As of 2025, it was the second-largest food company in Australia, although few would recognise its name. The mainly Brazilian-owned JBS Australia is our largest meat company, with feedlots and processing facilities (read abattoirs) across every Australian state except Western Australia. JBS supplies fresh and pre-packaged meat to major supermarket chains and butchers, as well as owning familiar brands such as Primo Smallgoods and Huon Salmon.
The company entered the Australian market in 2007 when it acquired the Australian and international operations of the US-based meat company Swift & Company. Swift had established a presence in Australia as early as 1910, when it purchased a freezing works in Melbourne, and by 1914 had processing works established on the Brisbane River and at Alligator Creek in Queensland. At the time of the JBS entry, Swift owned Australian Meat Holdings, which operated four feedlots and four abattoirs in Queensland at Rockhampton, Brisbane, Townsville, and Toowoomba.
JBS had a long history before it arrived in Australia. The company was founded in Brazil in 1953 by José Batista Sobrinho – the original JBS – and expanded from one small slaughterhouse to a network of meat processing companies across the country. International expansion, driven by José’s sons Joesley and Wesley Batista, came with the acquisition, in 2007, of the Chicago-based processor Swift & Company. The $US1.4 billion takeover was backed by the Brazilian government, a backing secured by significant bribery and corruption. A year after JBS was established in Australia, similarly questionable funding arrangements allowed the company to pay $US150 million to acquire Tasman Group, which owned abattoirs in Tasmania and Victoria and a feedlot in NSW.
In 2017, in a plea deal that involved hefty fines, the Batista brothers admitted to bribing nearly 1900 politicians, including the Brazilian finance minister, over several years. Although they avoided gaol terms for this, they later served gaol time for insider trading when they dumped company shares at a high price before their confessions were made public. JBS has also faced scandal for sourcing cattle from illegally deforested land in the Amazon and has been accused of employing slave labour. There have been controversies in Australia, too. JBS Australia has had an ongoing battle with the Australian Taxation Office, which sued the company in 2020 over tax avoidance, and has repeatedly been accused of health and safety violations.
Despite this, JBS Australia has gone from strength to strength. In 2014, it acquired Primo, Australia’s largest manufacturer of smallgoods and deli meats and, in 2021, added to its portfolio with Riverlea Pork and Huon Aquaculture, Australia’s second-largest producer of farmed Atlantic salmon. According to its website, as Australia’s largest multi-species processor, exporter and feedlotter, the company has a daily production capacity of more than 10,000 head of cattle, 1,600 pigs and more than 12,000 head of small stock. In 2026, it employed more than 15,000 people across more than 50 sites.
You can’t buy shares in JBS Australia on the Australian stock exchange. It’s the Australian subsidiary of JBS S.A., a Brazilian multinational corporation that’s publicly listed on the Brazilian Stock Exchange and American markets. However, the ultimate controlling interest is still held by the Batista family through their private holding company.