Companies that vanished: Beatrice Foods, former household name

I remember being amazed at all the products bearing the Beatrice name in the fine print. KKR has a lot to answer for, leveraged buyouts were--and are--generally not good for anyone but the financiers. When Beatrice was bought out and sold to ConAgra, the scale got even greater. Competition, if it is to be real, must not just be divisions of one company competing against each other (well-satirized in the recent CokeZero/CocaCola commercial), but between separate businesses.

The formaytion of Beatrice was greatly influenced by the acquisition of The Hunt's Companies by NSI or Norton Simon Inc. one of the original corporate raiders Norton Simon formed Hunt-Wesson by buying up "sick" companies and reviving them or dismantling them and selling them off. He in turn was acquired by Esmark which in turn was acquired by Beatrice or the other way around. In any case the result was a sizeable Hunt- Wesson part of Beatrice. Beatrice had acquired a numbe rof independenmt brands that were not in the pocessed foods category( Avis, Playtex, Max Factor, Atlas Diesel Co ( United Can Company). Jmaes Dutt, one of the CEO's was arrogsant enopught to have launched a $100 million advertising campaign to attach the meaning less Beatrice name to Stieffel Lamps, Culligan, Playtex , Max Factor, Arrowhead Water and many others. The significant drain of operating capital put beatrice in a precarious position and gnerated little or no revenue, amking it a target for KKR. KKR invested time , energy and infused the company with good management making it a profitable company. Several of the non food companies were spun off and the remains were known as Hunt-Wesson Foods Company. The behemoth ConAgra goobled HWF and ruined it as a recognizable entity in the processed Foods industry. It transformed Hunt's into a commodity type company that demphasized marketing strategies and concentrated on commodity type sales strategies. The Hunt-Wesson headquarters in Fullerton California was abandoned and 3eventually relocated to Irvine, CA and finally to Omaha, Nebraska, ConAgra's home. What remains is but a skeleton ofa once branded entity of Orville Redenbacher, Swiss Miss, LaChoy Foods, United Can Company (Hunt Wesson's internal container makera pioneer in hi-tech can and plastic bottle manufacuriing in the late 1980's), and a leader in Hunt-Wesson's TQM initiative based on the principles of W.Edwards Deming. ConAgra's mangement sheep were incapable of understanding Deming's principles as threy applied to Continuous Improvement and the Quality principles of J.M. Juran.

follow up to my comments; sorry folks I did not run spell check before posting

why no mention of REGGIE LEWIS, who was the African American that created the strategy to buy Beatrice Foods, deploying the largest financing plan in American history, using OPM? He died of a brain tumor, rumored to have been caused by his consitent use of a cell phone and his widow Phillipino wife sold out the business, took the money and ran...

Why no mention of Swift? I worked for the processed foods division which handled Peter Pan, Butterball, etc. and we were bought out by Beatrice.