Smithfield Foods

Shuanghui said it would list Smithfield on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after completing the takeover. On September 6, 2013, the US government approved Shuanghui International Holding's purchase of Smithfield Food, Inc. The deal was valued at approximately $7.1 billion, which included debt. It was the largest stock acquisition by a Chinese company of an American company. The deal included Smithfield's 146,000 acres of land, which made WH Group one of the largest overseas owners of American farmland.

For decades Smithfield had run its acquisitions as independent operating companies, but in 2015 it set up the "One Smithfield" initiative to unify them; Circle Four Farms in Milford, Utah, for example, became Smithfield Hog Production-Rocky Mountain Region. Ken Sullivan said in 2017 that he saw the company's future as a "consumer-packaged goods business".

Mergers and acquisitions (2016-2019)

In 2016, Smithfield purchased the Californian pork processor Clougherty Packing PLC for $145 million, along with its Farmer John and Saag's Specialty Meats brands. Smithfield also acquired PFFJ (Pigs for Farmer John) LLC and three of its farms from Hormel Foods Corporation. In August 2017 Smithfield acquired Pini Polska, Hamburger Pini, and Royal Chicken of Poland, and in September that year it announced that it would purchase two Romanian packaged-meat suppliers, Elit and Vericom. In 2019 it acquired Maier Com in Romania.

Nasdaq IPO (2025)

On Jan 28, 2025, Smithfield became publicly traded with an initial public offering of 26 million shares and was listed on the Nasdaq, though WH Group retained 90% of the company stock. In September 2025, An additional 19.5 million shares were sold, reducing WH Group's majority ownership to 88% of the company.

Nathan's Famous (2026)

On January 21, 2026, Smithfield agreed to acquire hot dog brand Nathan's Famous in a deal worth $450 million. Smithfield already had an exclusive license to manufacture, distribute, market and sell Nathan's product, but the licenses had been set to expire in March 2032.

Successfully closing the acquisition will secure Smithfield’s rights to this iconic brand into perpetuity.

Joseph W. Luter III said that vertical integration produces "high quality, consistent products with consistent genetics". The company obtained 2,000 pigs and the rights to their genetic lines from Britain's National Pig Development Company in 1990, and used them to create Smithfield Lean Generation Pork, which the American Heart Association certified for its low fat, salt, and cholesterol content. According to Luter, it was vertical integration that enabled this.

Housing and lagoons

The pigs are housed together in their thousands in identical barns with metal roofs, known as Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The floors of the buildings are slatted, allowing waste to be flushed into 30-feet-deep "open-air pits the size of two football fields", according to The Washington Post. These are referred to within the industry as anaerobic lagoons. They dispose of effluent at a low cost, but they require large areas and release odors and methane, a greenhouse gas.

Smithfield Foods states that the lagoons contain an impervious liner made to withstand leakage. According to Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone, the waste—a mixture of excrement, urine, blood, afterbirths, stillborn pigs, drugs and other chemicals—overflows when it rains, and the liners can be punctured by rocks. Smithfield attributes the pink color of the waste to the health of the lagoons, and states that the color is "a sign of bacteria doing what it should be doing. It's indicative of lower odor and lower nutrient content." In 2018 it announced an "animal waste-to-energy" plan; the company said it would spend $125 million over ten years, along with Dominion Energy, to cover the lagoons in North Carolina, Utah and Virginia with "high-density plastic and digesters" to capture the methane gas and direct it into a local pipeline.

Pregnant sows

Smithfield said in 2007 that it would phase out its use of gestation crates by 2017. Pregnant sows spend most of their lives in these stalls, which are too small to allow them to turn around. Pregnancies last about 115 days; the average life span of a sow in the United States is 4.2 litters. When they give birth, they are moved to a farrowing crate for three weeks, then artificially inseminated again and moved back to a gestation crate. The practice has been criticized by animal-welfare groups, supermarket chains, and McDonald's. Smithfield did not commit to requiring its contract farms to phase out the crates. Almost half the company's sows in the United States live on its roughly 2,000 contract farms.

In 2009, Smithfield said it would not meet the deadline because of the recession, but in 2011 it returned to its commitment, and to doing the same in Europe and Mexico by 2022. In January 2017 the company said that 87 percent of sows on company-owned farms were no longer in crates, and that it would require its contract farms to phase out crates by 2022. As of January 2018, on company-owned farms in the United States, Smithfield confines pregnant sows in gestation crates for six weeks during the impregnation process. When pregnancy is confirmed, they are moved to pens within a group-housing system for about 10 weeks, then to a farrowing crate, then back to a gestation crate to be impregnated again. It uses two forms of group housing: in one system, 30–40 sows are kept in a pen with access to individual gestation crates; in the other system, five or six sows are housed together in a pen. In July 2017 Direct Action Everywhere filmed the gestation crates at Smithfield's Circle Four Farms in Milford, Utah. The FBI subsequently raided two animal sanctuaries searching for two piglets removed by the activists. In January 2018 Smithfield released a video of the gestation and farrowing areas on one of its farms.

