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A.G. Edwards
Year Founded: 1887
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 15,338
For the better part of its 120 years, the name A.G. Edwards was synonymous with U.S. brokerage houses. Founded by Albert Gallatin Edwards and his son in 1887, it was the first St. Louis brokerage to give Missourians access to the New York Stock Exchange—in fact, it bought its own seat on the exchange before the turn of the century. After going public in 1971, it grew to encompass 740 locations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with offices in London and Geneva. A monster staff of nearly 6,620 financial consultants managed $374 billion in total client assets, and in its final year before being acquired by Wachovia, it posted revenues north of $3.1 billion and more than $331 million in earnings. Among its broker alumni: Marty Bicknell, who left the firm in 2006 to start Mariner Wealth Advisors, supplanting his former employer as a national wealth-management monolith.
Ameren Missouri
Year Founded: 1902
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Electric Utility
Number of Employees: 9,116
Part of a two-state powerhouse—literally—Ameren Missouri is well known to 1.2 million electric customers in the state, as well as 132,000 natural gas customers. In addition to the parent company’s similar numbers of clients in Illinois, Ameren Missouri serves a 64-county area of the state, much of it in the eastern and central regions, as well as a swath to Kansas City’s north. It boasts electric rates that are among the nation’s lowest, with a full range of power sources that include coal- and gas-fired plants, hydroelectric, and the Callaway Nuclear Generating Station, the only one of its kind in the state. All told, they crank out 10,500 megawatts of electricity at their peak. And its history is of significant relevance to weekend boaters on the Lake of the Ozarks: The company’s predecessor, Union Electric, built the Bagnell Dam to form what was then the world’s largest man-made lake in 1931.
Anheuser-Busch
Year Founded: 1852
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 30,000
If you think one ill-advised marketing ploy would dethrone the King of Beers, think again: St. Louis icon Anheuser-Busch remains the undisputed No. 1 in domestic beer production and No. 1 globally, to boot. Industry figures say A-B poured out more than 70 million barrels of golden goodness last year, encompassing five brands that make up precisely half of America’s Top 10 sellers: Michelob Ultra, Bud Light, traditional Budweiser, Busch Light and Natural Light. The linch-pin of it all is the brewery that is home to the company’s headquarters, a towering red-brick structure overlooking Interstate 55. With 6,000 employees at the time—and a nearly unparalleled philanthropic history in St. Louis—the city was sweating bullets after Brazilian-owned InBev acquired it in 2008. While the civic commitment is still strong, broader market trends have been unkind, and the brewer’s local staff has been nearly halved since that sale.
Ascension
Year Founded: 1999
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 175,000
Missouri itself was just seven years old when four sisters from the order of Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul arrived to assemble the state’s first hospital, the forerunner of what today is Ascension. An awful lot has changed in health care since then, including the series of mergers and moves that, ironically, leave one of the state’s biggest health-care providers with precisely zero Show-Me State hospitals among its 140 nationwide. Nonetheless, Ascension is one of the nation’s leading non-profit and Catholic health systems, with a special focus on care for the poor and indigent. Last year that charitable mission provided $2.2 billion in such care and other community benefit programs, a considerable slice of its $28.3 billion in overall revenues. Its human capital numbers 134,000 associates and 35,000 providers, operating in 18 states and the nation’s capital, and last year, they combined to treat and discharge 716,000 patients, perform nearly 600,000 surgeries and deliver 79,000 newborns.
Bass Pro Shops
Year Founded: 1972
Headquarters: Springfield
Sector: Recreation
Number of Employees: 40,000
The history of Missouri entrepreneurship is replete with tales of visionaries who built vast enterprises from scratch—but the starting point for “scratch” leaves much room for interpretation. In Johnny Morris’ case, it was selling fishing bait from the back of his father’s liquor store in Springfield. His empire spanned eight square feet, and that’s where he labored for 13 years to expand it into something considerably bigger—roughly 200 stores nationwide, including those of the competitor he bought out, Cabela’s, plus his marine division outlets. Today, Forbes magazine tabs Morris as the wealthiest person in the state, with a personal fortune of more than $9 billion. Those assets aren’t just gathering interest: Morris has become a huge conservation advocate, investing millions to improve his properties to create some-thing that will bring people off the sofa. Those efforts have earned him the moniker “Walt Disney of the Outdoors.”
BJC HealthCare
Year Founded: 1996
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 27,081
Until this year, BJC was one of Missouri’s biggest health-care systems. Thanks to its merger with Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City in January, it’s more appropriate to see it as the only statewide provider of medical services and research. For now, the Saint Luke’s brand has been retained as the western division, while BJC remains focused on the east, including Saint Louis. Combined, though, they have a consumer market of 6.2 million people, and last year, the revenues of the two organizations topped $13 billion. That border-to-border reach includes 28 hospitals, clinics, and service centers, as well as a patient base that hails not just from Missouri but also Kansas, Illinois, and other Midwestern states. The new organization has 44,000 employees and an annual community impact of $1 billion. It also includes the top three hospitals in Missouri and five of the top 10.
