The top brass of a well-known deli-meat company is so secretive that its chief financial officer didn’t know who its CEO was as recently as two years ago.
Boar’s Head deli products are found in supermarkets across the U.S., and the company employs thousands of people. But the leadership of this family-owned company is anything but traditional, the New York Times reported.
According to a deposition from 2022, when asked who the CEO of the company was, CFO Steve Kourelakos, a two-decade Boar’s Head veteran, answered, “I’m not sure.”
The response is curious for a top executive at a company that brings in an estimated $3 billion in yearly revenue, the Times reported, based on interviews with employees and others. And many more details about the company would have remained secret were it not for several lawsuits brought by Eric Bischoff against his relatives and the company over the allocation of corporate shares. The public information from those lawsuits, including several depositions from 2022, offer one of the only windows into the everyday operations of the company.
Boar’s Head declined to answer questions from the Times and didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Despite its substantial size, secrecy is apparently the norm at the privately held Boar’s Head, which is run in general obscurity by two families with ties dating back nearly 100 years: the Brunckhorsts and the Bischoffs.
In the early 20th century, the company’s founder, the original Frank Brunckhorst, began selling deli meats out of a horse-drawn carriage in Brooklyn. A couple of decades later he teamed up with his brother-in-law Bruno Bischoff and another business partner to buy a real estate business and build a meat processing plant in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, marking the official birth of Boar’s Head.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and you find a brand that is a mainstay in supermarkets across the country. But a deadly listeria outbreak linked to its Virginia plant earlier this year has damaged its reputation for quality and dragged the company into the public spotlight.
For such a high-profile company, the Times reported that many of the decisions are made above the head of the company’s president, Carlos Giraldo, who replaced longtime president Michael Martella after he retired in 2021.
Behind the scenes, three owners who are also descendants of the company’s 20th-century pioneers are actually pulling the strings. That cohort includes 74-year-old Robert S. Martin, known as Bob, who is a grandson of one of the founders and is named as co-chief executive in court documents; another is Martin’s 50-year-old son, Robert A. Martin, known as Bob Junior; and their 61-year-old cousin Frank Brunckhorst III.
“From morning until night, we’re thinking about Boar’s Head, how to do it. We’re constantly in contact with each other,” Brunckhorst said of himself and the other two decision-makers in a 2022 deposition. “It’s our identities. It’s our life. That’s what we do.”
Yet little can be found online about any of the company’s leaders, and financial and sales information is closely guarded even from its senior employees.
When it came to making decisions, not even the company’s former president could act without approval, he said in a 2022 deposition.
“Frank [Brunckhorst] and Bob [Martin] were always directing the course of the company as far as what we should do and what we shouldn’t do,” he said. “I suggested it. They approved it.”
