Cargill’s Big Beef Bet Falters as Food Inflation Hits Demand
- Margins for the critical meat unit slip just as new CEO starts
- Profits at Cargill are losing speed after two record years
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When David MacLennan put plans in motion to step down as Cargill Inc.’s chief executive officer, his transformation of the global grains trader into a protein powerhouse was looking particularly shrewd.
During his nine-year tenure at the top of America’s largest private company, he’d turned 158-year-old Cargill into the US’s third-largest beef processor, engineered its return to chicken and posted two straight years of record profits. Meat had become such a big deal that when MacLennan moved on at the start of the year, he passed the baton straight to the former boss of Cargill’s protein division, Brian Sikes.