California closures

In 2020, Smithfield announced the closure of its plant in San Jose, California and the layoff of 139 workers from the site. Smithfield says it closed the plant due to the expiration of its lease and the decision of its landlord to sell. The local union that represented the plant's workers publicly questioned Smithfield's explanation.

In June 2022, Smithfield announced the closure of its plant in Vernon, California, by early 2023, and also stated that it is "exploring strategic options to exit its farms in Arizona and California". The company cited the high costs for the company to conduct business within the state of California.

Operations in Mexico

The earliest confirmed case of the H1N1 virus (swine flu) during the 2009 flu pandemic was in a five-year-old boy in La Gloria, Mexico, near several facilities operated by Granjas Carroll de Mexico, a Smithfield Foods subsidiary that processes 1.2 million pigs a year and employs 907 people. This, together with tension between the company and local community over Smithfield's environmental record, prompted several newspapers to link the outbreak to Smithfield's farming practices. According to The Washington Post, over 600 other residents of La Gloria became ill from a respiratory disease in March that year (later thought to be seasonal flu). The Post writes that health officials found no link between the farms and the H1N1 outbreak. Smithfield said that it had found no clinical signs of swine flu in its pigs or employees in Mexico, and had no reason to believe that the outbreak was connected to its Mexican facilities. The company said it routinely administers flu virus vaccine to its swine herds in Mexico and conducts monthly tests to detect the virus.

Residents alleged that the company regularly violates local environmental regulations. According to The Washington Post, local farmers had complained for years about headaches from the smell of the pig farms and said that wild dogs had been eating discarded pig carcasses. Smithfield was using biodigesters to convert dead pigs into renewable energy, but residents alleged that they regularly overflowed. Residents also feared that the waste stored in the lagoons would leak into the groundwater.

Exports

Since its acquisition by what would become WH Group, Smithfield has partially retooled its plants to export meat for consumption in China. This effort has been at least partially driven by the epidemic of swine fever in China that has resulted in massive reductions in that country's pig population and pork production. One plant in Smithfield, Virginia slaughters about 10,000 pigs per day for export. Smithfield's ramp up of exports to China has occurred in the face of headwinds in the form of 62% tariffs designed to protect China's hog farmers, who largely have small operations. Pork industry trade groups claim that the United States could export twice as much pork to China if the tariffs were lifted.

Production volume

As of 2006 Smithfield raised 15 million pigs a year and processed 27 million, producing over six billion pounds of pork and, in 2012, 4.7 billion gallons of manure. Killing 114,300 pigs a day, it was the top pig-slaughter operation in the United States in 2007; along with three other companies, it also slaughtered 56 percent of the cattle processed there until it sold its beef group in 2008.

Marketing

Sports sponsorships

In 2012, Smithfield announced a 15-race sponsorship with Richard Petty Motorsports (RPM) and driver Aric Almirola driving the No. 43 Ford Fusion in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. The sponsorship was increased to 30 races beginning in 2014. Smithfield rotates its brands on the car, featuring Smithfield, Eckrich, Farmland, Gwaltney, and Nathan's Famous. Smithfield and RPM parted ways in September 2017, allowing Smithfield to sponsor Stewart–Haas Racing in 2018.

As of 2023, Smithfield continues to sponsor Almirola in the NASCAR Cup Series with Stewart–Haas Racing. Almirola, who was set to retire from racing competition at the conclusion of the 2022 season, was coaxed by Smithfield to continue with his racing career and their partnership for 2023 and beyond in a multi-year agreement with the company.

2010 HSUS investigation

In December 2010 the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) released an undercover video taken by one of its investigators inside a Smithfield Foods facility. The investigator had worked for a month at Murphy-Brown, a Smithfield subsidiary in Waverly, Virginia. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the investigator videotaped 1,000 sows living in gestation crates. According to the AP, the material shows a pig being pulled by the snout, shot in the head with a stun gun, and thrown into a bin while trying to wriggle free. The investigator said he saw sows biting their crates and bleeding; staff jabbing them to make them move; staff tossing piglets into carts; and piglets born prematurely in gestation crates falling through the slats into the manure pits.

In response, Smithfield stated that it does not tolerate abuse or otherwise improper care of animals. The company asked Temple Grandin, a professor of animal husbandry, to review the footage; she recommended an inspection by animal welfare expert Jennifer Woods. Smithfield announced on December 21 that it had fired two workers and their supervisor. At the company's invitation, the Virginia state veterinarian Richard Wilkes visited the facility on December 22. He praised Smithfield for its efforts to improve animal welfare and said he saw no signs of abuse. The Humane Society criticized the tour.

2017 DxE investigation

A 2017 investigation by animal advocacy group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) filmed "piles of dead baby pigs rotting in feces while others drank from bloody, mutilated nipples of sows” and found that some pigs were still being housed in gestation crates, despite claims by Smithfield that the practice had ceased.