JBS USA Holdings

What they make

1 input JBS USA Holdings supplies

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Where they make it

2 facilities

Intelligence

What's known

Sourced claims about this company's role in supply chains, chokepoints, concentration, incidents, dual-use connections.

• Did you know2023

  JBS is publicly known as a beef company, but their pork slaughter byproducts are a critical input for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Heparin — the most widely used anticoagulant in medicine, administered to millions of surgery and dialysis patients every year — is synthesized from porcine intestinal mucosa (hog intestine lining). JBS's pork processing plants collect intestinal mucosa that is processed into crude heparin for pharmaceutical manufacturers. This is the same heparin supply chain that caused a global pharmaceutical crisis in 2008 when Chinese heparin contaminated with oversulfated chondroitin sulfate killed 81 Americans and harmed hundreds more — the worst pharmaceutical safety incident in the US since 1937. The contamination entered through Chinese slaughterhouse suppliers who were not FDA-inspected. JBS pork slaughter → pharmaceutical anticoagulant supply chain is invisible until it fails.

  US FDA ↗

• Incident2021

  On May 30-31, 2021, the REvil ransomware group (a Russia-affiliated cybercriminal organization) attacked JBS USA Holdings' IT systems, forcing JBS to shut down all US beef processing plants on June 1, 2021. The attack also disrupted JBS operations in Australia and Canada. For approximately 24 hours, one-quarter of US beef processing capacity — approximately 22,500 cattle per day — went offline. JBS USA paid an $11 million ransom in Bitcoin to the attackers to restore systems. The FBI was notified; the Biden administration attributed the attack to a Russia-based criminal group and raised the attack with President Putin at the June 2021 Geneva summit. The JBS cyberattack followed the May 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack by just three weeks — establishing a pattern of critical US food and energy infrastructure being targeted by Russia-affiliated ransomware groups. JBS's rapid payment of the ransom (rather than attempting system restoration from backups) drew criticism for incentivizing future attacks. The attack demonstrated that a single cybersecurity breach at one Brazilian-owned company's US subsidiary could interrupt American beef processing at national scale.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation ↗

• Origin2023

  JBS S.A. was founded in 1953 as Friboi by Jose Batista Sobrinho, a Brazilian cattle rancher's son, with a single slaughterhouse in Anapolis, Goias — a small city in Brazil's interior. The company expanded through Brazil's agricultural frontier over decades, then went global through a series of aggressive acquisitions in the 2000s: Swift & Company (US, 2007, $1.5B), National Beef Packing (US, 2008), and Pilgrim's Pride (US poultry, 2009, bankruptcy acquisition). JBS became the world's largest meat company by revenue in less than a decade. The Batista brothers (Joesley and Wesley) who led this expansion were later implicated in Brazil's Operation Car Wash corruption investigation: in 2017, they admitted to paying bribes to Brazilian politicians including President Michel Temer and signed plea agreements. This scandal triggered brief Brazilian beef export bans from several countries. A Brazilian slaughterhouse that went global through leveraged acquisitions — controlled by brothers who bribed presidents — now processes 25% of US beef.

  JBS USA Holdings ↗