The Boeing Co. Defense Space & Security
Year Founded: 1916
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 17,925
Almost by definition, the list of impactful companies in Missouri features those based in the state. The Boeing Co. is in a category all its own: Though headquartered in Arlington, Va., Boeing casts a wide shadow on the state economy, and especially the local economy in the St. Louis region. Nearly 18,000 advanced manufacturing workers in multiple locations produce—for the time being—the F/A-18 Super Hornet and F-15 combat planes. But the older, manned concept is giving way to new types of aerial weapons and support systems, and Boeing has announced plans to invest $1.8 billion in new production facilities. Among the envisioned products are the Boeing MQ-25 Stingray, an aerial refueling drone that will service those Super Hornets, Lockheed Martin’s F-35C, and Boeing’s EA-18G Growler. To do that, the company will bring on an additional 500 employees in three new facilities, including an assembly building, a post-assembly center, and a specialized laboratory and testing center.
Burns & McDonnell
Year Founded: 1898
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Construction
Number of Employees: 13,500
Founded in Kansas City in 1898 as a two-man operation specializing in civil engineering in the rural Midwest, Burns & McDonnell has emerged as a global player in the design and construction of large-scale infrastructure projects for water systems, power plants and transmission assets, aviation projects and more. Fully 90 years passed before the firm—now employee-owned—made the leap to St. Louis to cement a statewide presence, one it has solidified as the biggest engineering firm based in the Show-Me State. While you can find Burns & Mac’s work around the world, it has been particularly engaged in its home state. Among them: the Interstate 64 Daniel Boone Bridge over the Missouri River in St. Louis, the gas-fired Meramec Energy Center at the confluence of the Mississippi and Meramec rivers in St. Louis County, and the replacement Buck O’Neil Bridge over the Missouri in Kansas City. The company has been on a historic hiring spree in recent years, more than doubling its overall workforce to 13,500 as of this year.
Centene
Year Founded: 1984
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Insurance
Number of Employees: 67,700
There are big companies…and then there is Centene, the unquestioned revenue champion of Missouri Commerce. This health insurance giant has nearly 60,000 employees working to provide coverage for more than 28 million Americans through traditional commercial plans, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs and services. And with 2023 revenue of $154 billion, no other Missouri company came close to its No. 22 ranking on the Forbes 400 this year. That was up 6.5 percent from the Clayton company’s previous year. It’s been a remarkable run over the past 40 years since one-time hospital bookkeeper Betty Brinn started it in Milwaukee as Family Hospital Physician Associates, a non-profit Medicaid plan. It adopted the Centene brand in 1995 and relocated to St. Louis two years later. Explosive growth followed the 2001 conversion to a public company and through years under the leadership of the late Michael Niedorff. Since 2002, Sarah London has been running the show as CEO.
Cerner Corp.
Year Founded: 1979
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Information Technology
Number of Employees: 25,000 at peak
For years, Kansas City’s most successful entrepreneurial story of the late 20th and early 21st centuries seemed to be health-care IT’s immovable object. But the irresistible forces of that market came to bear in recent years, and Cerner’s presences appears to be receding in prominence for Oracle Corp. It acquired Cerner in 2021 and has since slowed regional development here as it sets its sights on a new global headquarters in Nashville. Founded in 1979, Cerner went public in 1986 to become a towering figure in health informatics globally. Founders Neal Patterson, Cliff Illig and Paul Gorup seized the opportunity to help the nation’s health-care system go digital, launching with a single product that blossomed into a suite of population health technologies. Gorup retired in 2015, a year before Patterson’s death; Illig left the Cerner board three years later. They created a company that would surpass $5 billion in revenue and, at one point, stood as the region’s largest private employer (roughly 15,000 here and 25,000 globally) before the sale to Oracle was finalized in 2022.
Commerce Bank
Year Founded: 1865
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 4,618
The FDIC’s digital records only go back to 1992, but 34 years is little more than the blink of an eye in the history of one of the Midwest’s oldest banks. Even then, though, Commerce Bank sat largely where it does today in terms of its financial muscle—near the top. It surpassed the billion-dollar mark on assets in 1971, 106 years after its founding, but needed just another generation to reach $2.5 billion (about $5.5 billion today). Since then, the bank has grown nearly sixfold, surpassing $31 billion as one of the region’s premier brands and a long-established partner to countless Midwestern businesses. Among the notable companies and projects spawned with its backing were Arthur Stillwell’s rail operation (he had already founded Kansas City Southern), Midwest Research Institute (now MRIGlobal), and Trans World Airlines’ overhaul center near KCI.
Cox Health
Year Founded: 1906
Headquarters: Springfield
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 13,970
One philanthropically inclined woman. One modest duplex in Springfield. One vision. That’s how Ellen Burge’s inspiration began nearly 120 years ago. For 40 years, it grew to serve southwest Missouri before running headlong into post-war financial difficulties, at which point another visionary, local businessman Lester Cox, stepped in with financial aid and a network of similarly motivated civic figures, turning a small, struggling hospital into a vibrant regional health-care provider. Today, more than 12,000 employees carry the baton first passed by the likes of Burge and Cox for a system with hospitals in Springfield, Branson, Monett, and Lamar and roughly 70 other clinics and specialty service providers in the network, all coming together to serve nearly one-fourth of the state—25 counties. System-wide, Cox boasts more than 1,100 licensed beds and patient revenues of more than $6.4 billion.
