Joseph Grendys

About Joseph Grendys

Birth Year: 1961
Birth Place: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Residence: Chicago, Illinois, US
Education: Holy Cross High School (River Grove, Illinois)
Alma mater: Loyola University
Occupation: Chairman, CEO, president and owner, Koch Foods

Joseph Grendys

Joseph Grendys was born on 1961 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Joseph Grendys runs Koch Foods, a poultry processor that slaughters, ships and sells chicken under its own brands and through private label products. The $3.3 billion (estimated revenues) business makes buffalo wings and chicken strips for Walmart and nuggets for Burger King. Grendys joined Koch in the mid-1980s after graduating from Loyola University, lured by a 50% equity offer from original owner Fred Koch. At the time it was just a one-room shop with 13 employees, and its main business was taking bones out of chicken and cutting up the meat. Grendys bought out his former boss in 1992 and vertically integrated the company by gobbling up smaller feed mills and slaughterhouses.
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Biography/Timeline

1960

Grendys was born in Chicago in the early 1960s. His Father was a butcher who was also involved in the wholesale and Retail meat trade. His grandparents emigrated to the US from Poland.

1980

Grendys started full-time at Koch Foods in the mid-1980s, when it had just 13 employees. The owner Fred Koch was one of his father's customers, having started Koch Foods in 1973, and offered him a 50% equity share in the Business.

1984

He was educated at Holy Cross High School in River Grove, and worked at Koch Foods part-time while a student. In 1984, he received a bachelor's degree in Finance and Marketing from Loyola University.

1992

He bought out Fred Koch in 1992. Grendys' companies now slaughter, ship and sell chicken using the Koch Foods, Antioch Farms, Preferred Foods and Rogers Royal brands. Koch slaughters over 12 million chickens and processes over 50,000,000 pounds (23,000 t) of chicken every week.

2011

In 2011, Koch employed 14,000 people, had an annual turnover of $2.8 billion, and was one of America's five largest "fully-integrated chicken processors".

2014

In a 2014 interview, Grendys stated that he planned to acquire more companies and that he might branch out into another protein, but that he was "not sure what that protein would be yet". Rather than running a chicken company, he sees it as "the Business of converting corn and soybeans into meat protein".

2018

As of February 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$2.9 billion.

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