Don Tyson, 1930-2011

The ‘dumb chicken farmer’ who built a food empire

Don Tyson hated to let any part of a chicken go to waste. While his vast network of processing plants stocked America’s meat counters with chicken breasts, wings, and drumsticks, they used the feathers, blood, and internal organs in pet food and shipped the feet to China, where they’re used in soup stock. But Tyson had little success finding a use for the gizzard, a small, muscular pocket in the bird’s digestive tract. A scheme to add hamburger flavor to gizzards and sell them as a novelty food fell flat. So Tyson contacted someone he knew who worked in corrections, and together they hatched a plan to feed gizzard burgers to prisoners. After inmates sampled them for the first time, Tyson’s acquaintance called him and said, “Don, if we try to serve ’em again, these prisoners are gonna riot.”

Born in Olathe, Kan., Tyson was raised in Arkansas, where he took over the family business after his father and stepmother’s car collided with a train. Although he liked to describe himself as a “dumb chicken farmer,” Tyson turned a small family feed and hauling business into a global food empire, said The Wall Street Journal. He was a ruthless, risk-taking entrepreneur who built on his father’s strategy of controlling all facets of chicken production “to create a national brand of meat, something that few packers had dared to do.” He was one of the first to recognize that the parts of a chicken, when processed and conveniently packaged, could be worth more than the whole. “He took boring old chicken and turned it into the thousands of chicken products we have now,” said industry consultant Paul Aho.

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