Tyson Foods Headquarters, Springdale, Arkansas, USA. John Tyson started his company in the Great Depression, bolting crates to the bed of his pickup truck to deliver chickens to farmers. Today, Tyson Foods, with 130,000 employees in 120 facilities, produces 20 percent of all the meat eaten in the United States. Roughly half of its chicken, beef, and pork is sold in grocery stores, with the other half going to McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, Burger King, etc., in the form of McNuggets, chicken for chicken sandwiches, or pepperoni for pizzas. Tyson processes hogs and cattle but doesn't raise them. However, it starts chickens at breeder farms, develops them in hatcheries, and then raises and processes them. The meat and poultry processing business is highly competitive. Chicken, beef, and pork prices have been dropping thanks to industry overproduction, which will only be made worse by Tyson and its competitors over the next three years as they increase pork-processing production by 10 percent and chicken-processing production by 8.4 percent. Tyson was hoping that record demand for chicken from consumers and fast food chains would raise chicken prices, but over- supplies pushed prices lower, cutting Tyson's chicken profits in half. Jon Kathol, who heads Tyson's investor relations, said, "We have never seen this in our lifetime." Tariffs on beef, chicken, and pork products hurt sales by significantly raising prices in key international markets. For example, with China losing 55 percent of its hogs to a devastating disease, sales of Tyson pork should have soared in China. But a Chinese tariff of 72 percent on US pork effectively stopped Tyson's sales in China. Tyson and other pork producers responded by storing 575 million pounds of frozen pork in refrigerated warehouses until tariffs are eventually reduced or eliminated. Tyson also faces a new competitive threat from manufacturers of plant-based meat substitute products like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Beyond Meat's vegetarian Impossible Burger, for example, gets rave reviews because it feels, looks, and tastes like real beef. One consumer said, "Every single time I order it, I think they must have made a mistake and given me beef instead." Demand is so strong that customer visits increased by 17 percent when Burger King added Impossible Whoppers to its menu at 7,000 restaurants. Impossible Foods is raising the ante with its new Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage products. Before a national rollout, Burger King will first test Impossible Pork at a limited number of restaurants by offering the new Impossible Croissan'wich, made with egg, cheese, and Impossible Sausage. Kroger, the largest US grocery chain and one of Tyson's largest customers, is rolling out its own private label Simple Truth plant-based burgers, ham, turkey, and sausages. Tyson's meat-processing competitors, Hormel, Perdue, and Smithfield, are taking similar steps. Smithfield's John Pauley said, "There is a growing demand out there. We'd be foolish not to pay attention." Sales of plant-based meat rose 10 percent last year to $5 billion. With intense competition and too much production capacity in the meat-processing industry driving down prices, a significant slowdown in meat exports because of aggressive overseas tariffs, and a growing threat from new competitors manufacturing plant-based meat substitutes, Tyson Foods is facing a number of critical strategic decisions. To formulate effective strategies, we must find good answers to these fundamental questions. First, what business are we in? Are we primarily a supplier of beef, chicken, and pork to grocers, or are we a supplier of processed beef, chicken, and pork (e.g., Chicken McNuggets) to restaurant chains? Moving forward, what business should we be in? Second, are there potential business opportunities among the threats to our business? If so, what are they? Finally, how do we grow? Should it be via internal growth, meaning with existing products, or by creating and growing new businesses? Or should we grow externally by merging with or acquiring other companies in the same or different businesses? In other words, in pursuing growth, should we build or buy