The Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) World Cup is easily the most popular event in the soccer world as more than 700 million television viewers tune in from around the world. Another 3 million usually attend the games, and FIFA says it has allocated 2.9 million tickets for the World Cup tournament currently being played in Brazil.

The event is also a huge moneymaker; FIFA alone is expected to take in a record $4 billion on this year’s event. Brazil, on the other hand, is expected to make even more as an expected 600,000 foreign tourists descend on the country and spend an estimated $2.6 billion. It is projected that the 3 million Brazilians expected to attend the games will spend another $8 billion over the course of the tournament.

Not only will all of those attendees bring their wallets but they’ll also bring their appetites, providing a boost to demand for meat, milk and vegetables in Brazil. Meat demand alone is expected to spike by more than 1.3 million pounds over the course of the event. On top of that, this isn’t an entirely one-off event, with the upcoming 2016 Olympics in Rio expected to draw 1 million visitors to the country – just that many more mouths to feed.

Brazil-based BRF SA (NYSE: BRFS) is the fourth-largest food processor in the world, raising, slaughtering and packing beef, pork and poultry as well as milk, pasta, frozen vegetables and soybean products. It operates 60 plants and 30 distribution centers and exports to 120 countries. It alone is responsible for about 20 percent of global poultry trade.

Formed through the merger of Perdigão and Sadia, announced in 2009 and concluded in 2012, BRF generated BRL30.5 billion in sales last year – up from BRL28.5 billion in 2012 – with about 40 percent of that coming from foreign markets. Cash flow from operations shot up by 36 percent to BRL3.3 billion largely thanks to strong margin improvement as it eliminated three layers of middle management between its plants and the C-suite. Net income rose 38 percent year-over-year to BRL1.06 billion with net income margin rising from 2.7 percent to 2.5 percent.

The company turned in similarly strong results in its recently concluded fiscal first quarter, with net sales up 1.8 percent year-over-year to BRL7.3 billion largely thanks to higher selling prices. Gross profit was also up to BRL1.9 billion, an 11.5 percent gain, as gross margin rose 2.3 percent. Net income for the quarter totaled BRL313.4 million with a net margin of 4.3 percent.

The real story behind the success of BRF, and most other meat processors for that matter, is the world’s insatiable appetite for meat. While demand growth in the developed world has remained relatively flat over the past few years largely due to health concerns and increasingly finicky consumers, demand in the developing world is exploding. By 2022 demand from those regions is expected to explode by 80 percent over 2012 levels, with the strongest growth occurring in Africa and South America. Chicken demand is expected to show the strongest increase thanks to the fact that it is one of the least expensive, readily available proteins.

Much of that growth is due to the expanding global middle class. Numbering about 2 billion people today, by 2030 it is expected to more than double to 4.9 billion with Asia expected to be home to 64 percent of them. The largest share will reside in India at 29 percent of the total, with China home to 20 percent.

That is a huge long-term driver for profit growth at BRF, which has positioned itself well as a lower-cost provider of meat and processed food products. It has also done an excellent job of extending its geographic reach, most recently agreeing to acquire a 40 percent stake in Al Khan Foods, another of the world’s largest food processing companies based in Oman. BRF has also closed a deal to acquire all of Federal Foods, which is based in the United Arab Emirates and which it had most recently purchased a 49 percent stake of in January 2013. That extends BRF’s reach into the rapidly growing Middle Eastern market, a region often overlooked by its competitors.

Interestingly, if you look at the countries where BRF has inked most of its deals, they tend to be areas where the local currency is consistently stronger than the Brazilian real. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that currency considerations are driving the company’s deal making geography, there’s no denying that BRF will enjoy a higher degree of cost competitiveness and earnings impact because of it.

That sort of strategic thinking is part of why BRF has generated average revenue growth of 10.4 percent over the past three years and net income growth of 9.7 percent while the industry as a whole has experienced a contraction.

While the World Cup and the upcoming Olympics will provide short-term boosts, BRF SA is a terrific long-term buy up to 30 thanks to growing demand and solid strategic decision-making.