Edward Jones
Year Founded: 1922
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 54,000
When he opened his investment office in 1922, Edward Jones didn’t have many options for places to hang his nameplate: He had a desk. Three chairs. A hat rack. But he also had an unflagging drive to help clients find appropriate, quality investments. That was early in the period we’ve come to know as the Roaring Twenties, as American investors chased dreams of quick wealth from an exploding stock market. A generation later, Edward Jr.—“Ted”—was running the show with a determination to break out of its St. Louis confines. He opened the first branch office in Mexico, Mo., in 1957, set his sights on 300 offices across the region (it took until 1980 to do so), and brought on board John Bachman, who kicked the growth into overdrive: Within five years, the firm had 1,000 offices, well on its way to the 10,000th that opened in 2008. Today, under the leadership of CEO Penny Pennington, the firm’s 50,000 associates serve more than 8 million clients with a staggering $1.6 trillion in assets.
Emerson
Year Founded: 1890
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Construction
Number of Employees: 86,700
When your fame attains global proportions, the world comes to know you by a single name—just ask Adele, Beyonce or Sting. Same with Emerson, the St. Louis powerhouse that started as Emerson Electric Manufacturing Co. in 1890, attained global reach as Emerson Electric, and now sports the stand-alone Emerson brand. The names kept getting shorter, but the product line and geographic reach has done nothing but expand for decades—the company was producing revenues of nearly $1 billion a year half a century ago. From its inception making electric motors, then fans, motors for household appliances, and even bomber turrets during World War II, the company has established a presence at more than 170 locations on five continents, racked up more than $15.16 billion in revenue last year, and employs 86,700 people worldwide (nearly 1,250 at its St. Louis headquarters).
Energizer Holdings
Year Founded: 1896
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 6,000
When you talk about high-energy companies, Energizer Holdings has to be part of the conversation; after all, this St. Louis conglomerate produces batteries for consumer use under multiple brands: Energizer, Eveready, Rayovac, and the German-variant Varta. Whether for everyday dev-ices, hearing aids, flashlights, or specialty devices, this St. Louis company is the nation’s undisputed market leader for consumers looking for portable power. But there’s a lot more to it; the company also has a line of a dozen auto-care product brands with similarly iconic names, such as Armor All and STP. All told, its product line-up generated more than $2.96 billion in 2023 sales—up 75 percent since 2015, when it was split off from what is now Edgewell Personal Care as a stand-alone public company. More than 5,000 people are employed at Energizer, supplying products shipped across the U.S. and to 35 countries worldwide.
Enterprise Mobility
Year Founded: 1957
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Transportation Services
Number of Employees: 90,000
When you think about what made Enterprise a house-hold word—rental cars—it made perfect sense last year to rebrand the parent company as Enterprise Mobility. In terms of relative motion, it certainly fits better than “Holdings.” That previous designation had been in use since 2009, two years after Enterprise Rent-A-Car asserted its dominance in that space with the acquisition of Van-guard Car Rental Group, the parent company for National Car Rental and Alamo. The company was founded in 1957 by Jack Taylor, grandfather of third-generation CEO Chrissy Taylor, and has constantly evolved with new products as consumer tastes have shifted, such as adding Enterprise CarShare and Car Club. It also has operating units for fleet management, sales of used rentals, truck rentals and even Exotic Car Collection by Enterprise, catering to those seeking a more exotic type of rental.
Evergy
Year Founded: 2018
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Electric Utility
Number of Employees: 5,000
Don’t be fooled by the age of the youngest corporate entity on this list: Evergy may be just six years old this year in its current incarnation, but its history goes back more than a century before the 2018 merger of Kansas City’s Great Plains Energy and Kansas-based Western Resources. That created a powerhouse—a carefully-chosen word, that—of investor-owned electric generation serving more than 1 million customers in western Missouri and Kansas. With $5.51 billion in 2023 revenues, it’s one of the largest public companies in Missouri, and more than 5,000 employees keep the juice flowing to businesses and residential customers. The drive to keep electric meters humming has the company pressing to innovate, especially with its sustainability initiatives, but it’s already producing wattage from a robust blend of coal, natural gas, fuel oil, wind, solar, nuclear and biogas fuels.
Express Scripts
Year Founded: 1986
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Pharmacy Services
Number of Employees: 26,600
How influential is the name of pharmacy-benefit manager Express Scripts? Well, for one, its services cover nearly one in four Americans—85 million of them. But even after health-care giant (and Cigna subsidiary) Evernorth Health Services shelled out $54 billion for the St. Louis company in 2018 and announced a rebranding in 2020, the monument sign outside the company’s headquarters still reads: Express Scripts. To be fair, the online presence has been modified to “Express Scripts, by Evernorth.” It’s a global company with 26,600 employees, roughly 5,000 of whom work at the mother ship at 1 Express Way. Their efforts helped the parent company to produce $195.3 billion in revenues last year. The corporate history dates to 1986, when the merger of Sanus and Medicare-Glaser created a pharmacy services company that changed hands several times before New York Life Insurance acquired it in 1989; the company went public in 1992.
