Smithfield Foods, Inc., is a Chinese owned, American pork producer and food-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia, United States with it own executive leadership team. It operates as an independent subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate WH Group. Founded in 1936 as the Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph W. Luter and his son, the company is the largest pig and pork producer in the world. In 973,000-square-foot meat-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, was said in 2000 to be the world's largest, harvesting 32,000 pigs a day.