Dole Food Company

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Dole Food Company, Inc.

logo
legal form Incorporated
ISIN US2566031017
founding 1851 as Castle & Cooke
Seat Westlake Village , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management David H. Murdock
Number of employees 36,800 (2018)
sales $ 4.4 billion (2018)
Branch Food
Website www.dole.com

A dole plantation on Oahu ( Hawaii )

Dole Food Company is an American company headquartered in Westlake Village, west of Los Angeles .

The company is the world's largest supplier of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and fresh cut flowers and also markets a growing range of refined products. The product range consists of over 200 products.

history

The story of today's Dole Food Company is mainly due to three fruit companies back in the early days were created from 1850 to 1920: Castle and Cooke , Standard Fruit Company and that of James Dole in Wahiawā on Hawaii , founded Hawaiian Pineapple Company . Dole's business began selling canned pineapples in 1903. Right from the start, his goal was to "expand the Hawaiian pineapple market to every grocer in the US," as Dole wrote in his 1901 prospectus . In 1922 Dole acquired the entire Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi , on which he planted more than 8,000 hectares of pineapple and thus achieved 75% of the world's pineapple production. Since 1972 the company has also been selling Dole branded dessert bananas . In 1991 it was renamed the Dole Food Company .

The oldest of the companies is Castle and Cooke . Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke, US citizens from Boston, arrived in the Sandwich Islands in 1837 as missionaries for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions . In 1839 the Hawaiian chiefs demanded that the royal offspring be trained in a school run by Cooke and Castle. King Kamehameha III. appointed Castle three years later as the unofficial royal advisor, as the Boston Mission Society deprecated political offices of its missionaries. About ten years later, in 1849, Castle and Cooke became partners to turn the former mission warehouse into a department store. Castle and Cook's warehouse grew into one of the five largest companies in Hawaii and was particularly active in the sugar business. It was not until 1894, after the death of Samuel Castle, that Castle and Cooke was incorporated under the laws of the young, still independent Republic of Hawaii and its President Sanford Dole . From the 1930s, the company continued to expand, primarily through acquisitions of other companies.

The three Sicilian brothers Joseph , Luca and Felix Vaccaro and Salvador D'Antoni , who had just immigrated to the United States, founded the forerunner of the later Standard Fruits Company in 1899 to import bananas from La Ceiba , Honduras to New Orleans . The Standard Fruit Company was founded by the Vaccaro brothers in 1924 as an American trading company. Castle and Cooke took over 55% of Standard Fruit in 1964 and entered the banana trade. Four years later the company was completely taken over.

The 23-year-old Harvard graduate James Dole, cousin of the former president and then governor of Hawaii, founded the Hawaiian Pinapple Company in 1901 . Castle and Cooke took a 21% stake in the company in 1932. The well-known quality of the fruit, which was associated with James Dole's name, led the company to print DOLE on pineapple cans and pineapple juice packaging in 1933. The Dole brand was born. In 1961, Castle and Cooke took over the Hawaiian Pineapple Company entirely.

In the 1980s, ex-school dropout, real estate developer and head of the container rental company Flexi-Van , David Howard Murdock , took over the management of Castle and Cooke . The companies merged in 1985 and were renamed Dole Food Company in 1991 as Dole is the main brand of the global company. Their logo has long been used not only for pineapple tins, but also for various tropical fruits, especially bananas. In the mid-1990s, Dole Food spun off property management into its own company, which carried the old name of Castle and Cooke again. This real estate division was held solely by David Howard Murdock. After a stock market crisis at the beginning of the 21st century, he bought back the 76% of the shares that were in free trade with the support of an international banking consortium. In 2009 he again sold 60% of the shares. After posting a loss of US $ 142 million on sales of US $ 4.2 billion in 2012, the company took the company off the stock exchange in 2013 by buying back the shares for US $ 1.6 billion. He held the pressure of shareholders for quick profits and dividends responsible for the loss. So the Dole Food Company became a family business again. Murdock restructured its company into the Murdock Holding Company in the following years . In mid-2018, however, he sold 45% of his Dole Food Company to Irish fruit and vegetable company Total Produce, plc for $ 300 million .

In 2007, the Dole Food Company's banana plantations in Colombia were certified according to international standards for workplace conditions and human rights for the first time . The certification according to the SAN standard (Sustainable Agriculture Network) protects the jungle from deforestation and also strengthens the local employees. Dole works with local plantation owners and manufacturing companies like Tecbaco. Since 2014, in cooperation with the German supermarket chain EDEKA and WWF Germany , further measures have been developed and implemented on selected farms whose bananas Dole sells, which go beyond the SAN standard in terms of content. The aim is to make conventional banana cultivation more sustainable. Few retailers are seriously interested in sustainable banana cultivation.

