Charoen Pokphand Foods

Livestock

CPF's livestock business includes broilers, layers, swine, and ducks. Products can be divided into three main categories, animal feed, farm, and meat and food products.

Animal feed

The company produces livestock feed in the forms of concentrate, powder and pellets for chickens, cows, swine, and ducks. The feed is distributed by more than 600 sales representatives throughout Thailand. A portion of the livestock feed is sold directly to large animal farms.

Animal breeding

The company researches and develops natural animal breeds. The goal is to obtain breeds that are disease-free and suited to the breeding environment in Thailand. The company produces parent stock broiler chicks, parent stock layer chicks, parent stock swine, broiler chicks, layer chicks, layers, and piglets for distribution to animal farms and domestic sales representatives.

Grandparent stock used in livestock breeding is imported from abroad to breed parent stock which are then raised on the company's farms.

Controversies

Slavery allegations

In June 2014, after a several-month-long investigation, the British newspaper The Guardian claimed that Charoen Pokphand Foods (CPF) purchases fishmeal, which it then feeds to its farmed prawns, from suppliers that own, operate, or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves. The Guardian claimed that after the slaves are bought "for as little as £250", the working conditions on those boats included forced labor with 20-hour work days, forced drug use, starvation, and executions.

In July 2014, CP Foods hosted a three-day meeting to create a task force on the issue, with representatives from retailers, local government authorities, and non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam and the Environmental Justice Foundation. The progress made at this meeting is difficult to ascertain, as the original newspaper, The Guardian, has not posted any additional stories and the company website's sustainability page says "For the latest general update covering our approach and achievements" to read a page from December 2013, which promises "a further progress update in Q1 2014."

The president and CEO of Charoen Pokphand subsequently posted a "Statement to Shareholders" vowing to purchase only from certified processing plants, only acquire product from certified Thai fisheries, and that supply chain "...fishing vessels, fishmeal processing plants...must be certified by Thailand's Labor Standard or have been audited...by an external agency (Third Party)...."

In Australia, Woolworths stocks only CPF-Vietnam products and Metcash, wholesale supplier to Independent Grocers of Australia (IGA), has eliminated CPF SKUs from their inventory.

In January 2017, the United States District Court, Northern District of California ruled on multiple grounds in favour of CP Foods in relation to litigation brought against them and others, which claimed damages related to the alleged presence of human rights abuses in the supply chain for Thai shrimp. The Court's order - dismissal with prejudice - bars the plaintiffs from bringing such claims again.

Allegations of links to blackchin tilapia outbreak

CP Foods has been alleged to be the source of an outbreak of the blackchin tilapia. The blackchin tilapia is native to West Africa but became an invasive species in Thailand, having spread to 19 provinces as of 2025. This raised suspicions that the source could be CP Foods, as it is the only private company to have obtained regulatory approval for legally import of fish for research purposes. A class action lawsuit was filed against CP Foods by fishermen from Samut Songkhram, which was accepted by the Bangkok South Civil Court in March 2025. A panel of the House of Representatives of Thailand also came to the conclusion that the "sole legally authorized importer" of the fish was to blame and urged state agencies to take legal action. CP Foods has publicly acknowledged that it imported the fish from Ghana in 2010 for breeding research at Yisan Farm, Samut Songkhram, close to where the outbreak first began a year later, However, the company denied being the cause of the outbreak. CP Foods claimed that the fish it had imported all died within days and were properly disposed of in line with regulations, with samples of the dead fish sent to the Department of Fisheries. However, the Department stated it had no record of receiving samples from CP Foods. Moreover, Bancha Sukkaew, the ex-chief of the fishery department, had mentioned that approximately 230,000 blackchin tilapia were shipped by 11 exporters to 17 countries between 2013 and 2016. In 2025, CP Foods sued the BioThai Foundation and its director, environmental activist Witoon Lianchamroon, for defamation. This lawsuit followed the BioThai Foundation’s sharing of data that linked the outbreak to Yisan Farm at an academic conference in September 2024. Various groups expressed concern that this amounted to a SLAPP suit intended to silence debate, including Mary Lawlor, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, who stated the charges were baseless and a reprisal for Witoon's work on community rights and food security.The lawsuit is specifically in response to Biothai's use of "false" images and information, which created public misunderstanding and damaged its reputation. On October 22, 2025, the Nonthaburi Provincial Court held the first hearing in a criminal defamation case filed by the public prosecutor against Witoon Lianjamroon, Secretary-General of the BioThai Foundation. The charges involve criminal defamation through the publication of false and misleading information regarding the spread of invasive blackchin tilapia, which has caused significant reputational damage to CPF.