Animal Slaughtering and Processing — U.S. Industry-Group Primer

NAICS 2022 code 3116. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S. government uses to group businesses. This is a NAICS industry group (4-digit) — one level up from its single child industry, 31161 (Animal Slaughtering and Processing). Because 3116 has only one child, the two levels describe the same set of businesses. This is a short rollup: it gives this level's own ground-truth federal figures and points you to the child primer for the full story.

Read the full detail in the NAICS 31161 primer. Everything below is a summary; the 31161 page carries the company-by-company map, the four-way breakdown of the sub-industries, and the reasoning behind each figure [6].

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1. Overview

This is the whole American meat factory floor in one code: every plant that turns a live animal — cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens, turkeys — into the meat on a plate, plus the plants that cure and package that meat and the ones that recycle the leftovers. It is a ~$304 billion-a-year manufacturing industry employing 556,000 people [1] — one of the largest and most essential slices of U.S. food production.

Both public-market and private investors meet it here. Public investors buy it through a short list of diversified protein conglomerates — JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, Pilgrim's, Hormel, Seaboard — plus one rendering pure-play (Darling). Private investors meet it through family firms (Cargill, Perdue, Koch, American Foods Group), foreign strategic owners (Brazil's Marfrig, Hong Kong's WH Group), and farmer cooperatives (Triumph, U.S. Premium Beef). There is no pure-play "U.S. meat" stock — the big names each straddle several sub-industries at once, so buying the sector means buying a bundle.

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2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

The industry group 3116 contains exactly one child industry:

Because there is a single child, 3116 and 31161 are effectively the same industry, and their federal statistics match dollar-for-dollar. The interesting differences live one level further down, inside 31161's own four children:

• 311611 — Animal (except Poultry) Slaughtering — the red-meat "kill floor" (cattle, hogs). ~$125B, 41% of the level's revenue; a genuine oligopoly (HHI ~1,251) and, right now, the loss-making one [1][2].
• 311615 — Poultry Processing — chicken and turkey. ~$90B, 30% of revenue but 43% of the level's workers; moderately concentrated (HHI 568) and gaining share [1][5].
• 311612 — Meat Processed from Carcasses — bacon, ham, sausage, deli, hot dogs. ~$81B, 27%; genuinely fragmented (CR4 33.6%, HHI 336) and the most defensive [1][3].
• 311613 — Rendering and Meat Byproduct Processing — cooking fat and bone into tallow and feed. ~$8B, 3%; highly concentrated (CR4 67.5%) and re-rated by biofuel policy [1][4].

Those four behave like completely different businesses — a cyclical red-meat oligopoly, a fragmented branded-foods trade, a tiny energy-linked recycler, and a labor-heavy poultry chain — and even the revenue-versus-jobs split diverges: red-meat slaughter ships about $780,000 per worker, poultry only ~$377,000, because cutting up billions of small birds is hand-work [1][2][5]. The 31161 primer is where that four-way contrast is explained [6]; this page keeps the group-level view.

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3. How big it is

Federal figures for the whole NAICS 3116 industry group (our ground-truth data). Because 3116 = 31161, these equal the child industry's figures:

CR4 is the share of revenue held by the four largest firms; the HHI is a standard concentration score. That works out to average pay of about $51,000 per worker across all roles — a blend of managers and office staff with frontline line workers, whose median wage sits well below that (roughly $19/hour, or ~$40,000/year, for slaughterers and meatpackers) [1][2].

The numbers reconcile cleanly, which is unusual. The four sub-industry receipt figures ($124.7B + $81.1B + $7.94B + $89.9B) sum to exactly the $303.6 billion above, and employment and establishments reconcile to the head as well; firm counts are the one exception — the four sum to ~3,204 against 3,149 here, because a firm operating in two sub-industries is counted once at the parent and twice below [1][2][3][4][5].

