of almonds, and a few slices of cheese—the kind of meatless
snack you might see in the cold case at Whole Foods, but this
one bears the Jimmy Dean logo. Wouldn’t the carnivorous,
country-crooning Mr. Dean be turning over in his grave at
such a sight? No, Hayes counters. Dean would understand
that for a tradition-steeped company such as Tyson, success
over time “means keeping a boot in the past but putting the
other one in the future.”
During the Great Depression, John Tyson had a one-man
trucking company. In 19 3 5 he started transporting chickens
to farmers in crates bolted to the loor of his rattletrap truck.
He slowly built his own hatcheries and, in 1958, entered the
chicken processing business. It was his son, Don, who led the
company through 16 acquisitions and transformed a local
Arkansas business into a poultry empire.
Until Hayes, all but one of Don’s ive successors were
educated at Southern colleges and elevated through the
Tyson ranks. The new CEO is from Merrimack, N.H., and
graduated from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School
of Management, after which he spent 20 years in Chicago.
Despite his urbanity, Hayes calls himself a “small-town boy”
who got his irst job in the food industry at age 14, washing
dishes at a local restaurant, and whose grandfather tended
a 200-acre potato farm in Vermont. His dad, Warren, was an
electrical engineer for Wang Laboratories, an early manu-
facturer of desktop computers. When Wang went bankrupt,
Hayes Sr. founded a company that processed aluminum
components for the computing industry, waking up before
dawn every morning and working past dark. Hayes’s mother,
Patricia, helped run the company while raising three kids.
After college at the University of New Hampshire, Hayes
became a sales rep for the dairy giant HP Hood, then moved
to sales positions at ConAgra Foods and Kraft Foods before he
became chief customer oicer at Sara Lee. The company at the
time had both a bakery and a meat division. (The latter split
of to become Hillshire Farm in 2012.) As Hayes’s afection for
pork might suggest, his career hit its stride in the sausage sec-
tor, where he learned everything from hog-farming logistics to,
well, how the sausage is made. He was eventually promoted to
become Hillshire’s chief supply chain oicer.
Tyson’s big pivot began in 2014 when it acquired Hillshire
—and Hayes. “That was when we began to transition from
an operational-based company to a branded company,” says
John Tyson, grandson of the company founder and current
board chairman—in other words, from a business centered on
animal processing to one focused increasingly on direct-to-
consumer brands. Before the acquisition, Hayes had pushed
for product diversiication and helped develop so-called
hand-held breakfast items at Hillshire, including Jimmy Dean
Delights sandwiches, which drove up the brand’s frozen prod-
uct sales by 25 percent. John Tyson likes that Hayes under-
stands the way consumers think and what they want. “That’s
integral to our future,” he says.
He adds that “Tom is comfortable talking about the hard
issues”—and the company was facing a lot of hard issues
when Hayes stepped in. In May 2016 the antipoverty orga-
nization Oxfam International released a report titled “No
Relief,” exposing grim working conditions inside the poul-
try industry. It quoted 10 Tyson plant workers saying their
managers had denied or reprimanded them for bathroom
breaks. “I Had to Wear Pampers” read a headline on the
Washington Post’s Wonkblog about the report. That same
month the advocacy group Mercy for Animals released vid-
eos showing farmers at Tyson chicken facilities kicking and
stomping on chickens, some of which appeared to have con-
genital deformities. In September, New York-based food dis-
tributor Maplevale Farms Inc. brought a class-action antitrust
suit alleging that major poultry producers, including Tyson,
had colluded to limit supply, drive up prices, and overcharge
customers. (Tyson has disputed these allegations, along with
others brought against it.)
In November 2016, in the immediate wake of all this,
Tyson announced that Hayes would replace Donnie Smith,
who’d served as CEO since 2009 and tripled the company’s
gross proit. Some analysts were up in arms. “We are not at all
happy to see Mr. Smith step down,” Timothy Ramey of Pivotal
Research Group wrote. “[His tenure] has been the best period
of Tyson’s history.” Tyson’s stock stagnated in the three months
after Hayes took over, but it soon rallied and by December was
up 30 percent. Trade disputes and an abundance of domestic
supply have since hurt big U.S. meat producers, and in July,
Tyson lowered its yearly proit forecast.
John Tyson insists that the CEO change had “nothing to
do” with the public-relations challenges. But he also says, “Our
name is on the door, and when people raise concerns about
are we doing enough, it becomes a little bit personal.”Twenty minutes from Springdale, Tyson’s state-of-the-art
hatchery produces 1.8 million chicks per week. Racks of
eggs rotate slowly on automated incubation trays as digi-
tal sensors monitor their temperatures. Behind a window
covered by a steel door, 40,000 newborn chicks sit on shal-
low plastic trays. They look cramped, but clean and dry,*AS MEASURED BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE’S PER CAPITA DISAPPEARANCE FIGURES; DATA: USDA, BLOOMBERGThe Meat We Eat
1970 2017956535Pounds consumed per person in the U.S.*
Beef Chicken PorkTyson 2017 revenueBloomberg Businessweek August 20, 2018
41Beef $14.8bChicken $11.4bPrepared foods
and other $8.2bPork $5.2b