America's Largest Private Companies · Cargill $154B, Koch $125B
Cargill tops U.S. private companies at $154B in annual revenue, with Koch Industries second at $125B — the only two above $100B. More than half of the top 15 sit in food, retail and beverages (Publix $60B, Mars $55B, H-E-B $50B, Reyes $44B), staple categories whose steady demand supports enormous scale. Non-food leaders span car rental (Enterprise $38B), asset management (Fidelity $33B) and construction — quiet names, public-company-large. Today's high-valuation AI startups still earn a fraction of these traditional operators.
Why this matters for B2B
The private-company list is a map of who actually moves goods. Grocers and wholesale distributors — Publix, H-E-B, Reyes — are exactly the retail and distribution counterparties a B2B supplier sells into, and several (H-E-B, Reyes) are Texas-based, on Cube-Age's doorstep. It's also a reminder that the biggest buyers are often private and low-profile: revenue, not press coverage, is the signal. See the retail channel and U.S. market data.
Source: Forbes, most recent fiscal-year revenue as of December 2025. Visualization: Visual Capitalist ("America's Largest Private Companies by Revenue"). Original image reproduced above with source attribution intact.