Tom Hayes
Isn’t Chicken
Animal meat is going the way
of cigarettes and combustion engines.
Tyson’s new CEO can’t wait
By Amanda Little
Photographs by Christopher Gregory
“Now that is a beautiful belly,” Tom Hayes says, running
his hand along the plastic-wrapped contours of a slab of pork
about the size and shape of a Gutenberg Bible. It’s lying on a
stainless steel table in a test kitchen at the Discovery Center,
a laboratory for product innovation at Tyson Foods Inc. in
Springdale, Ark. Hayes, who’s served as chief executiveoi-
cer since December2016, lifts and rotates the block of meat,
examining the cut with loving attention. “Ever seen a pork
belly, Liz?” Hayes asks his director of executive communica-
tions, Liz Cofey, who’s touring the research and development
center for the irst time. She has not.
“I think you should hold the pork belly,” Hayes says, his tone
half-joking, half-reverent. He carries the slab with outstretched
arms and lays it in Cofey’s hands, conducting what seems to
be a spontaneous benediction.
Tyson produces 1 of every 5 pounds of meat consumed
in the U.S. Hayes and his 122,000 employees annually pro-
cess and sell $15billion worth of beef, $11 billion of chicken,
and $5 billion of pork. They also formulate, package, and sell
$8 billion in prepared foods under a brand roster that includes
Hillshire Farm, Jimmy Dean, Ball Park Franks, Original Philly
Cheesesteak, and Aidells Sausage. Half of the products are dis-
tributed by retail grocers; most of the rest go to McDonald’s,
Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC, and other food-service outlets.
Hayes, 53, is an upbeat, shoulder-punching, “call me Tom”kind of leader—“a man of the people,” as more than one mem-
ber of his team describes him. All that bonhomie has embold-
ened and perhaps insulated the CEO, who’s positioned himself
as a forward-thinking renegade in an industry many consider
ethically unsound, environmentally catastrophic, and mired
in old-world thinking. Since Hayes started, he’s trumpeted
the promise of “sustainable proteins” and “cleaner foods” in
the media (Squawk on the Street,Mad Money), at conferences
(Davos, Milken), and in the Twittersphere. He’s made practiced
statements such as “I took this job to help revolutionize the
global food system” and pledged “to raise the world’s expec-
tations for the good we can do through food.”
The language sounds awfully suspicious coming from a man
whose company processes about 1.8 billion animals per year.
Tyson operates dozens of mass-scale slaughterhouses and has
been criticized for water and air pollution, animal cruelty, and
labor violations. It’s also responsible for tens of millions of met-
ric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, on par with the
whole of Ireland. “To call it a sustainable or do-gooder com-
pany would be absurd,” says Matthew Prescott, senior director
of food and agriculture for the Humane Society of the U.S. Yet
Hayes, whose square-jawed face and brilliantined hair give him
the look of a 1950s marketing boss, insists it’s precisely because
of Tyson’s scope that he has the potential to make a diference:
“We’re so big that the industry can’t change if we don’t lead.”Bloomberg Businessweek38