Beatrice Foods

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The Beatrice Foods Company was a major American food processing company and household name, until it was taken over by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1986 during the leveraged buyout raids of the 1980s. Its brands and assets were sold off, the bulk becoming part of ConAgra Foods, Inc. in 1990.

The Beatrice Creamery Company was founded in 1894 by George Everett Haskell and William W. Bosworth, by leasing the factory of a bankrupt firm of the same name located in Beatrice, Nebraska. At the time, they purchased butter, milk and eggs from local farmers and graded them for resale. They quickly began separating the butter themselves at their plant, making their own butter on site and packaging and distributing it under their own label.They devised special protective packages and distributed it to grocery stores and restaurants in their own wagons and through appointed jobbers. To overcome the shortage of cream, the partners established skimming stations to which farmers delivered their milk to have the cream, used to make butter, separated from the milk. This led to the introduction of their unique credit program of providing farmers with hand cream separators so that they could separate the milk on the farm and retain the skim milk for animal feeding. This enabled farmers to pay for the separators from the proceeds of their sales of cream. The program worked so well that the company sold more than 50,000 separators in Nebraska from 1895 to 1905.On March 1, 1905, the company was incorporated as the Beatrice Creamery Company of Iowa, with capital of $3,000,000.By the turn of the century, they were shipping dairy products across the United States, and in 1910, they ran nine creameries and three ice cream plants across the Great Plains.

The company moved to Chicago in 1913 - at the time the centre of the American food processing industry. By the 1930s, it was already a major dairy company, producing some 30 million gallons (110 million litres) of milk and 10 million gallons (38 million litres) of ice cream annually. Its Meadow Gold brand was a household name in much of America by the beginning of World War II. In 1946, it changed its name to Beatrice Foods and doubled its sales between 1945 and 1955 as the post-war baby boom created vastly greater demand for milk products.

From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, the company expanded into Canada and purchased a number of other food firms, leveraging its distribution network to profit from a more diverse array of food and consumer products. It came to be the owner of brands like Avis Rent A Car, Playtex, Shedd's, Tropicana, Good & Plenty and many others. Annual sales in 1984 were roughly $12 billion. It was during this year that the corporation ended advertisements for its products with the catchphrase "We're Beatrice"; the red and white "Beatrice" logo would simultaneously appear in the bottom right hand corner (example). It was determined that the campaign alienated consumers, calling attention to the fact that it was a faceless and far-reaching multinational corporation, and the campaign was pulled off the air by autumn (despite the fact that Nabisco ended advertisements with a bumper in similar vein well into the late 1990s).

Through the 1980's, Beatrice was a defendant in a class-action lawsuit alleging that it had dumped toxic waste in the drinking water of Woburn, Massachusetts. The case became the subject of the popular book and film A Civil Action. The judge ruled that Beatrice was not responsible for the contamination, although the book and film suggested otherwise.

In 1986, Beatrice became the target of leveraged buyout specialists Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. They ultimately took over the firm for $8.7 billion — at the time the largest leveraged buyout in history — and over the next four years sold it off, division by division. In 1990, the last of Beatrice's assets were sold to ConAgra Foods. Most of Beatrice's brand names still exist, but under various other owners, as trademarks and product lines were sold separately to the highest bidder.

Beatrice's Canadian subsidiary, Beatrice Foods Canada Ltd., was founded in 1969 and became legally separate from its parent firm in 1978. It was therefore unaffected by the buyout of its American counterpart.