In a sheltered bit of the Chesapeake Bay in front of Jim Perdue’s home in Berlin, Maryland, the scion of America’s most famous chicken family raises clams. Each year he sells about a thousand to local crab shacks. The rest are eaten by the Perdue clan. The clam farm is the last remainder of his dream of striking out on his own and farming seafood, which inspired him, in 1974 at 25, to walk away from his family’s successful poultry business.
“You don’t know if you’re getting a pat on the back because you did a good job, or because your name is on the door,” says the 77-year-old Perdue, from a barn on the property. The structure is adorned with memorabilia from the company’s history, including the famous ads featuring his father, Frank, with his signature slogan: “It takes a tough man to sell a tender chicken.”
Aaron Kotowski for Forbes
Frank was the legendary poultry magnate who grew his own father’s hatchery (founded in 1920) into a $1 billion (sales) business by the time he turned over the reins to Jim in 1991. Jim had come back to the family coup a few years earlier—and only after Frank threatened to sell the company unless he returned.
“My dad didn’t trust a lot of people,” Perdue says, “but he trusted me.”
Frank, who died in 2005 at 84, still looms large at Perdue Farms. But in the 35 years since Jim first became chairman and CEO, it’s the third generation who has supercharged the family business into America’s fourth-largest chicken producer with $9.2 billion in 2025 revenue. Under his control, Perdue Farms has also become the country’s largest organic soybean oil producer (over 500 million pounds annually) and one of the biggest grain traders overall (over $2 billion of grain each year). He has also avoided the third-generation curse—it’s estimated that only 10% of family-owned businesses or less make it to the fourth—and grown the company nearly 10 times over.
“The idea is to add value and to upgrade,” says Perdue. “It’s not like we need to go out and buy more chickens right now.” Building on the strategy begun by his father—using vertical integration to focus on premium products—Perdue Farms is now America’s largest organic chicken producer (more than a 30% market share) and largest organic grain purchaser (roughly 20 billion pounds of grain). Aside from poultry, thanks to its ownership of Niman Ranch and Coleman, Perdue is among the country’s largest producer of pasture-raised meat—Niman’s regenerative organic certified beef program, for example, has cattle grazing across 105,000 acres and plans to reach 250,000 acres by 2028.
Perdue spent over 14 years between 2002 and 2016 transitioning every one of its chicken farms to being fully antibiotic-free. Larger competitors such as Tyson have recently reneged on their own promises to go antibiotic-free, blaming the cost. But Perdue says antibiotic-free farming is not actually more expensive. The company has implemented a multi-pronged approach that includes decreasing the density of livestock on farms and keeping where the animals live clean, well-ventilated and well-lit.
Perdue says it’s all to breed a tastier chicken. But it’s also more profitable. Perdue Farms chicken sells at higher prices than other large-scale producers, and Forbes estimates that the company’s EBITDA profit margin tops 15% compared to Tyson’s 6% and JBS-backed Pilgrim’s Pride’s 7%. That extra cushion helps Perdue withstand the swings and cycles common in agricultural businesses.
“We’re not the cheapest chicken out there,” he says plainly.
Hatching A Plan: “You only get one shot with a family business,” says Jim Perdue, who has grown Perdue Farms tenfold since taking over from his father in 1991.
Aaron Kotowski for Forbes
It adds up to a substantial family fortune, which Forbes estimates at more than $5 billion. That includes not only the equity stake in the business (worth $4 billion) but also the value of the dividends which have been paid out since 2005. “That was to maintain family unity,” says Perdue. “My dad was so focused on the company. He wanted every penny to go back into the business.”
The family still owns 100% of the business and Perdue shares it with his three sisters as well as their children and grandchildren. There are currently about 50 Perdue family members—including 5 members of the fourth generation—with jobs at the company.
“We’re all temporary stewards of this business,” says fourth-generation Chris Oliviero, 52, who previously ran Niman Ranch and is today Perdue’s senior vice president for commercial strategy and business planning. “And we are willing to do all the hard stuff.”
While Jim credits Frank—who dropped out of college to take over his father’s one-employee firm in 1940—as the real visionary, it’s actually he who has steered the family business through nearly four decades of tumult, from grain cycles that bankrupted competitors, to drastic industry consolidation to avian flu threats to the Trump tariffs that shutdown sales of soybeans to China.
