History
Seaboard's history is deeply tied to grain. Otto Bresky purchased his first flour mill in Atchison, Kansas, in 1918. During the next 40 years he would purchase additional flour mills, mostly in Kansas, under the name Rodney Milling.
In 1959 the company went public through a merger with Hathaway Industries, Inc., a publicly traded company. The name changed to Seaboard Allied Milling Corporation, and stock was traded under the symbol SEB.
The newly formed company began concentrating on milling operations closer to major metropolitan areas along the East Coast and in the Southeast. Beginning in the early 1960s Seaboard built five U.S. mills over the course of a 14-year period. The company's first investment outside the U.S. was the joint acquisition of a flour mill in Ecuador. Seaboard later constructed mills in Sierra Leone, Guyana, Liberia and Nigeria.
When Otto Bresky retired as Seaboard's chairman and member of the board of directors in 1973, his son H. Harry Bresky took his place. After serving in WWII, Harry joined his father in the milling business and assumed the title of president in 1967, then later CEO. Seaboard built its current corporate headquarters in Merriam, Kansas in 1980.
In 1982 Seaboard sold its domestic flour milling division to Cargill, Inc. and changed its name to Seaboard Corporation, while continuing its milling operations outside the U.S. Harry Bresky and Seaboard took noticeable steps to diversify the company, initially by entering the poultry industry and by further international investments. Even though Seaboard eventually sold these original poultry interests to ConAgra in 2000 for $375 million,[4] the poultry business proved the efficiency of a vertically integrated business model. This model of integration would continue to be successful in Seaboard's expansion and growth.[5]
Seaboard Marine, Ltd. was formed in 1983 to provide containerization services between the U.S. and other international ports. In 1986 Mount Dora Farms, Inc. was established in Latin America to produce fruits and vegetables. The company utilized its marine transportation division to ship its produce from South America to Miami. Today Mount Dora Farms, Seaboard's produce division, specializes in processing jalapeños in Honduras to ship to the U.S. and European markets.
Also during the decade of the ‘80s, Seaboard purchased two baking companies in Puerto Rico and ventured into shrimp farming in Ecuador and the Honduras. It constructed a new polypropylene bag plant in Nigeria. The Puerto Rico bakeries were sold in 1998, and after a brief entry into salmon farming, Seaboard eventually sold off all seafood investments in the early 2000s.
Transcontinental Capital Corporation, Ltd. formed in 1989 with the purpose of supplying electrical power to the Dominican Republic. The new subsidiary was the first independent power producer in the Dominican Republic.
In 1990, Seaboard Corporation began pork production and processing. The company's pork division, Seaboard Foods, acquired a pork processing plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota. As it had done with poultry, Seaboard quickly began to invest in processing pork, constructing its first feeder pig facility and feed mill in Northeast Colorado in 1991. In 1992 Seaboard began construction on a state of the art pork processing facility in Guymon, Oklahoma. To support the Guymon facility, Seaboard constructed feed mills in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. Guymon eventually opened in 1996. The $110 million plant had the capacity to process over four million hogs annually, employing more than 1,000 workers, utilizing two shifts. The Minnesota pork processing plant closed in 1994.[4]
That same year, in 1996, Seaboard acquired an interest in Tabacal Agroindustria, an Argentine company engaged in sugar cane production and refining and citrus production. Two years later, in 1998, Seaboard Corporation purchased a controlling interest in a winery in Bulgaria.
Seaboard added Daily's® Premium Meats, a bacon processor with two processing plants in Salt Lake City, Utah and Missoula, Montana to its integrated operations in 2005. Seaboard also has an exclusive agreement to market Triumph Foods pork products utilizing a processing plant in St. Joseph, Missouri.
H. Harry Bresky retired in July 2006, but remained chairman of the board until his death in March 2007. Steven J. Bresky, his son, then served as Seaboard Corporation's president and CEO and its director and chairman of the board until his death in 2020.[6]
Seaboard once again entered the poultry business with the acquisition of half ownership in Butterball, LLC in 2010.
With continued expansion in commodities trading, alcohol distillery operations and specialty crops processing abroad, Seaboard exceeded $4 billion in revenue by 2010. In 2011 Seaboard Corporation made the Fortune 500 for the first time in company history.
In 2018, Seaboard acquired the West-African agri-food group Mimran, increasing its flour and feed milling capacity with approximately 15 percent to over 24,000 metric tons per day.[7]