Farmland Industries
Year Founded: 1929
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Agribusiness
Number of Members: 600,000 at peak
At one point, it was the largest farmer-owned cooperative in the United States, owned by 1,700 local co-ops representing more than 600,000 farmers across North America. That all came crashing down in 2003, when plunging fertilizer prices combined with an unsustainable debt burden to force the company into bankruptcy. Smithfield Foods, which eventually emerged with the Farmland Foods brands that are still in groceries today, tried to throw a lifeline to the cooperative with an offer to buy its beef and pork operations, but was rebuffed. Stung by two years of nine-figure losses, the company attempted to line up $430 million in financing, but with its debt rating effectively reduced to junk status, that proved impossible. It spelled the end for a company that had nearly $12 billion in revenues (equivalent to about $21.2 billion today), ranking it near the very top among the Kansas City region’s list of largest private companies.
Ford Motor Co.
Year Founded: 1903
Headquarters: Claycomo
Sector: Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 9,100
After adding an additional 2,000 employees in just the past two years, Ford Motor Co. casts an even wider shadow on a regional economy the size of Kansas City’s, even if they’re not based here. That hiring burst has pushed local employment past the 9,100 mark, stressing parts of the manufacturing-sector workforce. The company has long produced its signature F-150 pickup truck series at the Claycomo assembly plant, which for years also cranked out the reliable crossover SUV, the Ford Escape. That work was moved out of state after 2010, and Ford spent more than $1 billion retooling to accommodate its new Transit van concept, along with battery-powered versions of the F-150. The presence of that kind of manufacturing heavyweight has had a major influence on decisions by Ford’s suppliers to set up shop here, driving massive growth in the industrial real estate market and, by extension, the regional logistics sector that supplies the factory.
Graybar Electric
Year Founded: 1869
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Construction Services
Number of Employees: 9,500
Putting the muscle into manufacturing across North America, Graybar is a revered St. Louis institution with a history that goes back more than 155 years. Today, with more than 9,500 employees at nearly 350 locations in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, it distributes electrical, communications, data networking and industrial products. Its products serve corporate customers in the construction market, commercial and institutional properties, government facilities, and industrial/utility markets, providing support for new construction, infrastructure updates and building renovation, facility maintenance, repair and operations, and original equipment manufacturing. It has an enormous product line of industrial components—bearings, wire, cable, HVAC components, lighting, industrial control and automation among them—as well as a line of services and supply-chain solutions to improve clients’ operational efficiencies.
H&R Block
Year Founded: 1955
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 4,000
Its unassuming start on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Kansas City back in 1955 offered no clue of what was to come: Accountants Henry and Richard Bloch began offering tax services to business clients as a courtesy service, then realized there was a business line of its own involved. Thus was born H&R Block, which would go on to become a publicly traded company and the world’s most recognized brand for business and individual tax-preparation services. On a more local scale, the firm played a key role in the revitalization of Downtown Kansas City when it committed to building a new headquarters there in 2003. The completion of that project in 2006 helped create critical mass for the development that followed—today’s Power & Light entertainment district, along with thousands of new market-rate apartments bringing residents back to the central business district.
Hallmark Cards
Year Founded: 1910
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 20,000
The power of personal expressions made Hallmark a globally recognized brand. But the power of diversification was on display earlier this month when its long-time rival, print-focused American Greeting Cards, could be put on the auction block by its majority owners. The drag on printed greeting cards in the digital age long ago induced Hallmark’s decision to explore multiple business channels, including its own television network, and the concept of a birthday, get-well or anniversary card has blossomed into a much broader field known as personal expressions, including greeting-card software and video cards. But there’s more to come, as it explores instant e-cards, custom streaming music, customized postage stamps, video flip books, creative-content search engines, and more. It has helped Kansas City develop a creative class that punches well above its weight for markets this size.
Herschend Enterprises
Year Founded: 1950
Headquarters: Branson
Sector: Hospitality
Number of Employees: 12,000
The middle name says it all: Family. For the Herschends of Branson—specifically, brothers Jack and Peter—that’s what’s been behind the business model since their youth when their parents acquired the rights to turn a spectacular natural wonder into what we know today as Marvel Cave. In the decades since, the family has acquired land around the site, built the Silver Dollar City theme park from the ground up, and now claims its place as the world’s largest family-owned themed attractions company. Combined, the properties employ more than 12,000 people who greet 15 million families every year. Best-known in Missouri for the Branson operation, the company portfolio spans North America with more than two dozen destination parks and attractions: Dollywood Parks & Resorts in Tennessee, Adventure Aquarium in New Jersey, Callaway Resort & Gardens and Wild Adventures in Georgia, Kentucky Kingdom and Newport Aquarium in Kentucky, and the Vancouver Aquarium in British Columbia.
HCA Midwest Health
Year Founded: 2003
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 10,000
In a state where non-profit models define nearly all of the 88 hospital systems in operation, HCA Midwest Health stands out as the complementing for-profit institution and brings to this market the power of the nation’s biggest for-profit player, Nashville-based HCA. In 2003, the parent laid out $1.3 billion—about twice that in today’s dollars—to immediately become a dominant player in the Kansas City region. That acquisition of Health Midwest wasn’t just KC-specific: With roughly 10,000 employees, the system’s seven regional hospitals and medical centers account for nearly one-fifth of the region’s total beds and patient admissions—more than 60,000 of the latter each year—generating in excess of $12 billion combined. That transaction also infused the region with nearly half a billion dollars worth of philanthropic muscle directed to a pair of health-care foundations, one on each side of the state line.
