Beatrice Foods
The Beatrice Foods Company was one of the largest US food groups until it was taken over by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1987 and the company was subsequently broken up. The company was founded in 1894 under the name Beatrice Creamery Company by George Everett Haskell and William W. Bosworth in Beatrice, Nebraska . The core business initially consisted of buying and selling dairy products and eggs. In the following years, the range of products expanded and by the beginning of the twentieth century the company was already active throughout the United States. In 1913, the company moved to Chicago, then the center of the American food industry.
The company was renamed Beatrice Foods Company in 1946 and expanded to Canada a short time later. One of the company's best-known brands in Germany was Avis Rent A Car . Sales rose to $ 12 billion by 1984.
The company's decline began in the 1980s. Beatrice Foods was particularly troubled by a lawsuit from residents of Woburn (Massachusetts) and an unsuccessful advertising strategy. In 1982 the plaintiffs and WR Grace and Company sued the company for damages and compensation for pain and suffering over drinking water contamination in Woburn in the 1970s. The plaintiffs either had leukemia themselves or had lost relatives with leukemia. The cause of the illnesses was apparently chemicals that got into the drinking water. The lawsuits were later settled out of court for payments in the millions.
The scandal served the author Jonathan Harr as a template for the novel civil process (original title: A Civil Action ) and was later filmed with John Travolta in the leading role.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. took advantage of the company's weakness in 1987 and took it over at a price of $ 8.7 billion. The group was renamed TLC Beatrice International in the following year and sold division by division. Only the independent subsidiary Beatrice Foods Canada Ltd. founded in 1969 was spared from this, as it had been operating independently of the parent company since 1978 and was therefore not part of the takeover. However, the latter was finally taken over in 1997 by the Italian group Parmalat .