The undercount caveat runs the opposite way from most industries. The problem is not that tiny operators go unmeasured — meat plants are licensed and federally inspected animal-by-animal, so the count is unusually accurate. The problem is that this code captures only the manufacturing steps and misses the rest of an integrated chain: the ~25,000 poultry contract-grower farms, feed mills, and hatcheries that feed the plants are counted under agriculture codes (the raw broiler crop alone had a liveweight farm value near $45.4 billion in 2024, on top of the ~$90 billion the plants ship) [5]; branded/packaged and in-store butchery revenue leaks to other food and retail codes, so the broader U.S. processed-meat market is estimated near $168 billion against the $81 billion the merchant-processing code captures [3]; in-house rendering is counted with the slaughter plants, leaving 311613's 78 firms as essentially the independent renderers rather than the whole ~$10 billion rendering economy [4]; and the ultimate owners of several large packers are foreign, so profits flow abroad [2][3]. Read the $303.6 billion as the plant-level manufacturing value of American meat — accurate, but the tip of a larger farm-to-fork system.

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4. The investable universe — where value concentrates

There is no single "meat" stock; value is embedded inside a handful of diversified protein companies, weighted differently across the four sub-industries. (Tickers and valuations belong here by house convention and will move.) The 31161 primer carries the full company table [6]; the short version:

• Broadest exposure: JBS (NYSE: JBS — NYSE-listed June 2025, dual-listed on Brazil's B3 [7]) and Tyson Foods (NYSE: TSN, ~$54B revenue FY2025) span all four sub-industries — the most complete, and most cyclical, single bets. Tyson's FY2025 shows the split in one filing: beef ~$21.6B with a $1.1B operating loss, chicken ~$16.8B at an 8.5% margin [2][5].
• Pork: Smithfield (Nasdaq: SFD, ~$15.5B revenue, WH Group–controlled at ~87%, IPO January 2025) and Seaboard (NYSE American: SEB, thinly traded; also 52.5% of Butterball) [2][3][5].
• Poultry: Pilgrim's Pride (Nasdaq: PPC, ~$18.5B net sales, 82.3% JBS-owned — thin free float); Tyson is the largest U.S. chicken producer at ~21% of ready-to-cook volume, Pilgrim's ~16% [5].
• Branded processing: Hormel (NYSE: HRL, ~$11.9B net sales, ~9% operating margin) — Spam, bacon, deli, dividend stability [3].
• Rendering: Darling Ingredients (NYSE: DAR, ~$6.1B revenue) — the one clean public play, a leveraged bet on fat prices and biofuel policy through its 50%-owned Diamond Green Diesel JV with Valero [4].
• Diluted / packaged: Kraft Heinz (Nasdaq: KHC) and Conagra (NYSE: CAG) via Oscar Mayer and meat snacks [3].

Private and foreign owners hold much of the rest — Cargill, National Beef (Marfrig, ~$13.8B revenue), and American Foods Group in beef; Triumph, Clemens, and Prestage in pork; Wayne-Sanderson (formed 2022 via the $4.5B Sanderson Farms take-private), Perdue, Koch, and Mountaire in poultry, where the top five make roughly 70% of U.S. ready-to-cook chicken; Baker Commodities and Sanimax in independent rendering; and hundreds of regional family firms in processing [2][3][4][5].

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5. How the money works

Every part of this industry runs the same core engine — a conversion spread — on top of a biological commodity cycle. Owners do not primarily bet on meat prices rising; they earn the gap between the sellable output (plus the by-product "drop credit" from hides, fat, and offal) and the cost of the animal, minus labor and plant overhead — and they live or die on keeping expensive plants full.

The shape of that spread differs by sub-industry: red-meat slaughter buys animals on the open market and swings to losses when the herd shrinks — fall-2025 beef margins ran roughly −$126 to −$166 per head with plants at ~77% utilization, and USDA's 8-to-12-year cattle cycle means that squeeze persists for years, not quarters [2]. Carcass processing splits into thin-margin commodity cutting and higher-margin branded goods; Smithfield's Packaged Meats segment earns a 12.5% operating margin against 2.6% in Fresh Pork, and Hormel roughly 9% [3]. Rendering is a regional, near-local-monopoly spread — inputs are heavy and perishable, so a plant competes only within a truck radius — now boosted by biofuel demand, with Gulf tallow assessed near 89–90 cents per pound in late 2025 [4]. Poultry is a feed-vs-meat "crush" spread where corn and soybean meal are 65–75% of a bird's cost, and because birds reach weight in 6–7 weeks the industry over- and under-shoots fast [5]. Exports (selling cuts Americans won't eat) are a growth lever across all four — a record ~$8.6B of pork, ~$10.5B of beef, and ~$5.5B of chicken in 2024 [2][5]. The full breakdown is in the 31161 primer [6].