Hunt Midwest
Year Founded: 1931
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Logistics
Number of Employees: 65
Pro football fans everywhere, and especially those in Kansas City, know the impact that Lamar Hunt left as the founder of the Kansas City Chiefs franchise, but his entrepreneurial legacy runs far deeper—quite literally—than the successes at Arrowhead Stadium. Hunt, who died in 2006, held varied business interests, and one that continues to reshape the region today is his real estate development unit, Hunt Midwest. Its operations in the Kansas City area are highlighted by SubTropolis, the world’s largest underground business complex, sprawls across 7.8 million square feet and is virtually a city under the city: It’s home to more than 55 companies, including 10 automotive outfitters serving Kansas City’s burgeoning vehicle-assembly sector, and more than 2,000 people go to work there each day. And there’s more to come, with an additional 6.2 million square feet available for complex expansion.
Jack Henry & Associates
Year Founded: 1976
Headquarters: Monett
Sector: Information Technology
Number of Employees: 7,500
Two things make Jack Henry stand out among Missouri companies: First, its sterling national reputation for fintech services, primarily for community banks and credit unions that require transaction processing, business process automation, and information management services. The second? It’s a NASDAQ-listed public company with 7,500 employees that remains headquartered in a burg with barely more people than it employs overall—fewer than 10,000 residents in the southwest Missouri headquarters town of Monett. That workforce, of course, is widely distributed across 32 offices from Seattle to Hartford, Conn. The firm was founded in 1976 by its namesake, Jack Henry, and Jerry Hall in Monett, formally incorporated a year later and went public in 1985. Last year’s revenues topped $2.2 billion. The company has racked up an impressive number of industry and media awards, primarily as a best employer and for the sophistication of its sustainability and diversity initiatives.
JE Dunn Construction
Year Founded: 1924
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Construction
Number of Employees: 4,500
The story of JE Dunn Constructions 100 years in business is defined by two major themes: The creation of a corporate culture over the first half-century that built the company into one of the Kansas City region’s most respected employers and civic champions, followed by spectacular growth over the past 50 years. Now the region’s largest hometown contractor, it’s also one of the 20 big-gest in the nation. With 1,200 employees at the Kansas City headquarters and more than 4,500 in more than two dozen offices nationwide, JE Dunn continues to break records, as with last year’s high-water revenue mark of $6.47 billion. The company’s commitment to local philanthropy and civic engagement in all of its markets is well known, and its commitment to members of the team was demonstrated when it transitioned to an employee stock ownership model in 2010.
Kansas City National Security Campus
Year Founded: 1949
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 9,000
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Campus in Kansas City bills it—rightly—as “a hidden gem in national security.” That’s not overstating things: Most people in the region may know that the sprawling campus in south Kansas City is managed by Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, but they couldn’t tell you what occurs there. And what occurs there is a big-time piece of the national defense posture. More than 7,000 employees at the plant produce the bulk of non-nuclear components that go into America’s atomic arsenal. In 2024, the plant marks 75 years of operations, and has plans to add even more to its 1.175 million square feet of manufacturing space at its main plant, which was completed in 2015. The five-building project, developed at a cost of $713 million, also includes 325,000 square feet of office space.
Kansas City Southern/CPKC
Year Founded: 2023
Headquarters: Calgary, Alberta/Kansas City
Sector: Logistics
Number of Employees: 19,927
Arthur Stillwell was onto something big when he founded the predecessor to the Kansas City Southern Railway in 1887. Just a decade later, he was transforming the region with a suburban rail line and laying the groundwork—literally—for a regional system connecting Kansas City to commercial lanes in the Gulf of Mexico. In the century-plus that followed, it grew to become one of the nation’s few Class I railroads, albeit the smallest, but its impact extended well beyond this region when it acquired track south of the border and formed Kansas City Southern de Mexico, further extending the Midwest’s rail reach to ports on the Pacific Ocean. KC Southern has also long been a champion of commerce here; one of its spinoff divisions became DST Systems, at one time a corporate giant in its own right. In 2021, the rail line reached a deal to merge into the Canadian Pacific Railway. That created Canadian Pacific Kansas City billed as the first and only single-line rail network connecting an entire continent.
Leggett & Platt
Year Founded: 1883
Headquarters: Carthage
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 20,000
Another bright example of small-town Missouri’s ability to support manufacturing companies that operate on a global scale, Leggett & Platt is a massive enterprise with 135 production facilities in 17 countries. A work force of nearly 20,300 overall includes nearly 4,400 at the Carthage headquarters and plant, leading the design and manufacture of products and components for use in furniture, bedding and seats used in homes, offices, airplanes, and automobiles. And to think it all started more than 140 years ago when J.P. Leggett had the inspiration for a better night’s sleep: a bedspring made of spiral steel coils. He recruited his brother-in-law, C.B. Platt, to begin fashioning the springs, then covered them with cotton, feathers and horsehair. It worked. In the decades that followed, innovation and opportunities with applications in hydraulics and automotive/aerospace parts have driven growth, and L&P is among the nation’s biggest makers of adjustable beds.
