Seaboard Corporation

Seaboard Corporation is a diversified and vertically integrated agribusiness and ocean transportation company. Our goal across all of our business lines is to provide exceptional value to our customers. Through diversity in geographic regions and business segments, we are well positioned to take advantage of a robust U.S. economy and the dynamic changes taking place overseas. Key Dates: Company merges with Hathaway Industries, Inc.; name changes to Seaboard Allied Milling. Company sells U.S. milling operations to Cargill, Inc.; name shortened to Seaboard Corporation. Seaboard Corporation is a diversified company whose largest business consists of pork production for domestic and foreign consumption. Seaboard and its subsidiaries also sell commodities such as grains and seeds, process citrus fruit and seafood, grow sugar cane, make wine, generate electrical power, mill flour and animal feed, and ship cargo between the United States and points south. The company was a leading poultry producer until January 2000, when it sold this operation to ConAgra for $375 million. Seaboard is publicly traded, but 75 percent of its shares are held by the Seaboard Flour Company, which is owned by heirs of founder Otto Bresky. Seaboard traces its roots to the early part of the 20th century. Company founder Otto Bresky started out in 1916 as a flour broker, buying his own mill in Atchison, Kansas, two years later. In 1919 he purchased the Imperial Brewing Company of Kansas City and converted it to a milling operation. Bresky's company became known as Rodney Milling in 1928 when he purchased a company of that name, which he then incorporated under. Gradual growth continued over the next three decades, with purchases of Ismert-Hinke Milling in 1938 and Consolidated Flour Mills in 1950. In 1959 Rodney Milling merged with Hathaway Industries, Inc. and became a publicly traded company. The newly united firms took the name of Seaboard Allied Milling Corporation. Seaboard soon began expanding, following a strategy of building flour mills near populous areas in the East and Southeast. The first of these was completed in 1962 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with another built in 1966 in Jacksonville, Florida. Also in 1966, the company initiated its first overseas venture, investing in a flour mill in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in conjunction with Continental Grain Company. Shortly after this more moves were made abroad, with mills built in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1968 and Georgetown, Guyana, a year later. Back in the United States, Seaboard built a mill in Culpepper, Virginia, in 1970 and enlarged it just two years later. The year 1973 saw founder and patriarch Otto Bresky step down from a leadership role after more than half a century with the company. His son, Seaboard President Harry Bresky, took the reins of the still largely family-owned concern and kept it on its course of expansion. The 1970s saw more mills built in New York, Louisiana, Liberia, and Nigeria, and the expansion of businesses in Ecuador and Liberia. The company also purchased a mill in Tennessee and an Ecuadorian animal feed company, and opened another feed plant in Nigeria. Seaboard capped the decade with construction of a new corporate headquarters in Merriam, Kansas. In the face of increasing competition, the company made a dramatic strategic shift in early 1982 when it sold its American flour mills to Cargill, Inc. for $40 million. Its name was also shortened during the year, to Seaboard Corporation. The company was now preparing to move in new directions, and soon founded a subsidiary, Seaboard Marine, Ltd., to ship goods between the United States and Central and South America. Two baking companies in Puerto Rico were also purchased at this time. At the beginning of 1984 Seaboard entered the poultry business with the purchase of Central Soya's poultry division, which consisted of three facilities located in the southern United States. The processing plants, in Athens and Canton,