Influence and power

The two Hawaiian companies Castle and Cooke and Hawaiian Pinapple Company as well as the American / Honduran Standard Fruit Company developed from a small trading company into a global giant, which at times had the power to swap governments in some small states at will, or at least to increase it influence. The term banana republic also originated from this time, and Dole's biggest competitor Chiquita ( United Fruit Company ) also contributed to the creation . In the late 1980s, Dole Food Company was the world's largest pineapple and second largest banana marketer. In addition to the 202,000 hectares of land in the USA, it also owned 11,330 hectares in Honduras , 7,446 hectares in the Philippines , 4,850 hectares in Costa Rica and 2023 hectares in Thailand .

criticism

In 1982 the group, which at the time was still operating as the Standard Fruit Company , ceased all banana transactions with Nicaragua in violation of a contract with the Nicaraguan government that was valid until 1985. He took part in the action taken by the USA against the Sandinista ruled Nicaragua in the context of the Contra War , for which the USA was convicted in 1986 by the International Court of Justice in The Hague .

The Dole Food Company has been criticized for its perceived anti-union policies and attempts to silence critical voices.

She caused a greater stir in 2009 when she tried to prevent the screening of the documentary " Bananas! * ". In the film, Dole is accused of illegally using the toxic pesticide DBCP , which was already banned in the USA at the time, on their plantations. In July 2009, Greenpeace declared that anyone who bought the company's products was aiding and abetting censorship against critical media. Dole's methods of suppressing free journalism and silencing the workers through extensive economic and legal pressure are illustrated in the film "Big boys gone bananas!" from 2011.

The authors of the black book brand companies accuse the group of "exploiting plantation workers, using dangerous plant toxins and child labor".

In order to be able to reopen plantations in Nicaragua , the company has agreed to provide "humanitarian aid" to 1,700 sick former employees. An admission of guilt should be prevented, but access to the production facilities should be made possible.

Dole Europe

Dole Europe was founded in 1990 to coordinate the import of fresh fruit and vegetables to Europe through the various import branches and commercial agencies of the various European countries. In 2011, the European headquarters, previously located in Paris, was relocated to Hamburg ( Dole Fresh Fruit Europe OHG ). Dole has been active in the port city of Hamburg , which is important for Europe, since 1975 .

Web links

Commons : Dole Food Company  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ History ( Memento from November 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ a b Dole Food Company, Inc. 2012 Form 10-K Report , at www.sec.gov , accessed October 10, 2015
  3. ↑ Dole Food forbes.com , accessed August 18, 2020
  4. ↑ Dole, James Drummond (1877-1958) In: harvardsquarelibrary.org , accessed on August 4, 2020 (English)
  5. ↑ On Lanai, paying homage to the once-plentiful pineapple, now mostly a memory In: latimes.com , June 16, 2915, accessed on August 4, 2020
  6. ^ F. Washington Jarvis: James Drummond Dole "The Pineapple King" . Retrieved August 4, 2016 from jphs.org
  7. ↑ A 90-year-old billionaire and the power of fruit welt.de , August 13, 2013, accessed on August 18, 2020
  8. ↑ Dole Food forbes.com , accessed August 18, 2020
  9. ↑ A court found that an LA billionaire duped Dole investors latimes.com , March 9, 2018, accessed August 17, 2020
  10. ↑ David Murdoch forbes.com , December 20, 2019, accessed August 17, 2020
  11. ↑ Christian Seiler: The banana is a stick. Portrait of our favorite fruit. Das Magazin, Tamedia, Zurich, October 1, 2016, pages 10–15
  12. ↑ Nina Sigrist: The perfect banana. Migros Magazin Zurich, October 10, 2016, pages 38–45
  13. ↑ Castle & Cooke, Inc. Business Information, Profile, and History companies.jrsank.org , accessed August 17, 2020.
  14. ↑ Barricada International (English-language weekly magazine of the SNLF Managua) November 8, 1982, p. 12
  15. ↑ International Court of Justice: Case concerning military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua ( Memento of March 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) June 27, 1986.
  16. ↑ cf. No bananas for censorship! , Greenpeace, July 21, 2009 at greenpeace-magazin.de
  17. ↑ Fruit company pays poison victims. In: TAZ . January 5, 2015, accessed January 5, 2015 .
  18. ↑ Dole moves European headquarters to Hamburg . In: Port of Hamburg Magazine , issue 2/11, p. 35, Hamburg Marketing eV Hamburg 2011.