Our annual Top 100© report predates even me, but legend has it this is our 49th year of producing the Top 100, THE best list of the largest food & beverage processors in the U.S. and Canada.
Why the best? 1. Because we do the research ourselves. 2. Because we go to great lengths to include not just public but private companies. 3. We base their sales only on consumer-ready (but not necessarily branded) food and drink products. 4. We count only products these companies make themselves in U.S. and Canadian plants.
Every year we refine it. Some companies are added, some disappear. We adjust some sales figures if we learn a contract manufacturer did most of the work or if products were made at an offshore plant.
While lots of effort went into creating the story and list for the magazine, even more work goes into what's on our website. There you can find a longer version of the story (www.foodprocessing.com/55129383) -- a longer story means more analysis -- as well as the big chart (www.foodprocessing.com/top100/2024chart). Most importantly, if you click on any company name in that chart, you're taken to a lengthy profile of that company, including key executives, subsidiaries and parent firms, brands(!), food categories and, in most cases, the locations of their plants.
Go there once (www.foodprocessing.com/top100/2024chart) bookmark it and come back often.
Corrections from past months
In my June/July Editor’s Plate, I made a reference to Hydrox cookies being an "imitation" of Oreos. As two readers pointed out, and Wikipedia confirms, Hydrox came first, debuting in 1908. Oreo was a copycat of that cookie, arriving in 1912. Apologies to Gerry and Betsy, who kept me on my toes.
Going back a month further, in my May column I made a reference to Covid originating with a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, China. While that was the accepted explanation for a long time, now even U.S. government authorities are split on the origin; the FBI more or less "officially" thinks it came from the Chinese government’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. FWIW.