Who is JBS?

José Batista Sobrinho was just over thirty years old when, in 1953, he opened a small slaughterhouse in Anápolis, in the interior of the Brazilian state of Goiás. It was a modest plant, designed to supply a regional market, in a Brazil that was still far from imagining itself as a global agro-industrial power. However, this family enterprise was the starting point of one of the most impactful, and also most controversial, stories in the animal protein business. Decades later, under the leadership of his sons Joesley and Wesley Batista, that slaughterhouse transformed into JBS, the largest global animal-origin food group, with a scale that crosses continents, markets, and entire production chains. JBS's growth always followed a clear logic: gaining industrial scale, diversifying proteins, and expanding geographically to cushion the ups and downs inherent in the livestock business. After consolidating itself in Brazil as one of the main players in the meat market, the turning point ...