Big Turkey is our cute name for the U.S.' largest turkey producers. Our chart below ranks who they are by the total live weight of turkeys they processed in 2011:
The top three companies in our rankings, Butterball, Jennie-O Turkey Store and Cargill, account for over half of all turkeys processed in the United States.
As we noted yesterday, "Big Turkey" really isn't very profitable. With an average net profit margin of 2.9%, turkey producers, which would be grouped in the "Meat Products" sector of U.S. industries, would rank 171 out of some 215 industrial sectors.
But that's better than it appears - each of the publicly-traded companies that make up the list of companies in the Meat Products industry sector process more kinds of meat than just turkey, which do more to contribute to their profit margins. If not for the turkey segment of their businesses, the sector would have a higher net profit margin.