Jim Perdue grew up across the street from the first chicken houses that his grandfather, Arthur, built. Throughout high school, his sisters worked in the office while Jim took care of maintenance. All the while, Frank hawked Perdue chicken on television with his ubiquitous advertisements. While studying biology at Wake Forest, Jim Perdue met his future wife, Jan. After graduation, the young couple moved to Maryland so Perdue could join the family firm as a flock advisor. But he hated being a nepo-executive and quit after nine months.
“It was a very tearful conversation, but I just knew I couldn’t stand working there at that moment because I had no confidence,” he recalls. “I did it to go into a whole new career.”
Over the next nine years, Perdue earned a PhD in marine biology from the University of Washington in Seattle and worked with oyster farmers in the Pacific Northwest. Just as he was considering becoming a professor, Frank gave him that ultimatum: Come back to Perdue or he would sell the company.
“You only get one shot with a family business,” he recalls.
Generation Next: Jim Perdue with his father, Frank and his grandfather, Arthur, who founded the company in 1920. In 1995, Jim had the daunting task of replacing his father in ads.
Perdue
Perdue returned as an entry-level quality assurance trainee and quickly moved through production and sales roles. He took over Perdue Farms in 1991 as the chicken industry was growing at 5% a year.
He also had the daunting task of replacing his father in the company’s iconic commercials. A market research study determined that the general public would accept an heir as the company’s new spokesperson as long as they worked in the business. Or as Perdue explains, “They can’t live on a yacht in Florida. They have to look over the chickens just like Frank did.”
In his first five years as CEO, he doubled total revenue to over $2 billion and he attributes that milestone to empowering his employees. One of the first things he did when he took over the company was to ask Perdue executives what they wanted to do next. He found was that many of the executives were complacent—his father had hired employees who were good soldiers, not good generals. Some 30% of managers left because, as he recalls, “before that, the strategic plan was in the head of Frank Perdue.” To the executives that remained, he emphasized focusing on the consumer, a simple lesson that can be surprisingly difficult to remember.
“Most people start to look inside and make life better for the business rather than for the consumer,” Perdue says. “You would think it’s obvious. It’s not.”
Listening to consumers is what pushed Perdue to go entirely antibiotic-free, a healthy food strategy that continued across other acquisitions. In 2011 Perdue acquired Coleman, then America’s largest organic chicken producer and four years later Perdue bought the pasture-raised pork and beef producer Niman Ranch.
“We have a reputation—we acquire somebody, we don’t try to make it a Perdue operation,” he says. “Let’s let them continue doing what they’re doing and let’s learn from what they’re doing.”
That strategy has led Perdue’s eldest son, Ryan, who joined the company in 2010, to focus on the next generation of brands. He founded what’s now one of America’s largest premium pet treat brands, Full Moon (estimated annual revenue: $100 million) and then led the acquisition of pasture-raised chicken brand Pasturebird, which has scaled from less than $10 million in annual revenue over the past five years to an estimated $50 million.
Ryan, 47, who now appears in Perdue commercials with his brother Chris, says he likes to think in terms of decades: “I’m not the type of person that is going to do things on a whim because it’s a flashy trend. I believe deeply in methodically planning out meaningful change.”
Adds Chris, 42, who oversees marketing and e-commerce: “We want to see eye-to-eye with that next generation that’s coming to really be worthy of their trust. We’ve got to earn that.”
The fourth and future generations will have a lot to manage as their family gets deeper into its second century in business. Perdue now works with 6,200 grain farmers, 1,800 poultry farmers, 600 hog farmers and 85 cattle farmers—all of whom want to earn as much as possible for their efforts.
Jim Perdue gets that. He knows what it feels like to farm food and get squeezed by another business further down the supply chain. When he started selling his clams to a nearby seafood restaurant and wholesaler, he accepted their offer of 28 cents per clam and didn’t question it until he walked into the restaurant another day and ordered 12 steamed clams for $17.
After doing the math in his head, Perdue called his wholesaler and said, “Somebody’s making a lot of money here and it’s not me.” After all, he knows chicken feed when he sees it.