Screw around with Kraft

What do you call something who is passed from hand to hand ? Used goods ? Probably something worse ? Well, that is what we have to call Kraft these days.

With a touch of slight (?) exaggeration, you could say that the land of mom and apple pie, could be stretched to include Kraft too ! Read on to see the list of brands this company owned at one time or the other, and even the Professor - he of the class war against processed foods - would have had one of those some time or the other. Its a quintessentially American company. And yet the way it has been sold and bought and sold and bought again makes somewhat depressing reading.

As is usual with many of the well known companies, there is always a visionary entrepreneur in the beginning. There was a James L Kraft. He was born in Canada, but emigrated to the Chicago in 1903 and started selling cheese from a horse drawn cart. In 1916 they developed a new process for pasteurising cheese, enabling it to be shipped long distances and patented it. Then came World War I, the need to provision the army and Kraft took off. In 1928 came Philadelphia cheese. In 1930 it merged with National Dairy, then the leading ice cream company in the US and became a full fledged Dairy Products company. 1926 saw Breyers, a famous ice cream brand;  1935, Sealtest, another iconic ice cream brand.  It grew and grew and became a globally recognised company and one of the giants of the food industry.

Then came 1980 and the barbarians. Wall Street types seem to have a peculiar fascination for Kraft and it become the favourite darling of deals. In 1980 a merger was engineered with Duracell and Tupperware. Immediately thereafter it sold all the non food businesses including Tupperware, but retained Duracell. In 1988 it sold Duracell to private equity firm KKR. In that mad winter of 1988, when dizzying deals were done, Kraft itself was acquired by Philip Morris (the largest tobacco company in the world) . Philip Morris merged Kraft with its General Foods business (of Maxwell House, Jell O, Kool Aid and Tang fame ) and created Kraft General Foods.  In 1990 they bought Jacob Suchard a big European coffee company and also the owner of Toblerone. In 1993 came Shredded Wheat. In 2000, Philip Morris acquired Nabisco and merged it with Kraft. Into the fold came Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Ritz, etc. In 2001 Philip Morris IPOed Kraft and it became an independent company again. In 2009, Kraft acquired Cadbury. In 2011 it split itself into two companies - the North American Kraft and the global Mondelez. And then last week, Warren Buffett and 3G bought out Kraft and will now run it together with Heinz which they already own.

Whew. That is a dizzying pace of changing of hands. How can a business survive this level of buying, adding, stripping and selling all the time. I wonder what the suppliers, consumers and employees make of all this. Businesses need some stability. Wall Street types doing financial engineering, don't do much for the long term health of the business.

There is one saving grace. Warren Buffett is not a wheeler dealer. He holds for the long term. Maybe Kraft will get some stability now.