Family empire: Wesley Batista Filho inherits the world's largest meat company - and its scandals

After almost a decade, a family member is once again taking over the management of the world's largest meat producer. But Wesley Batista Filho is under pressure from several sides at JBS.

Salvador. Wesley Batista Filho's grandfather slaughtered cattle in the savannah of western Brazil in the middle of the last century. When thousands of workers needed to be fed during the construction of the new capital Brasília, he opened a slaughterhouse.

Wesley Batista Filho's father and his two uncles turned it into the largest meat company in the world. Now the 34-year-old will take over operational management at JBS from Gilberto Tomazoni - so the food company will once again be run by a family member after almost a decade.

It is intended to improve the company's reputation, which has been damaged by corruption scandals, and generate new growth. However, trade conflicts, rising costs and political risks are putting the global protein business under pressure. In the USA, of all places, the most important market, the beef business is in crisis.

At the age when his father and grandfather were already working, Wesley Batista Filho went to a boarding school in Switzerland. He attended the Lyceum Alpinum in Zuoz. His father's condition was that he would learn German, he said in an interview with Swiss Learning. His favorite subjects there were economics and epistemology.

But Batista Filho also later went through the tough school of the family business. At the age of 19, he began a trainee program in North American slaughterhouses, including night shifts in the cold rooms. He soon dropped out of his parallel studies at Colorado State University.

“After I kept falling asleep in class, I decided to focus on my internship,” he told Swiss Learning. His father told him that he should be the first to come and the last to leave. “You learn more and your colleagues respect you.”

In his early 20s, he eventually managed the slaughterhouses in Uruguay and Paraguay and later ran JBS Canada and the US beef business. After positions at the helm of JBS Brasil and the poultry subsidiary Seara, he was appointed Global President of Operations in 2022. Since 2023 he has been head of JBS USA, the group's most important business.

Now comes the next career step in the family business: at the beginning of 2027, the 34-year-old will take over the management of JBS as Global CEO. When the company went public on Wall Street last year, founder José Batista Sobrinho, after whose initials the company is named, was 91 years old.

Batista Filho takes over a company of enormous dimensions. 280,000 employees work there - about as many as at the food and beverage company Pepsico. The company supplies 180 markets worldwide. Half of its sales come from the USA, followed by Brazil with a quarter.

Europe accounts for nine percent of sales. Since the IPO in New York in 2025, the group holding company has had its legal headquarters in the Netherlands; a holding company for the US business is based in Luxembourg. The most important growth market for JBS is currently Southeast Asia.

JBS has slaughter capacity for 78,000 cattle, 150,000 pigs and 14 million chickens daily and produces eleven million eggs daily. In 2025, JBS had sales of $86.2 billion and earned a net profit of $2.2 billion. Batista Filho told the Wall Street Journal that he could tell from the parking lot whether a slaughterhouse was doing well or not. "Is the grass cut? Are there flowers? Do the workers seem happy?" These are important indicators of whether a plant is being managed well.

But the future boss not only inherits the business, but also JBS's scandalous past. The low point for the company was reached in 2017, when his father Wesley and his uncle Joesley spent several months in custody. They had systematically bribed politicians and judges to obtain government funding.

Buying politicians was part of everyday business for them. "It works like this: You do your business. The politicians look at it and create a problem," Joesley Batista said in court at the time. “Then you pay them to fix the problem.”

The fines worth the equivalent of two billion dollars have now been suspended in Brazil. In the USA, too, the Batistas accepted legal punishments for bribery and price fixing.

Joesley and Wesley are now again among the most influential entrepreneurs in Brazil and, according to Forbes, each have a fortune of $3.8 billion. And at 54 and 56 years old, they are far from giving up control. They continue to hold this over the entire group via the J&F holding company, which is listed on Wall Street.

They will be watching the new CEO closely. At the same time, Batista Filho has to show that the third generation can continue to grow the company.

JBS shares have lost a fifth of their value on the stock market since May this year. The global animal protein market is sensitive to geopolitical upheavals, epidemics, scandals, wars and political disputes between countries. Markets may close overnight.

The business that Batista Filho knows best is currently particularly difficult: the USA. Sales and margins are shrinking there. The cattle population has fallen to its lowest level since 1950, and cattle prices have risen accordingly. The industry cannot simply pass on the higher purchasing costs.

In addition, US President Donald Trump has imposed a 25 percent tax on foreign beef imports. The aggressive raids by the US immigration authorities ICE are exacerbating the staff shortage in the slaughterhouses. Many immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa traditionally work there.

Problems arise elsewhere too. China has blocked individual JBS slaughterhouses from imports. The EU has stopped beef imports from Brazil despite the agreement with Mercosur that has just temporarily come into force.

JBS is also under pressure because of its environmental balance. Environmentalists criticize the fact that the company recently conceded its net emissions targets for 2040. JBS does not want to be responsible for methane emissions in its value chain.

While Batista Filho has to concentrate on the meat business, his father and uncle are expanding the family empire. In order to become more independent from the fluctuations of the global meat market, Wesley and Joesley are diversifying their holding J&F Investimentos. It is now active in pulp, energy, finance, consumer goods, mining, media, real estate and education.

And the brothers are once again well connected politically. Since they donated $5 million to Trump's inauguration, they have had direct contact with the US president. On August 20, Trump received Joesley Batista in the Oval Office. Batista argued that additional beef from Brazil could bring down high meat prices in the United States if Washington lowers import burdens.