Perdue’s new CEO brings a steady hand
Randy Day faces evolving market, trade concerns
SALISBURY — When Perdue Farms named its new CEO in March, a chicken company with a taste for innovation and taking risks embraced something different: stability.
When it comes to branding its own products, shifting away from using antibiotics, recycling residual manure and producing organically raised and processed chickens, the Salisbury-based company has been at the poultry industry’s forefront.
Perdue didn’t bring in some outside business hotshot to succeed CEO Jim Perdue. The company’s executives simply walked down the hall to the office of their chief operating officer, Randy Day, a man who had touched just about all aspects of the company during his nearly 40 years with Perdue.
He may be the safe choice, but he says he’s still willing to take risks.
Day said he’s just as amenable to betting on new technology, business acquisitions and following consumer demands as Perdue had been.
“When you move into this job,” he said, “it gives you an appreciation for what people do and what you need to do to be successful.”
A case in point is the slow-growing chicken issue. In response to a rising chorus of consumers demanding breeds that don’t pack on so many pounds so quickly, grocer Whole Foods told its suppliers last year to start making the switch. While the chicken industry’s trade group criticized the idea as inefficient and wasteful, Day said it’s worth investigating.
“It’s something we’re absolutely studying,” said Day, adding that Perdue’s research farms are examining existing “heritage” breeds to better understand them.
But growing chickens more slowly presents challenges. Broilers are now grow to market size in half the time it once took. The faster-growing chickens mean lower costs of production.
“When you go back in time, unfortunately the cost goes up,” Day said. “It’s up to us to find a solution that meets their needs.”
Day is the fourth CEO in Perdue’s nearly 100-year history and only the second who wasn’t a member of the Perdue family. The other was Donald Mabe, a longtime executive who held the job from 1988 to 1991.
Mabe was succeeded by Jim Perdue, the grandson of the company’s founder, Arthur, and son of the man who turned it into a household name, Frank. Jim Perdue stepped down to make way for Day, but Day still answers to his predecessor, who remains chairman and the company’s brand spokesman.
“Randy has done an outstanding job as chief operating officer over the past year, and he has my trust and the trust of our leadership team in this new role,” Jim Perdue said in a statement. Day “embraces and drives change and will provide the strategic leadership to make sure Perdue Farms remains innovative, relevant and trusted as we move into our next century.”
Day is taking over the day-to-day operations of the nation’s fourth-largest chicken producer. The private company generates more than $6 billion in revenue a year and employs about 19,000 workers.
Growing up in Salisbury and Easton, Day has been surrounded by the chicken industry his whole life. He earned a master’s degree in poultry nutrition from the University of Maryland, College Park and completed the advanced management program at Harvard Business School.
He started at Perdue in 1980 in the logistics department, overseeing the routing of deliveries. Through the years, he also would work in sales, quality assurance, and research and development. In the early 1990s, he oversaw the company’s international expansion.
He was named president of the foods division in 2015 and chief operating officer in 2016.
Day isn’t the only prominent member of his family. His son, Jake, was elected to the Salisbury City Council in 2013 and was immediately named council president; he was elected mayor two years later.
The father and son don’t talk shop at family get-togethers, Randy Day said. But he added that he’s a Salisbury native and is always looking for opportunities to “pitch in if I can” to improve the community.
To that end, when the company went looking for new space for its corporate training center last summer, it settled on a 5,000-square-foot space inside a prominent downtown Salisbury building. Revitalizing the city’s heart has been one of Jake Day’s biggest objectives as mayor. The facility is expected to open later this spring.
Perdue has long shown a willingness to take risks on new ventures, particularly during the past decade. It expanded into new markets by acquiring potential competitors and leveraging their expertise and market resources. One of its most significant additions was Coleman Natural Foods in 2011, which overnight made Perdue the country’s largest producer. It also took Perdue into the pork and beef business for the first time.
The company also has been a leader in automation. At its processing plants, many of the cutting tasks once performed by humans are now completed by machines. Workers’ hands only do the final, finishing cuts.
“We are always looking for new technology that will make jobs easier, especially focused on those repetitious jobs that can cause hand and arm issues,” Day said. “It makes us a better place to work, and more people want to work there.”
Perdue and other fully integrated chicken companies have come under fire in recent years, though, from critics who say their contracts with the farms that raise their chickens are unfair. The companies own everything that turns a profit while the growers are left with those elements that cost money, such as their mortgages and the cost of utilities, they argue.
Last December, the Obama administration announced a slate of new draft regulations governing the relationship between growers and processors. Among other things, the new rules would make it easier for farmers to sue meat packers over unfair practices by no longer requiring them to prove those practices harm the entire market.
The administration of President Donald Trump has since stalled the rule.
Critics misunderstand the business, Day said. The current system rewards growers for being efficient and producing healthier birds while ensuring a baseline income, he said.
“If they’re genuinely concerned, they should probably talk to a variety of family farmers, not just one loud voice,” he said. “It’s a meritocracy. The better you do, the better you get compensated.”
Day is confident that the chicken industry will continue to weather economic ups and downs.
Some business leaders have expressed alarm at Trump’s rhetoric about placing tariffs on countries he sees as having an unfair advantage. Those countries could retaliate by closing their borders to trade, they say.
In the meat industry, markets open and close, sometimes without warning, Day said. He pointed to the latest example: Four Asian countries, including Japan, halted U.S. imports of poultry earlier this month after reports of an avian flu outbreak on a Tennessee farm that sells to Perdue’s competitor, Tyson Foods.
“Every year, some country closes its market to our product for some different reason,” Day said. “Honestly, I’m concerned about it whenever it happens, but I’m not over-concerned about rhetoric over a trade dispute right now. We’ll see how it plays out.”