The Biggest Member-Owned Businesses in the U.S.

State Farm is the U.S. cooperative with the highest turnover in 2020. The insurance mutual, a special type of member-owned business either paying its policyholders a dividend or reducing premiums, managed to generate an income of $42 billion in the corresponding year. As our chart based on the World Cooperative Monitor 2022 shows, the most successful companies owned by their members in the United States are active in two specific sectors.

Next to State Farm, the top 8 also features Liberty Mutual, Northwestern Mutual and New York Life, all insurance companies adhering to the mutual company structure. The other four spots are taken up by agricultural cooperatives like the Dairy Farmers of America, which had a turnover of $17.9 billion in 2020. Around the world, the top 300 cooperatives were responsible for a turnover of $2.2 trillion, with around two thirds of the companies generating a maximum of $5 billion in income each. The cooperative company with the highest total turnover in 2020 was the French Groupe Crédit Agricole with $89 billion. France is also the country with the highest number of top-earning cooperatives (42) globally, followed by the United States (38) and Germany (28).

Cooperatives and mutuals can take on many shapes and forms and are not limited to big financial or insurance companies. While every cooperative needs to be an "autonomous association of persons" that's "jointly owned and democratically controlled" by its members according to the accepted definition by the International Cooperative Alliance, the specifics differ. For example, consumer cooperatives are owned by the people who consume their goods and services, producer cooperatives are governed by those who produce goods and services and worker cooperatives are businesses run by their workers. Of the latter, there have been 612 in the United States in 2021, generating a gross revenue of $283 million, according to the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Overall, around three million companies worldwide are organized as a cooperative and 12 percent of the world population are members of at least one of these organizations.