[9][10] William Vestey earlier worked in stockyards in Chicago in the late 19th century, and realised that the meat waste could be used in products which were then in short supply in Britain.

He and Edmund started a canning business, before foreseeing that the meat could be worth even more if the vast supplies of beef in the Americas could be transported and delivered fresh rather than canned, so they first experimented with a friend's cold store.

Creating their own shipping company, the Blue Star Line, they supplied outlets in the UK, USA, Europe and South Africa for over fifty years.

[10] In 1912 they purchased for £250,000 the Ord River cattle station in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia from investor Sam Copley.

The family later administered the business through a Paris trust that enabled it to legally avoid an estimated total of £88m in UK tax until the loophole was closed in 1991.

Having saved cash reserves for the purpose, they entered into a price war with the US-owned importers to largely drive them from the UK market.

The business also owned the Downsway supermarket group, which was based in East Anglia and had 80 stores at the time of its sale to rival Fine Fare in 1978.

[citation needed] By the middle of the twentieth century, the Vestey Group had acquired a large amount of grazing land in Australia, and used many Aboriginal Australians as cheap labour.

They were paid less than a quarter of the minimum wage of non-Indigenous workers and sometimes only received salt beef, bread, tobacco, flour, sugar and tea instead of a salary.

[18] The line owned a number of refrigerated ships (Reefers), and business later expanded to countries as far apart as Egypt and China, carrying passengers in addition to various foodstuffs.

[10] By 2000, the vertically integrated model was broken up, and separate companies created to run farming, cold storage, and food import and distribution businesses.

[10] In Venezuela in 2005, state troops occupied a cattle ranch owned by the Vestey Group, under a 2001 land use reform programme instituted by the Hugo Chávez government.