Vestey Brothers

The Vestey Group (Vestey Group Ltd) (formerly Vestey Brothers) is a privately owned UK group of companies, comprising an international food product business (that includes meats, dairy products, frozen vegetables, bakery products, food services and trading) and significant cattle ranching and sugar cane farming interests in Brazil and elsewhere. Union International, the former core of the Vestey family business, went into receivership in 1995.

William Vestey (later Lord Vestey) and his younger brother Edmund (later Sir Edmund) established the Vestey empire in 1897 from a family butchery business in Liverpool. They were a pioneer of refrigeration, opening a cold store in London in 1895.

The Vestey brothers were initially sent to South America in an attempt to make their fortune because the economy there was booming. They started by buying game birds and storing them in the cold stores of American companies before shipping them to Liverpool.

These early activities soon developed into importing beef and beef products into the UK, which in turn led to them owning cattle ranches in Brazil, Venezuela and Australia and their own meat processing factories in Argentina, Uruguay (Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay), New Zealand and Australia (in 1914 Vestey Brothers built a meat processing works at Bullocky Point, Darwin, Australia, but closed its operations in 1920 after the Darwin Rebellion).

...
Wikipedia