Lockton
Year Founded: 1966
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 10,750
Yet another example of the Kansas City entrepreneurial spirit assuming global dimensions, Lockton is a Kansas City-based insurance brokerage and benefits consultancy with offices around the world. Looking at its reach today, it’s hard to imagine that it all started back in 1966 with Jack Lockton turning a spare room into a game-changer in the insurance brokerage space. In the nearly 60 years that followed, corporate revenues have gone up every single year. That’s an achievement few companies, in any business sector, can claim as their own. The company’s leadership passed from its founder, who died in 2004, to his brother, David, who turned over the reins to the founder’s son in 2017. After several years in the role of chairman, Ron Lockton resumed that day-to-day oversight as CEO earlier this year. Resisting acquisition overtures along the way, Lockton has grown to become the world’s largest privately owned independent brokerage—and 10th-largest overall. It has roughly 1,600 employees in the Kansas City region.
McCarthy Building Co.
Year Founded: 1864
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Construction
Number of Employees: 6,000
Now 160 years old, McCarthy is ranked by Engineering New-Record among the 20 largest general contractors in America. They help tie the Show-Me State with New York and Texas for most Top 20 builders. McCarthy Holdings, the parent, counts two contracting divisions—McCarthy Building Companies and Castle Contracting. The former, with offices across America, serves clients in the health-care, renewable energy, commercial, aviation, education, entertainment/hospitality and marine sectors, plus parking and research laboratory settings and water/wastewater systems. Castle is a site-work contractor that offers site preparation and design-build services, site utility work, earthwork, and trenchless technology directly to owners, general contractors, and mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection contractors. Combined, they give the holding company an overall workforce of more than 7,300 people and annual revenues topping $5.4 billion.
Mercy
Year Founded: 1871
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 45,000
For more than 150 years, Mercy has been a fixture in St. Louis, a thriving, competitive market for health-care delivery and acute care. Like the larger Ascension system and the comparably sized SSM Health, it has its roots in faith-based service, with its first hospital founded in 1871 by the Sisters of Mercy order. They started with a 25-bed facility focused on serving women and children, and today, its six Missouri hospitals—in St. Louis, Jefferson, Joplin, Lincoln, Washington and Springfield—are part of a system that treats 2.7 million people at more than 40 acute-care hospitals and clinics in the four-state area of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. The company headquarters are in Chesterfield, not far from the main hospital that has nearly 1,000 licensed beds. Roughly a third of the system’s 45,000 employees work in the St. Louis market, and overall revenues last year were nearly $7.5 billion.
Monsanto
Year Founded: 1901
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 25,500 (at peak)
Chalk this one up as Missouri’s contribution to the old saying about “the bigger they come, the harder they fall.” It was indeed a hard fall for this agribusiness giant, whose name was synonymous with products that increased farm yields, helped feed the world—and saw it all crumble after a series of legal disasters over the health effects blamed on the herbicide Roundup and other products. The company also ran afoul of environmentalists over its genetically modified seeds, which were blamed for lowering yields in Third World nations and contributing to farm failures in countries that could ill afford them. Almost ironically, the company’s peak year of revenues—$15.4 billion in 2015—was soon followed up by Bayer’s $66 billion acquisition, a move that would cost the German conglomerate $10 billion to settle the Roundup claims in 2020. At its peak, the Creve Coeur-based company had 25,500 employees worldwide, with about 5,400 in the St. Louis region.
Nestlé Purina Petcare
Year Founded: 1894
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 15,000
This company didn’t just give St. Louis bragging rights to a dominant player in the pet-care field; its proud history produced a United States senator and the chancellor of the state’s most highly respected private university. Founded 130 years ago by family patriarch William Danforth, the original Purina Mills focused on animal feeds. It graduated to human consumption early in the 20th century with a line of breakfast cereals, rebranded as Ralston Purina, sold off the animal feed unit and rebranded the human side as Ralcorp Holdings. In 2001, European food conglomerate Nestle came calling with $1.3 billion in hand to create the brand we know today. Danforth’s genetic legacy produced grandsons Jack and William; the former went to Washington to represent Missouri in the Senate for 19 years, while Bill became a cardiologist and eventually served as chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Olin Corp.
Year Founded: 1892
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 7,326
It started in 1892 on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, turning out blasting powder before a corporate journey that would make Olin a global name in the production of chemicals and ammunition. Nearly 40 years into its corporate life, the chemical company made a strategic move that would prove transformational with its acquisition of the Winchester brand, already the nation’s biggest maker of small-arms ammunition. Nearly a century later, Olin operates offices in 15 countries—and serves more than 100 nations overall—with a team of 8,000 professionals. Its product portfolio isn’t just diverse; it’s respected globally, as Olin ranks No. 1 in global production of small-caliber ammunition, No. 1 in chlor alkali capacity, No. 1 among bleach and acid producers in North America, and No. 1 globally in production of epoxy materials. It’s also setting standards for corporate philanthropy among St. Louis companies, giving employees up to 40 hours of paid time off each year to contribute to non-profit organizations—more than 55,000 hours’ worth of service last year alone.
O’Reilly Auto Parts
Year Founded: 1957
Headquarters: Springfield
Sector: Retail
Number of Employees: 90,302
Do we really owe the presence of a national auto-parts titan to the great potato famine that hit Ireland in the mid-19th century? We can’t say it wouldn’t have happened otherwise, but the arrival of immigrant Michael O’Reilly in 1949 started the wheels rolling. His son, Charles Francis, would become a traveling salesman for a St. Louis auto parts supplier, sparking his interest in southwest Missouri. By 1957, C.F. and his son, Chub, were working in that field when their employer proposed changes that neither one embraced. Instead, they founded O’Reilly Auto Parts with one store, 13 employees, and the world at their feet in Springfield. Over the next 67 years, the company has rocketed to more than 6,100 locations, almost step for step with AutoZone in the competition to be America’s biggest seller. Just last year, it made its first foray into Canada, completing the journey to becoming a supplier throughout North America, with 94,000 employees and $15.8 billion in 2023 revenues.
