Sam Fenwick
speaker
1,068 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 5d ago
Sam Fenwick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Between them, they control around 85% of the market.
One of them, JBS, is Brazilian owned and National Beef is majority Brazilian owned.
In November last year, President Trump posted on Truth Social calling for an investigation into meatpacking companies.
He said that they were driving up the price of beef through illicit collusion, price fixing and price manipulation.
He directed the Department of Justice to carry it out.
US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins gave an update on that investigation in May of this year.
So in about 50 years, four companies have gone from controlling a quarter of America's beef slaughter to controlling nearly all of it.
R-Calf USA, a national ranchers group, has its own antitrust lawsuit against the big four.
Eric Groper, who we heard from earlier, is its vice president.
Target and McDonald's have sued the meatpackers over pricing too.
We asked all four meatpacking companies to talk to us.
None responded.
The industry's trade body did, at least in part.
The Meat Institute wouldn't comment directly, but sent us a statement that it issued after Brooke Rollins' press conference.
And it said that beef packers large and small have been losing money nearly every month in the last 18 months.
On the ground, one of the small operators still standing has numbers to prove that.
Jamie Cromley owns Harpley's Meatpacking in central North Carolina, one of the thousands of smaller operators competing for what's left outside the Big Four.
She buys live cattle and slaughters them.
She explains what she's paying for an animal now against what she was paying three years ago.
Most of the animal goes into what's called 90-10 trim, the lean beef that ends up in what most of us would call mince.
Showing 721–740 of 1,068 · page 37 of 54
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