James T. "Red" Hudson, who founded Hudson Foods and sold it to a pair of rivals after an E. coli outbreak forced the meat and poultry company to recall 25 million pounds of beef in 1997, has died.

James T. "Red" Hudson, who founded Hudson Foods and sold it to a pair of rivals after an E. coli outbreak forced the meat and poultry company to recall 25 million pounds of beef in 1997, has died. He was 81. Hudson died Sunday afternoon, his family said in a statement. A cause of death was not

given. Hudson founded Hudson Foods in 1972 after buying a feed division from Ralston Purina Co., where Hudson worked as vice president of the company's West Central division. He joined Ralston Purina years earlier as a feed store clerk. By 1997, Hudson Foods was the third-largest publicly held processor in the United States, with more than $2 billion in sales, 12,500 employees and 19 processing plants in 11 states. In August 1997, E. coli contamination traced to a Hudson hamburger plant in Nebraska triggered multimillion dollar losses and led to the company's breakup.