Cargill
American-based international food conglomerate
Cargill, Incorporated is an American multinational corporation that trades, purchases and distributes grain and other agricultural commodities, such as palm oil; trades in energy, steel and transport; raises livestock and produces feed; and produces food ingredients such as starch, glucose syrup, and vegetable oils and fats for use and resale by food manufacturers, the food service industry, and retailers. Cargill also has a large financial services arm that manages risks in the commodity markets for the company. Headquartered in Minnetonka, Minnesota, the company was founded in 1865 by William Wallace Cargill. As of 2023, Cargill was the largest privately held company in the United States in terms of revenue.
Cargill has been a subject of long-term and widespread scrutiny for a variety of issues, including child trafficking and child slave labor and other human rights abuses, union busting, ignoring worker safety during COVID-19, land grabbing, food contamination with mercury and E. coli, deforestation, air pollution, tax evasion, animal abuse, toxic spills, building on restorable wetlands, contributing to the antibiotic resistance crisis, and price fixing.
In 2003, the company split off a portion of its financial operations into Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities. It previously owned two-thirds of the shares of The Mosaic Company (sold off in 2011), a producer and marketer of concentrated phosphate and potash crop nutrients.
The company supplies about 22% of the United States domestic meat market. It is the only US producer of Alberger process salt, which is used in the fast-food and prepared food industries.
Cargill has remained a family-owned business, with family having connections to descendants of the founder owning over 90% of the company.
The public source identifies “Cargill” as american-based international food conglomerate. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cargill, American-based and international.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1036056. VIAF identifies the subject as 173298349. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1865, 2023, 2003 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cargill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.