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6. What drives demand

• Population, income, and protein preference — Americans eat roughly 226 pounds of red meat and poultry per person a year, chicken leading at about 101 pounds (2024) [3][5]; the high-protein diet trend is a tailwind.
• Relative price and substitution — when beef is expensive (as in 2025–26), shoppers trade toward pork and especially chicken, making poultry a structural share-gainer in a tight cattle cycle; chicken is now about 45% of combined red-meat and poultry disappearance, up from 40% a decade ago [3][5].
• The livestock cycle — red-meat supply moves in multi-year waves (8–12 years for cattle) while broilers respond in weeks; feed-grain prices set the cost of raising every animal [2][5].
• Foodservice — food away from home reached a record 58.9% of U.S. food expenditures in 2024, supporting portioned and value-added products [3].
• Exports — Mexico, Japan, Korea, China, and Canada are the big buyers; about 14% of U.S. broiler production was exported in 2024, and trade access can swing volumes overnight [5].
• Energy policy (rendering only) — renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel now set the marginal price of animal fat; the Section 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit (effective 2025) pays up to ~$1.00/gallon on carbon intensity [4].
• Health perception (a processing headwind) — the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies processed meat as "Group 1 — carcinogenic to humans" and red meat as "Group 2A" (a statement about strength of evidence, not size of risk); that, plus GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) weight-loss drugs, is a slow, unsettled drag [3].

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7. Regulation

Meat manufacturing is one of the most heavily regulated activities in the U.S. economy, and the same agencies touch every part of the group. Under the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) places inspectors continuously in every plant and examines carcasses animal-by-animal, and every plant runs a HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) food-safety plan [2][5]. Line speed is an active fight on both sides: FSIS is moving to let pork plants under the New Swine Slaughter Inspection System set their own speeds, potentially removing the 1,106 head-per-hour cap (comments due April 2026) [2], while poultry plants under the New Poultry Inspection System can run up to 175 birds per minute, which FSIS moved in 2025 to codify [5] — either way it moves throughput and margins directly. Pathogen policy has been swinging too: the proposal to treat certain Salmonella levels in raw poultry as adulterants was withdrawn in April 2025 and is not current law [5]. The Packers and Stockyards Act polices how packers buy livestock, though its 2024 "unfair practices" rule was withdrawn in early 2026 — enforcement swings with administrations [2][3]. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and immigration enforcement bear on a workforce that is more than half foreign-born; the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulates wastewater and emissions under 40 CFR Part 432 (tighter rules withdrawn August 2025), and USDA's APHIS runs disease response [2][3][5]. Rendering carries an extra layer — the EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard and the Section 45Z credit, restricted to North American feedstock from 2026 — that sets fat demand [4]. Foreign ownership of major packers draws recurring national-security attention [2][3].

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8. Consolidation

The group-wide concentration score is the industry's most misleading statistic. For all of NAICS 3116, the top four firms hold 42.7% of revenue and the HHI is 559.4 [1] — which, against the ~1,500 threshold antitrust agencies treat as "moderately concentrated," reads as unconcentrated. But that number averages four markets that don't compete with each other: beef slaughter is a genuine oligopoly (the Big Four buy ~85% of fed cattle; HHI ~1,251) [2]; rendering is highly concentrated (CR4 67.5%, CR8 80.6%, with the HHI suppressed in federal data) [4]; poultry is moderate nationally (HHI 568, top four ~58% of ready-to-cook volume) but regional in practice — USDA found 77% of broiler growers had no more than three integrators within reach [5]; and carcass processing is genuinely fragmented (CR4 just 33.6%, HHI 336) [3]. The blended average washes out both extremes. The long arc is consolidation — rendering went from 700+ plants in the 1970s to about 273 by the mid-2000s [4], poultry created a new #3 with the $4.5B Sanderson Farms take-private [5], and a modern beef plant now costs hundreds of millions (Cattlemen's Heritage ~$520M, Sustainable Beef ~$325M) [2] — softened by a policy-backed counter-movement, USDA's $500 million SPUR program plus rancher- and retailer-funded independents, to dilute Big Four power [2]. Price-fixing and wage-suppression litigation is a recurring cost across every part of the group: beef ($87.5M), pork ($75M and others), broilers (Tyson $221.5M, Pilgrim's $75M civil plus ~$107.9M in DOJ criminal fines), and roughly $400M of poultry plus $200M of beef/pork wage-suppression settlements [2][3][5]. The full picture is in the 31161 primer [6].

