Led by No. 1 Walmart, these Fortune 500 firms find Arkansas feels like home.
Collectively, the four Arkansas companies featured in the 2024 Fortune 500 saw more than $733 billion in revenue in 2023 and employed more than 2.2 million people — that’s more than 7.3% of the entire Fortune 500’s employment base.
Those totals are helped by the fact that No. 1 on the publication’s annual list is Bentonville-based Walmart, with 2.1 million employees and more than $648 billion in revenue alongside a comparatively modest profit of $15.5 billion.
The other three? No. 85 Tyson Foods, based in Springdale; No. 214 Murphy USA, based in El Dorado; and No. 316 J.B. Hunt Transport Services, based in Lowell but visible up and down the highways of the United States. So are Murphy USA’s fuel and convenience stores — most of them conveniently located near (but not owned by) a Walmart store.
Among tens of thousands of major corporate facility projects worldwide recorded in Site Selection magazine’s global Conway Projects database in the decade between September 1, 2014, and September 1, 2024, Walmart and Tyson Foods alone have combined for 129 of them, with several of them in their home state.
Hey, It’s Good to Be Back Home Again
If you go looking for news about Walmart’s headquarters, you won’t find much. That’s because the company calls it the “home office” for a reason reinforced by the massive new 12-building home office campus under construction in Bentonville: Leaders want employees to feel at home.
That feeling starts with the warm feel and sustainable efficiency of mass timber construction and continues throughout the campus design, including buildings with names like Upstream, Together, Change and Sparky. Based on a cluster of neighborhoods and developed to integrate with the surrounding community, that design has followed three principles that could easily serve as economic development principles for the company’s home state:
- Create a winning work environment.
- Stay true to who we are.
- Nurture people and place.
Projected to be ready for move-in in 2025, the 350-acre site will feature:
- The 200,000 square foot Sam Walton Hall, a place for convening, learning, celebrating and remembering that will contain artifacts such as Sam Walton’s first aircraft, a 1946 Ercoupe;
- The 8th & Plate food hall, which will feature 12 restaurants, including regional favorite Ozark Mountain Bagel;
- Food truck plazas and seven coffee shops, including collaborations with local roasters Airship, Heroes and Onyx, whose bike-though and bike-over coffee shop, The Camp @ Bud’s Preserve, will be located along the Razorback Greenway.
Tyson Foods World Headquarters, Springdale, Arkansas
Photo courtesy of Tyson Foods
Tyson Cultivates Solutions and Connections
Ever since John W. Tyson and his family delivered farm-raised chickens from his truck in the 1930s, Tyson has cultivated family ties of many types in Arkansas. That includes startups.
In July, the company’s venture capital arm Tyson Ventures hosted its third annual pitch event, welcoming 12 companies from seven states, Canada and the UK to present their supply chain-related innovations, ultimately choosing five of them for continued talks with the business. “Transformational solutions come from all over, and to see so much strategic potential in one place was inspiring,” said Heidi Solomon, vice president of global strategy for Tyson Foods, in a release. “When protein supply chains become more efficient, we can all do more to feed the world like family and fulfill our corporate mission. The global reach and scale of Tyson Foods can help these companies apply their groundbreaking solutions to make a difference.”
Tyson Ventures has invested more than $100 million in emerging proteins, new technologies for food and worker safety and improved food production since it launched in 2016.
J.B. Hunt is Innovating
J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. (JBHT) is a component of the Dow Jones Transportation Average. The company’s services include intermodal, dedicated, refrigerated, truckload, less-than-truckload, flatbed, single-source, last-mile, transload and other shipping options.
Recently, the company announced two new expansions and innovations. On September 27, 2024, JBHT announced that it had added 20 new Nikola Tre fuel cell electric vehicles to its fleet to expand sustainability solutions for its customers along the West Coast.
On October 2, 2024, JBHT announced the establishment of its first-ever Logistics Venture Lab (LVL). The logistics and freight-focused arm will aim to launch as many as six startups over the next three years to solve “core strategic challenges within the industry,” the company said. “The startups, the first of which the companies target to begin launching in 2025, are inspired by opportunities to drive efficiency and solve common problems faced by providers in the logistics and freight transportation space.”
Murphy USA Adds to Portfolio
Murphy USA is a nationwide chain of fuel and convenience stores that now has more than 1,700 locations in 27 states — mostly in the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and Northeast. During a recent earnings call, the company that began in 1996 announced that it was continuing a solid growth course, adding 40 new stores and remodeling another 47 stores in 2024 and 2025. In January 2021, Murphy acquired the QuickCheck brand to bolster its portfolio.
“Our efforts to frontload our real estate pipeline have paid off as we’ve seen more stores exit the permitting process than expected,” President and CEO Andrew Clyde said on the earnings call. “As such, we are updating our (capital expenditure) projections for the year as we take advantage of this beneficial timing.”
Murphy currently ranks No. 4 on the CSP Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience store companies by total store count.
