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JBS is the world's largest meat company, slaughtering and processing beef, pork, and chicken and selling it to supermarkets, restaurants, and food companies around the world.
JBS is the biggest meat company on the planet, and its business is as simple and as brutal as it sounds: it buys live animals, kills and cuts them up in enormous factories, packages the meat, and sells it to supermarkets, restaurants, and food companies in dozens of countries. Started in Brazil in the 1950s, it grew from a small slaughterhouse into a global giant by buying up rivals, and today it is the largest producer of beef and chicken in the world, with major operations in the United States, Brazil, Australia, and Europe.
The company runs three main engines. Its beef business buys cattle, processes them, and sells everything from steaks to ground beef to hamburger patties, with a huge share of its beef coming from its U.S. operations. Its pork business, anchored by the Pilgrim's Pride brand in the U.S., sells fresh and prepared pork. Its chicken business, built on Pilgrim's Pride, is one of the largest poultry producers in the world. It also owns a growing prepared-foods arm that makes bacon, sausage, and ready-to-eat meals, which carry higher profit margins than plain raw meat. The business is low-margin and cyclical, and it is exposed to things the company cannot control: cattle and chicken prices, feed costs like corn and soy, disease outbreaks, and trade rules. JBS does not really set prices — it is a price taker, squeezed between what farmers charge for animals and what supermarkets are willing to pay for meat. Its scale is its main weapon: it processes so much volume that even a thin profit per pound adds up to tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, and it can spread risk across countries and protein types.
JBS is also a company with a complicated past. Its controlling family, the Batistas, built it into a giant through aggressive dealmaking, but the company was swept up in a massive corruption scandal in Brazil in 2017 when executives admitted to bribing politicians, and the family's holding company later filed for bankruptcy. JBS has since cleaned up its act and listed its shares in the U.S. in 2025, a move designed to widen its investor base and improve its reputation. It has also faced pressure over its environmental footprint, especially its links to deforestation in the Amazon, and it has pledged to eliminate illegal deforestation from its supply chain. The company uses its cash to pay down debt, fund acquisitions, and return money to shareholders, and it remains the single most important player in the global meat trade.
Saved answer · last researched 5 Nov 2026