The Invisible Empire: Why Cargill Exists (Part 1)

It's the most powerful food company on Earth but prefers you didn't know that

Our first entry in this 500 Most Important Companies in Global Food & Beverage series was Walmart — the world’s largest retailer. We touched on how retailers are gaining more and more leverage over manufacturers and suppliers in the global race for consumers’ hearts, minds, and dollars. Branded consumer product companies have had a rough go in recent years as they slowly lose both negotiating leverage with retailers and also relevance with consumers… not to mention supply chain headaches, share erosion to private label programs of rising appeal and quality, and now a shifting regulatory zeitgeist aimed at the not-so-good-for-you stuff we feed ourselves and our kids.

But there’s another corner of the global consumer world that operates largely behind closed doors — the world of agribusiness, commodity traders, and middlemen who move the raw ingredients, set the prices, and, in many ways, decide who eats and who profits. The biggest of them all is Cargill: the most powerful food company on Earth — and one that prefers we don’t talk about it.

In the world of food and agriculture, some companies define the way we eat without us ever realizing it. If Walmart is the king of retail, Cargill is the emperor of supply chains — controlling the flow of food (and the commodities needed to make or process food) from farm to factory to fork. It’s one of the largest, most influential, and yet least understood corporations on the planet. And that’s largely by design. It’s also the largest privately held company in the United States — and among the largest companies in the world in general.

Cargill is the largest of the so-called “ABCD” companies — ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — which collectively control 50–60% of all global trade in the major commodity crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans. If you’ve eaten today, you’ve interacted with one of them.

Geopolitics and Natural Emergence

As with everything, context is important. Before we can understand Cargill, we need to understand why an entity like Cargill had to emerge in the first place. Let's take a detour through agricultural history, natural geography, and statecraft…