bookkeeping for over 80% of all beefiness processing in this state.

Those leading cattle-slaughtering companies are:

1. Tyson Foods (TSN -0.89%), the nation's largest beefiness producer. Tyson facilities can process up to 175,000 cattle per week. The company booked $16 billion of beefiness sales last year lonely.
2. Cargill. With 153,000 employees and $120 billion of almanac sales, Cargill is one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Subsidiary Cargill Beefiness processes 8 million cattle and eight billion pounds of boxed beef per year through its eight plants in the U.Southward. and Canada.
3. JBS Us is a subsidiary of Brazil-based JBS S.A., which is the largest beef packer in the globe. JBS United states of america operates 9 cattle processing plants across the Midwest.
4. National Beef is the fourth-largest cattle processor, with market share of 13%. Afterward a failed acquisition attempt by JBS S.A. in 2009, National Beef is now a subsidiary of holding visitor Leucadia National (JEF -3.91%).

Why it matters
The controversy over such a big concentration of beef production centers around pricing and condom worries. Since massive processing companies carry so much weight in the market for cattle, they tin drive prices downwardly for ranchers and feedlots, hurting their businesses in the process.

And above on the value chain, the lack of contest at the grocery-store level tin can push prices up for consumers. That's why the U.S. Justice Department challenged the proposed purchase of National Beef by JBS S.A., saying "contest in the sale of boxed beef to grocers, food service companies and ultimately American consumers" was at risk.

But the bigger business organization is over food safety, every bit Consumer Reports only highlighted. Since so much supply is being handled by so few companies, the potential for regional or even national outbreaks is enhanced. Albert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, recently told The Wall Street Journal that mergers are adding fragility to the food supply concatenation. "As you go more and more consolidated, with fewer and fewer redundancies, the opportunities for catastrophic breakdowns expand," he said. And that's true no matter how of import food safety standards are to these four beefiness giants.

What y'all can practise about information technology
Red-meat fans have a few options available to them if they want to reduce the take chances associated with eating beef. You can ask for well-done burgers at restaurants and purchase more sustainably raised beef during your adjacent grocery shopping trip. You can also shift consumption abroad from ground beef and toward whole cuts like steaks and roasts. Since bacteria tend to be only the surface of these cuts, as opposed to throughout mixed ground beef products, the cooking process is more likely to remove all of them.

But the trend of increasing concentration of beef processing isn't probable to opposite. But as in any industry, scale efficiencies give the big players major advantages over smaller rivals. And the leaders will always seek to maximize those benefits by growing bigger still.

marquezsentort.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/17/yup-80-of-our-beef-comes-from-4-producers.aspx

Bagikan Artikel ini