Panera
Year Founded: 1987
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Restaurant
Number of Employees: 120,000
Give it up for Ken and Linda Rosenthal, who scraped together $150,000, secured a Small Business Administration loan for an equal sum and a sourdough starter from San Francisco to launch St. Louis Bread Co. It started with a single location in suburban Kirkwood, but caught fire as a concept, and six years later, a deep-pocketed East Coast specialty baker known as au bon pain came calling with a $23 million acquisition bid. Even then, that was, uh, a lot of dough. The company has diverged in branding—the Gateway City stores still fly the original flag, while the rest of it has morphed into Panera, which now operates roughly 4,000 locations and 120,000 employees across North America. And remarkably enough, strains from that original sourdough starter are still being used to bake new loaves every day.
Post Holdings
Year Founded: 1895
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 11,430
The Post family of cereal brands goes back to 1895, when it started in a Michigan town called Battle Creek, roughly 440 miles northeast of St. Louis. The journey to become Post Holdings did not take a pencil-straight highway to make the move. But during its reincarnation to General Foods, then its acquisition by Kraft Foods, and finally to the 2012 deal that created Post Holdings, the company has had a daily presence at millions of breakfast tables around the nation. St. Louis-based Ralcorp acquired the Post cereal line in 2008, bringing the iconic brand to Missouri. In addition to dry cereals like Honey Bunches of Oats and Pebbles, the company produces refrigerated grocery products and others known in the grocery industry as “center of the store” products, including brands like Peter Pan peanut butter, Egg Beaters, the Ronzoni pasta line and Simply Potatoes.
Prime, Inc.
Year Founded: 1970
Headquarters: Springfield
Sector: Transportation
Number of Employees: 2,178
He was just 19 years old in a rural Missouri town of 369 people back in 1970, but Robert Low had an idea. The University of Missouri engineering student started hauling freight with a single truck. Flash forward 54 years, and Low has reached the logistics summit. His Prime, Inc., has a fleet of more than 7,700 trucks and 13,800 trailers. The vast majority of those assets provide refrigerated transport services, making his enterprise the largest in that niche anywhere in North America. But it also has traditional flatbed, tanker and intermodal platforms, with drivers in all of the 48 contiguous states counted among the company’s 7,000 employees. Part of its success stems from Low’s treatment of drivers based on his own trucking experiences. Safety is a priority, and with the average age of a fleet vehicle just two years, Prime is able to attract talent with new trucking tech and better fuel economy.
RGA
Year Founded: 1973
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 4,000
Perhaps the biggest Missouri company that most Missourians might never have heard of is RGA, the evolved brand for Reinsurance Group of America. The company flies below the public radar since it’s not the branded primary insurance carrier—it provides something closer to insurance for the insurance companies to help them manage their own risk exposure. In that role, it bills itself as the only global reinsurance company to focus primarily on life- and health-related reinsurance solutions. Just over 50 years ago, it took its original form as a spinoff from General American Life Insurance Co., and its global reach extends across North America to Asia and the Pacific region, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Headquartered in suburban Chesterfield, RGA boasts nearly 4,000 employees worldwide, helping clients with their risk-management needs and providing additional financial solutions.
Shelter Insurance
Year Founded: 1946
Headquarters: Columbia
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 3,400
Like other Midwestern insurance companies, Columbia’s Shelter Insurance started small. Very small: In March 1914, seven farmers met in the Chariton County town of Brunswick and banded together as a farm club, one of the state’s earliest. Driven by both self-interest and shared interest, they pooled resources to secure discounted prices on supplies, proved the model, and soon joined the Missouri Farmers Association. From that humble origin comes today’s Shelter Insurance, offering property and casualty risk management for auto and home but also providing life as well as coverage for renters, motorcycles, RVs, boats, and more. Nearly 1,400 Shelter agents, supported by roughly 2,000 other employees, cover a 15-state sweep across the heart of the nation, from Nevada to Indiana and Nebraska to the Gulf Coast. Last year, it racked up $3.06 billion in revenues, helping secure a No. 11 ranking nationwide for largest insurers for personal lines of coverage.
SSM Health
Year Founded: 1877
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 39,900
One trait that distinguishes the health-care market in St. Louis from any other in Missouri is the presence of major health systems operating in multiple markets across the Midwest. Fitting neatly into that profile is SSM Health, a $10.5 billion Catholic not-for-profit that has a small army of nearly 40,000 employees and nearly 14,000 providers. It boasts nearly two dozen hospitals with a combined 5,480 licensed beds—roughly equal to the entire hospital marketplace in the Kansas City region. The company’s reach is across the care spectrum: hospitals, physician offices, outpatient and virtual care services, senior-care facilities, home care and hospice services, pharmacy benefit management and health insurance services. Its financial impact is a long way from the $5 that five German nuns had—combined—when they arrived in 1872 and found their services were immediately needed: The city suffered through a smallpox outbreak their first winter in the U.S.
