Who Owns Perdue Farms?

Arthur and Pearl Perdue founded the business in 1920 on a farm in Salisbury, Maryland, initially selling table eggs. Arthur had worked for a railroad; the poultry operation grew steadily through the Depression on the strength of quality breeding stock, and by the 1950s the company was raising chickens for meat.

Frank Perdue, Arthur's son, took over in the 1950s and transformed the company. He vertically integrated feed milling, hatching, growing, and processing, and in 1968 began selling chicken under the Perdue name itself, a first in an industry where poultry was an unbranded commodity. His "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" television ads made him one of the most recognized executives in America and built Perdue into the East Coast's dominant chicken brand.

Jim Perdue, Frank's son, became chairman in 1991 and led the company's expansion beyond commodity chicken: acquisitions of Coleman Natural, Niman Ranch, and SiPleat brands pushed Perdue into natural, organic, and antibiotic-free categories. The company committed to no-antibiotics-ever production across its chicken in 2016, among the first major US producers to do so.

In 2021 the company hired its first non-family CEO, Kevin McAdams, a poultry industry veteran, while Jim Perdue retained the chairmanship. The fourth generation moved into executive roles during the same period. Today Perdue is consistently ranked among the largest US poultry producers, processing tens of millions of pounds weekly through plants concentrated on the Eastern Seaboard and Midwest.