Pork giant Smithfield's CEO touts growth outlook, minimizes threats from deportations, bird flu

Smithfield Foods' CEO says he hopes that everything the company has done to make working in its plants more attractive ever since COVID tore through the industry during the pandemic will help it weather the impact of President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations.

Smithfield went public Tuesday more than a decade after the world's largest pork producer was bought by China's WH Group. CEO Shane Smith says he believes the company is positioned to grow in the next few years. He said Smithfield has streamlined its costs and is focused on more profitable packaged meats business through its brands like Eckrich, Armour and Nathan’s Famous.

The company's shares went on sale for $20 and dipped less than a dollar in trading Tuesday before finishing close to the offering price, generating about $522 million for the Smithfield, Virginia-based company.

Smith said he is watching President Trump’s immigration policies closely, but he hasn’t seen any Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids at any of the company's 41 plants yet, and Smithfield has done everything it could to comply with labor laws and minimize the number of undocumented immigrants in its workforce.

“We follow all federal and state employment guidelines at each of our facilities,” Smith said. “I’m not going to speculate on what will or will not happen. But what I can tell you is that we believe as we look across those 41 different plants, we believe that we’re positioned as well as we can be.”

He said the company has also worked to reduce the number of contractors it uses in its plants to give it more control over hiring and costs. That should also reduce the chances of children working in Smithfield's plants as the labor officials documented over the last couple of years at some of the companies hired to clean slaughterhouses overnight.

Meatpacking companies have long relied on immigrants who are willing to take on the hard physical work in their plants. But Smith said Smithfield has “really worked toward becoming an employer of first choice in those communities. And what that means is if you’re the employer of first choice then you typically get the top of the workforce in that local community.”

So far, the fears about raids in the immigrant community haven't led to a drop in the daily slaughter figures that USDA reports across the industry, so it doesn't appear that many workers are staying home.

The turnover rate at most Smithfield plants is now at or below where it was before the pandemic forced the industry to temporarily close down plants and take other measures such as adding plastic barriers between workstations and require masks and temperature checks for workers. Conditions in slaughterhouses offered a prime opportunity for COVID to spread in the first year of the pandemic.