By Patrick Thomas | Photographs by Seeger Gray

The 33-year-old heir to a meatpacking dynasty can judge a slaughterhouse by its parking lot.

Is the grass freshly cut? Are there flowers planted around the facility? Are the workers who are walking through the doors smiling? These are telltale signs of how well a meatpacking plant is performing, according to Wesley Batista Filho, chief executive for the U.S. business of JBS, the world's largest meatpacker.

"It shows that people take care of the plant," he said in an interview in New York this past week. "It's a big deal."

Batista Filho -- a member of JBS's founding family -- honed his eye for a slaughterhouse as a teenager, working the night shift at JBS's beef plant in Greeley, Colo., 11 miles from the company's American headquarters. In his early 20s, he ran slaughterhouses in South America.

Now he is overseeing operations that supply about 1 out of every 5 pounds of the beef and pork products that Americans consume. JBS directly listed its shares for trading in the U.S. this month, forgoing the typical roadshow.

The Brazilian has spent his life around the business founded by his grandfather and is likely to be the third generation of Batista men to run all of JBS. He now oversees the company's most important market as JBS made its U.S. stock listing debut, a long-coveted feat and part of the family-controlled firm's effort to move on from past bribery scandals that temporarily pushed his billionaire father and uncle out of the executive ranks.

JBS's business is building momentum, too. American consumers' protein fixation helped the São Paulo-based company make nearly $2 billion in profit for 2024, bouncing back from a loss the prior year. Now with a market value of $15 billion, JBS employs 280,000 people globally and, in the U.S., it is the largest beef company and the second-largest processor of chicken and pork.

JBS's debut on the New York Stock Exchange followed a decade of delays, including pushback from politicians and environmental groups who have long accused JBS of deforestation. Now that it is finally listed, JBS hopes to entice more investors and lower borrowing costs. It is also a symbolic milestone.

On Wednesday, Batista Filho walked across the NYSE trading floor with his 91-year-old grandfather, José Batista Sobrinho, the family patriarch whose initials form the name of the company. They stood beside Batista Filho's father and uncle, ringing the bell above of a crowd of JBS executives and Batista family members, including his wife and their young son.

"It's a special moment for sure," Batista Filho said.

Born in Brazil, Batista Filho -- "Filho" means junior in Portuguese -- is the son of Wesley Batista, the former CEO of JBS and current board member.

Batista Filho's grandfather was working as a butcher in the Brazilian countryside when he established the company in 1953, slaughtering a couple head of cattle a day to help feed construction workers in the area.

After his sons Wesley and Joesley took over the business, they built JBS into a meat juggernaut in South America and later used government-backed loans to help fund an international acquisition spree that included Swift Beef, Pilgrim's Pride, Cargill's pork operations and Smithfield Foods' beef business. The brothers control about 85% of the voting power at JBS today.

While his father was expanding JBS's reach, Batista Filho wanted to study abroad. At 15, he attended a boarding school in the mountains of Switzerland, where he met his now-wife and became fluent in several languages.

He attended Colorado State University while interning at JBS on a night-shift production line at 19. After falling asleep in classes, he dropped out to focus on learning the ropes of the family business, he said in a 2021 interview with his Swiss boarding school.

Early in his career, Batista Filho's father counseled him to be the first to arrive and the last to leave. "You will have more time to learn, and it will help you earn the respect of your peers," his father told him, according to the school interview.

After leaving Colorado, he managed a small JBS plant in Uruguay that processed about 600 head of cattle a day. In 2012, at age 21, Batista Filho moved up to lead the company's beef operations in Uruguay and Paraguay. A year later, he went to run the Canada business. He took over JBS's U.S. beef business by 2014.

Batista Filho was promoted to the company's global leadership ranks in 2017 following a corruption scandal in Brazil. His father and uncle admitted to bribing politicians and spent several months in jail. Five years ago, they settled U.S. corruption charges.

Batista Filho wasn't implicated in the probes. "You need to look forward, " said the executive, who keeps a low profile. "That's what we are doing as an executive team...and as a family and growing the business."

JBS Chief Financial Officer Guilherme Cavalcanti remembers when he first met Batista Filho eight years ago. "I said, 'Wow, this guy is young,'" Cavalcanti said. "But when he started working at JBS, I was really impressed with his experience. He would be succeeding anywhere."

An early riser who enjoys cooking, Batista Filho is a lean operator. When he sat among JBS's beef employees at the Greeley, Colo., headquarters, he kept a nearly empty, plain desk. Sometimes the only thing on it was his mate, a South American herbal caffeinated drink similar to tea and the pick-me-up he prefers over coffee. He kept a water jug labeled JBS Paraguay next to a cup crafted from a cow horn.

Batista Filho is running a meat business that generates more than half of JBS's roughly $80 billion in annual revenue. It isn't an easy time to be in the beef business: America's cattle supply is at its lowest level since 1951, pushing cattle prices to record highs and raising costs for meat companies like JBS that buy livestock. Labor markets are expected to become tighter for meatpackers because of Trump administration immigration policies.

Batista Filho has responded to the cattle shortage with initiatives like the company's white bone program, directing workers to pick carcasses clean as they move down processing lines.

Last month, he met with city leaders and pork producers in Perry, Iowa, where the company is building a $135 million sausage plant. JBS is also planning an expansion into the egg industry and investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster some of its largest American beef plants.

At an investor event that followed the bell-ringing ceremony at the NYSE, Batista Filho frequently switched between Portuguese and English as he talked to guests. Investors and analysts in attendance spoke as if it was a given that he would one day soon be elevated to global CEO.

"I don't know if there is a legacy of mine. It's just doing what we're doing, having fun, growing the business," Batista Filho said. "When you do stuff that you like, when you're having fun, you don't work."

Write to Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 27, 2025 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)

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