Joseph Grendys

Early life Grendys was born in Chicago in the early 1960s. His father was a butcher who was also involved in the wholesale and retail meat trade. His grandparents emigrated to the United States from Poland.

Career Grendys started full-time at Koch Foods in the mid-1980s, when it had just 13 employees.

In 2011, Koch employed 14,000 people, had an annual turnover of $2.8 billion, and was one of America's five largest "fully-integrated chicken processors."

In a 2014 interview, Grendys stated that he planned to acquire more companies and that he might branch out into another protein, but that he was "not sure what that protein would be yet." Rather than running a chicken company, he sees it as "the business of converting corn and soybeans into meat protein." On August 7, 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided several food processing plants in Mississippi, one of which was the Morton plant of Koch Foods. Three buses were used to shuttle off workers alleged to be undocumented.

Personal life Grendys lives "relatively modestly in the Chicago bungalow where he grew up and drives a beat-up old Cadillac." Grendys also owns a $3 million house in Chattanooga, Tenn.