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9. Risks

• The commodity cycle — the dominant, shared risk; the U.S. cattle herd stood at 86.2 million head on January 1, 2026, the smallest since 1951, crushing beef slaughter and beef processing now [2].
• Animal disease — African swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza (of ~221.7M birds lost since 2022, only ~13.2M were broilers — layers and turkeys took the damage), and foot-and-mouth or BSE can wipe out supply or slam export doors overnight; one confirmed case can trigger immediate import bans [4][5].
• Labor — high turnover, injury rates, and immigration enforcement against a heavily foreign-born workforce [2][5].
• Food safety — a single failure can be existential: the 2024 Boar's Head listeria outbreak killed 10 people, recalled ~7 million pounds, and closed the plant permanently [3].
• Regulatory and legal — antitrust probes, price-fixing settlements, and shifting line-speed and inspection rules.
• Trade and tariffs — export dependence makes every part sensitive to tariffs and sanitary bans.
• Policy dependence (rendering) — fat values now hinge on biofuel incentives; any weakening of the Renewable Fuel Standard, 45Z, or state low-carbon programs cuts renderer margins sharply [4].
• Consumer shift and reputation — IARC's classification, plant-based competition, GLP-1 drugs, animal-welfare and worker-safety scrutiny, and (for JBS/Marfrig) deforestation exposure [2][3].
• Thin, cyclical margins — even in good years, a low-margin, high-fixed-cost business whose earnings swing violently.

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10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes: JBS and Tyson for the broadest, most cyclical bet; Smithfield and Seaboard for pork; Pilgrim's for near-pure poultry (thin float); Hormel for branded processing with a dividend; Darling for rendering plus biofuel policy; Kraft Heinz/Conagra for diluted packaged-meat exposure. What you're buying is cyclical commodity processors layered with downstream branded margin — value/cyclical names, not steady compounders; Tyson and Hormel are established dividend payers, while JBS and Smithfield are newer, more volatile U.S. listings. Consumer-staples or agribusiness funds hold the group without single-name risk.

Private routes: direct ownership is concentrated among family firms (Cargill, Perdue, Koch, American Foods Group), foreign strategics (Marfrig, WH Group), and cooperatives (Triumph, U.S. Premium Beef). Private equity plays the edges — regional processors, cold-chain logistics, rendering by-products, new independent beef plants, and poultry contract-grower farmland — as do the adjacent trades: cattle and farmland, feed and grain, cold storage, animal health, and renewable-diesel refiners.

