Joseph Grendys

10 FACTS ABOUT JOSEPH GRENDYS AND KOCH FOODS

“We like producing cheap. That’s what our company stands for.” Joseph Grendys

  1. Joseph Grendys, Chairman, CEO and President of Koch Foods, ranks #389 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans with a net worth of $3.3 billion.

  2. Koch slaughters more than 12 million chickens per week and contracts with up to 5,000 chicken farmers at any given time, making Koch the country’s fifth-largest chicken meat producer with an estimated $3.9 billion in annual revenue.

  3. In 1985, Koch Foods started as a one-room chicken processing operation with 13 employees. Since 1992 Grendys has vertically integrated the company by buying up smaller feed mills and slaughterhouses.

  4. “Grendys has spent years pulling in sky-high profits, and even during the worst inflation in 40 years, Koch Foods is able to report record sales volumes weekly. In fact, Grendys complains that demand is so high that Koch can’t keep up.” — Chloe Sorvino

  5. Koch and other major chicken meat producers were hit with antitrust lawsuits for alleged price fixing. Reportedly, this long-running conspiracy began as early as 2012 and lasted through 2019. Retailers allege that Koch and others schemed to fix the price of chickens by “destroying their own breeder hens and eggs to thwart production, resulting in a roughly 50 percent price increase.”

  6. In 2018, Koch Foods settled a class employment discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to the tune of almost $4 million. The EEOC charged the company with sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination as well as retaliation against a class of Hispanic workers at Koch’s Morton, Miss., chicken processing plant.

  7. Koch has a substantial history of citations for violations against them, primarily for employment, public health and safety, financial and environmental offenses that resulted in millions of dollars in fines, according to Violationtracker.

  8. “Chicken” is actually the bodies of chicks rapidly fattened to adult weight in just 6-weeks. A 2014 Mercy for Animals investigation exposed chicks at a Koch facility being violently slammed into transport crates and having their legs and wings broken before being electrocuted and then scalded alive.

  9. Koch is a key supplier for Chick-fil-A, according to Mercy for Animals.

Last Chance for Animals also released its undercover investigation in 2015, filmed at a Koch facility.