| Fate | Acquired by ConAgra Foods |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1894 |
| Defunct | 1990 |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California Downers Grove, Illinois |
| Products | Food |
Beatrice Foods Company was a major American food processing company.[1] In 1987, its smaller international food operations were sold to Reginald Lewis, a corporate attorney creating TLC Beatrice International, after which the majority of its domestic (U.S.) brands and assets were acquired by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR), with the bulk of the holdings sold off. By the early 1990s, the remaining operations were ultimately acquired by ConAgra Foods.
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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 promptly 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 them 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 center of the American food processing industry. By the 1930s, it was a major dairy company, producing some 30 million US gallons (110,000 m3) of milk and 10 million US gallons (38,000 m3) of ice cream annually. In 1939, Beatrice Creamery Company purchased Blue Valley Creamery Company, the other Chicago-based dairy centralizer. This acquisition added at least 11 creameries from New York to South Dakota. Beatrice's 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, John Sexton & Co, 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. It was determined that the campaign alienated consumers, calling attention to the fact that it was a far-reaching multinational corporation, and the campaign was pulled off the air by autumn.
Through the 1980s, Beatrice was a co-defendant alongside W. R. Grace and Company in a lawsuit alleging that the Riley Tannery, a division of Beatrice Foods, had dumped toxic waste which contaminated an underground aquifer that supplied drinking water to East Woburn, Massachusetts. The case became the subject of the popular book and film A Civil Action. A Federal judge ruled that Beatrice was not responsible for the contamination, although according to the book and film, the EPA later found both companies responsible.
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. Its smaller international food operations were sold to Reginald Lewis, a corporate attorney creating TLC Beatrice International in 1987, becoming the largest business in America run by an African American and the first company to reach a billion dollars in sales, with a black man at its head. 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.
In 2007, Almus, Inc. formed Beatrice Companies, Inc., as the new food manufacturing and distribution business, adhering to the original business model of high quality food products that are both regional and national in scope. Beatrice Companies, Inc. at present operates in the domestic (U.S.) market.
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.
Beatrice Foods Canada Ltd. is a Toronto, Ontario based dairy unit of Parmalat Canada. The Canadian unit of Beatrice Foods was founded in 1969, and was separated from Beatrice Foods in 1978.
Consequently, Beatrice's Canadian unit was not affected by the buyout of its founders and remained in business as one of Canada's largest food processing concerns.
In 1997 Beatrice Foods Canada was acquired by Parmalat. At first, Parmalat decided to drop the Beatrice name from the company's products, but was reinstated in late 2005 during which the Italian parent company was being investigated.