Stifel Financial
Year Founded: 1890
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 9,000
Sitting atop the FDIC’s list of biggest banking institutions in St. Louis, measured by assets, is this St. Louis titan, which controls $16.56 billion in assets. In terms of financial services, that is the tip of a very large iceberg: The parent company has a considerably larger footprint in wealth management: a monstrous $458 billion in client assets under administration, including $172 billion in fee-based assets across a client base in the United States and Europe. While the current organizational structure was set in place in 2002, the parent’s roots go back nearly 135 years, to its founding by a pair of investment specialists. For most of its history, it was primarily a brokerage firm serving individuals. Strategic moves, including acquisitions and the chartering of Stifel Bank in 2002, have broadened its financial services footprint. More than 2,300 financial advisers operate out of 400 offices in the U.S., reflecting a surge in growth that has added 1,500 associates in just the past five years.
Triumph Foods
Year Founded: 2003
Headquarters: St. Joseph
Sector: Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 2,400
One reason Missouri ranks fourth among states in hog production—1.2 billion pounds of it in the most recent reporting to the USDA—is that farmers can rely on Triumph Foods in St. Joseph to process their product for distribution nationwide. And as a processor, Triumph is distinctly different: It’s a farmer-owned processing company founded in 2003 by five of the country’s largest independently owned pork producers. The St. Joseph plant sprawls across an 800,000-square-foot space since it opened its doors in 2006, and more than 2,400 people who turn out more than 1.5 billion pounds of pork annually—better than half the state’s total—for both domestic consumption and foreign markets (more than two dozen of the latter, in all). More than 5.5 million hogs go to that Great Corn Crib in the Sky every year, as the plant asserts its dominant role in Missouri agribusiness.
UMB Bank
Year Founded: 1913
Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 3,773
In terms of deposit market share, UMB Bank stands toe-to-toe with a national giant—U.S. Bank—in the fight to claim supremacy in Missouri. At $26.64 billion, according to the most recent FDIC report, it trailed by just 0.06 percent in the 2023 data. If recent trends continue, this will be the year UMB seizes No. 1—it reduced that spread by a full 0.1 percent since 2022. That growth arc continues after a decade that saw UMB surpass Commerce Bank (its corporate cousin through the extended Kemper family banking tree) for leadership in the Kansas City market. As for bank assets, UMB will take another job following the recent news that it would acquire Heartland Financial for $2 billion. For most of the past half-century, UMB boasted a long history of Kemper family leadership, including the succession from R. Crosby Kemper Jr. to one son, Alexander Kemper, then another, R. Crosby III, and then a third, Mariner, who continues to oversee the holding company today.
University of Missouri System
Year Founded: 1839
Headquarters: Columbia
Sector: Higher Education
Number of Employees: 24,500
No, it’s not a business as they are generally understood, but there’s no mistaking the contribution that the University of Missouri System has made to commerce and industry in the state. Even before you address the work-force preparation in the system’s mission, the thousands of jobs across its four campuses in Columbia, Kansas City, Saint Louis and Rolla, the health-care impact from its medical schools and hospital affiliations, there’s a profound impact on business with university-led research and commercialization efforts. That latter aspect has produced Nobel Prize winners from various fields, either as faculty, researchers or former students. Combined, the system enrolls more than 61,000 students each year, with just shy of half that number studying through the main campus in Columbia. The system’s most recent assessment touted a $6.5 billion economic impact on the state, including nearly 69,000 direct and indirect jobs created.
Washington University
Year Founded: 1853
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Higher Education
Number of Employees: 19,646
With a stated mission that emphasizes the dissemination of knowledge, Washington University gets the job done on a global scale: Students from more than 100 nations are among the more than 14,500 students enrolled at the most highly regarded academic institution in the Show-Me State. And an impressive range of knowledge it is: WashU sports more than 300 academic programs, with 3,645 instructional faculty on board. The university was established in 1853, largely through the efforts of Wayman Crow, a successful merchant, and the leader of his church, William Greenleaf Eliot Jr. As the nation was growing to the west, they correctly identified a knowledge gap that the young city needed to fill. It is routinely ranked among the nation’s Top 25 universities for the strength of its instructional programming by U.S. News & World Report, and it has produced 26 Nobel laureates from among its faculty and alums, more than any other institution in the state.
World Wide Technology
Year Founded: 1990
Headquarters: St. Louis
Sector: Information Technology
Number of Employees: 10,000
When Dave Steward and Jim Kavanaugh founded World Wide Technology in 1990, the mission was simple: resell tech equipment. In one of the state’s biggest entrepreneurial success stories since, WWT’s annual revenues of $20 billion have outshined the likes of more Show-Me State achievements like Cerner Corp. ($5.7 billion before acquisition by Oracle), Evergy ($5.54 billion last year) and long-running hits like H&R Block ($3.47 billion) or Hallmark ($3.8 billion). In fact, it was bigger than all of those combined last year. Well-evolved from its reseller roots, WWT provides corporate customers (including 80 from the Fortune 100) with services to conceptualize, test and validate technology solutions for the best business outcomes, then help bring them to scale with global warehousing, distribution and integration acumen. Today, it boasts 55 locations worldwide, with 10,000 employees and a trophy case full of awards recognizing its status as a best employer, tech innovator and diversity champion.
