Daybreak Foods, once South Africa’s fifth largest poultry producer, appears to be near collapse.
The state-owned producer was bought by the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) in 2015, and has been in steep decline since 2025, when senior executives quit and the business faltered. Some 3 400 jobs were reportedly at risk when production and feed supply problems led to the starvation and mass slaughter of chickens. This resulted in criminal prosecutions from animal welfare authorities.
The PIC provided more funding as Daybreak went into business rescue in 2025, but foodformzansi reports that the rescue was unsuccessful and nearly 2 000 employees are to receive retrenchment notices. The company is pursuing what it calls a “lean reactivation plan” and a few hundred jobs will be saved in the planned reactivation of one of the company’s abattoirs.
Dominique Martin, communications officer for the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), said the state had failed to prevent the collapse of the company, despite the huge amounts of public funds spent trying to save it.
“The impending closure of Daybreak will also have a snowball effect on the futures of the wider impoverished rural communities who are already dealing with high unemployment figures,” Martin said.
He explained that the Daybreak failure will also have an extensive effect on the poultry sector as a whole in terms of local supply, consumption and production in Limpopo and Mpumalanga.
“The industry, as a formidable employer in domestic agriculture, has already been hammered by cheap imports and closures in other parts of the country and will inadvertently hinder the goals set out in the Poultry Master Plan,” Martin said.