Near-term outlook: beef is at the bottom of its cycle (the multidecade-low herd keeps packer margins pressured and plants under-utilized through 2026, with meaningful rebuilding unlikely before 2027 — and several new plants are opening into the shortage, risking overcapacity chasing too few animals) [2]; pork and poultry are the steadier near-term stories, though poultry has its own feed-driven oversupply cycle [2][3][5]; rendering has a policy tailwind from the 45Z North-American-feedstock rule and higher 2026–27 biofuel mandates [4]. Four switches are worth watching across the whole group: FSIS line-speed rulemaking, antitrust and immigration posture, the first hard evidence of cattle-herd rebuilding, and biofuel-credit stability [2][3][4][5]. Bottom line: a large, essential, foreign-influenced manufacturing industry that only looks like one business — underneath sit four very different sub-industries pointing in opposite directions. For the full analysis, read the NAICS 31161 primer.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau — Economic Census 2022 (receipts $303.6B, concentration CR4 42.7% / CR8 52.9% / CR20 65% / CR50 77.2%, HHI 559.4, firm count 3,149) and County Business Patterns 2023 (employment 556,205, payroll, 3,716 establishments), NAICS 3116 / 31161 and its children. Histometrics ground-truth federal statistics. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
2. Histometrics child primer NAICS 311611 — Animal (except Poultry) Slaughtering (via the 31161 rollup), synthesizing: U.S. Census Bureau (Economic Census 2022 — receipts $124.7B, CR4 66%, HHI 1,251; CBP 2023 — 159,965 workers); USDA NASS cattle inventory January 2026 (86.2M head); USDA ERS on the 8-to-12-year cattle cycle; North American Meat Institute on packer margins (−$126 to −$166/head) and plant utilization (~77%); Tyson 10-K FY2025 (beef $21.6B, operating loss $1.1B; pork $5.8B); JBS 20-F FY2025 (Beef North America $28.1B, U.S. Pork $8.4B); Smithfield 10-K FY2025 (Fresh Pork 2.6% margin); National Beef / U.S. Premium Beef 10-K (~$13.8B revenue); U.S. Meat Export Federation (2024 pork $8.63B, beef $10.45B); USDA FSIS (NSIS line-speed rulemaking, 1,106 head/hour cap); USDA $500M SPUR program; new-plant costs (Cattlemen's Heritage ~$520M, Sustainable Beef ~$325M); beef/pork antitrust and wage-suppression settlements.
3. Histometrics child primer NAICS 311612 — Meat Processed from Carcasses, synthesizing: U.S. Census Bureau (Economic Census 2022 — receipts $81.1B, CR4 33.6%, HHI 335.9; CBP 2023 — 146,308 workers); USDA ERS per-capita meat availability (~226 lb) and foodservice share (58.9%, 2024); Tyson, Hormel (~9% operating margin), Smithfield (Packaged Meats 12.5% vs Fresh Pork 2.6%; WH Group ~87% ownership; IPO January 2025), JBS (~$77B) and Pilgrim's disclosures; WHO/IARC processed-meat classification; Research and Markets U.S. processed-meat market (~$168B); Boar's Head 2024 listeria recall (10 deaths, ~7M lb, plant closed); Packers and Stockyards unfair-practices rule withdrawal 2026; EPA 40 CFR Part 432.
4. Histometrics child primer NAICS 311613 — Rendering and Meat Byproduct Processing, synthesizing: U.S. Census Bureau (Economic Census 2022 — receipts $7.94B, CR4 67.5%, CR8 80.6%, HHI suppressed, 78 firms; CBP 2023 — 219 establishments, 11,297 workers); Darling Ingredients 10-K FY2025 (~$6.1B revenue) and the Diamond Green Diesel JV with Valero; North American Renderers Association (~$10B industry; 700+ plants in the 1970s to ~273 by the mid-2000s); Fastmarkets tallow assessment (~89–90 c/lb, late 2025); Congressional Research Service / U.S. Treasury on the Section 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit and its North-American-feedstock rule from 2026; higher 2026–27 biofuel mandates.
5. Histometrics child primer NAICS 311615 — Poultry Processing, synthesizing: U.S. Census Bureau (Economic Census 2022 — receipts $89.9B, CR4 39.2%, HHI 568; CBP 2023 — 238,635 workers); USDA NASS Poultry Production and Value 2024 (~$45.4B farm value); National Chicken Council per-capita (~101 lb) and export statistics (~$5.5B, ~14%); Tyson 10-K FY2025 (chicken $16.8B, 8.5% margin, feed savings); Pilgrim's Pride 10-K FY2025 (~$18.5B sales; 82.3% JBS-owned); Wayne-Sanderson $4.5B take-private and top-broiler rankings (~58% top four by volume); USDA FSIS New Poultry Inspection System (175 birds/minute) and the April 2025 Salmonella adulterant-rule withdrawal; American Farm Bureau Federation on avian-influenza losses (~13.2M broilers of ~221.7M birds); broiler antitrust and ~$400M wage-suppression settlements; Seaboard 10-K (Butterball 52.5%).
6. Histometrics primer NAICS 31161 — Animal Slaughtering and Processing (the single child of 3116; full detail, company map, and four-way sub-industry breakdown). /primers-preview/31161
7. MEAT+POULTRY / CNBC — "JBS shares begin trading on the NYSE" (dual listing with Brazil's B3, ticker JBS, June 2025). https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/32034-jbs-shares-begin-trading-on-nyse