Tyson Foods Inc.

Tyson Foods runs slaughterhouses and meat processing plants across the United States, converting live cattle, hogs, and chickens into cuts and packaged products that reach grocery stores, food service kitchens, and government contracts. Federal law requires a USDA inspector to be physically present before any kill line can run, so the hard ceiling on how much meat the company can produce each week is set by how many inspector-hours the government assigns to each plant — not by the size of the equipment or the number of animals available. Because cattle and hogs cannot wait once they arrive at the gate without dying or losing commercial value, the kill schedule has to match livestock arrival almost to the hour, which is why the company owns its own chicken breeder flocks, hatcheries, and feed mills — controlling the biological clock internally rather than relying on outside suppliers whose chickens arrive on their own schedule. That same integration is the sharpest risk: because all those flocks share a single genetic line, an avian influenza outbreak does not thin the flock gradually but triggers simultaneous government-ordered depopulation across every connected facility at once, collapsing months of production capacity in a single event with no spot market able to replace the specific genetics that downstream processing schedules are built around.