Clay Center Dispatch
By Ryan D. Wilson

When Swift and Company was in financial trouble, Cargill’s tried to buy the US company but couldn’t because of packer consolidation laws. Instead, the US company was bought out by a Brazilian company, JBS Company, who is the largest beef packer in the world.

Linn, Kansas native James Beikman, senior account manager of Cargill’s Animal Protein Division, told Thursday’s public Lunch Bunch at Clay County Medical Center that the US-based Cargill intends to compete with the JBS Swift and others and “by 2015 we will be the partner of choice.”

The company is already a major player in the food production industry and Cargill Beef is the second largest beef processer in the U.S., processing 10 million head a year. Beikman said the company’s strategic intent is to double in size by 2015 through either new business or through acquisition.

Cargill’s was founded 1865 and started out as a grain elevator in Conover, Illinois. Now the company has over 159,000 employees in 68 countries.

The company isn’t just meat. “Cargill is an international marketer of food, agricultural, financial and industrial products and services,” Beikman said.

The company has 51 percent of its gross investment in North America with 61,000 employees, 23,000 employees in Europe, 40,000 in Latin and South America, and 36,000 in Asia and Pacific rim.

The company has become a major food provider by giving customers the products they want,” he said.

When a dairy producer customer wanted to reduce cholesterol in their milk, Cargill’s came up with a plant syrup to add to the milk that reduces cholesterol “without affecting the flavor profile of the milk.”

For a foam company that wanted to reduce petroleum ingredients in foam, Cargill partnered with Dupont to create a product that used plant fibers as an ingredient in foam and reduced the amount of petroleum used to create foam.

When McDonalds wanted a cooking oil that created an end product with no trans fat, Cargill suppled them with that cooking oil. The company provides 70 percent of the McDonald’s egg products and the meat for its McRib and chicken products. Cargill’s chicken plants in Ireland, the Netherlands and Thailand primarily support McDonald’s overseas.

The company has set up an “ice cream truck concept” to deliver products to small farmers in Poland, helped a gourmet cheese company to increase milk yields with a specially formulated grain formula, created food products and a distribution system to deliver products by motorcycle to small stores in Central America, set up a special feed ration for pork for a U.S. barbecue chain, developed a process to make lower quality meat more tender, and created a meat patty that would stay tender and juicy for up to 30 minutes on the serving line for schools and college cafeterias.

That meat patty, called “the TNT burger,” is made at the Milwaukee meat plant and was served as part of the lunch during Beikman’s talk.

The company isn’t new to innovation. About 50 years ago the company adapted coal railroad cars to ship grain, which cut food costs in half for the company and farmers and consumers.

Beikman also talked about how the meat business works and where consumers get their meat. In one example he cited two processing plants in Argentina Cargill’s owns that process 17,000 head a day and exports 90 percent-plus lean meat to the United States.

“Why do we export lean meat here into the United States from other countries?” he said. “It’s because of Americans’ thirst for health and lean product. All of our animals that we have in the US we cannot physically produce enough lean meat.”

Cargill’s pork plants in the U.S. are the fourth largest in U.S. with the fifth-largest sow herd.

The turkey processing plants in the Virginia and Missouri makes Cargill the largest processor of fresh and whole turkeys. The company produces 45.3 million turkeys a year.

The company case-ready plants all throughout the country to supply retailers. Recently the company invested in California because the state has the more dairy cows than any other state.

Cargill’s has beef processing plants in Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The company owns five feed yards that have a capacity of 300,000 head of cattle.

The Dodge City plant is the company’s largest beef plant, where they process 6,000 head a day. That’s 300-350 cattle trucks a day, a typical load of 32 cattle can be processed in about 3 minutes, Beikman said.

Some customers only want beef from the company’s “northern” plants which includes the Dodge City plants because they think better beef comes from those plants. Beikman said there’s some truth to that, cattle that are processed at those plants are more suited to the northern climate and produce better meat.