Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Once original...

US Cadbury! The one hundred and eighty six years of chocolate history at Cadbury [off on a tangent: Gildy, Cadbury's was founded by those prohibited at the time from attending university...and Kraft Food Company was once the proud sponsor of The Great Gildersleeve!] today takes another turn as they recommended a £12bn takeover from the US giant and rival Kraft Foods. The public information related to the offer and approaches since Sept 2009 for acquiring the business is avialable on a microsite (disclaimer). Less then 2 years ago (May 2008) they separated the confectionery from the 'America Beverage' business (Schweppes) and Cadbury plc claimed a vision to be "the world's BIGGEST and BEST confectionery company". Oh well...it's not the end of the world: I have about 10 Kraft brands at home as it is I just hope they don't play with any of the recipes! Does this make Kraft the biggest - in the confectionery sector - above Mars? I think it does, just.

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8 comments:

bonnie said...

10 at your home...mmmm ..name them in 10secs. :)
Can only think of a bar of Toblerone lurking in the cupboard.

Dark Chocolate for me..

The Great Gildersleeve said...

Interesting Span...and there's another thing I did not mention on my post about Universities and places of learning...in years gone by many were stopped from going to Uni. Also, we must not forget if you were not rich and powerful you could not attend and yes, you had to male.

Kraft and Cadbury's...I'll have to go away and think about that a bit more.

Span Ows said...

Bonnie...I can't cheat as all Kraft websites sem "unavailable right now"...hmmmm

A quick round up of what I can remember is Milka (sort of Cadbury's type products) Lu, in fact Lu have a factory near me...biscuits...usually choccy y flavoured some like jaffa cake...very moorish (packet in one sitting type stuff) Philidelpia (hmmmmm) Oreo...OK that's only 4 but I bet there's more.

Span Ows said...

Inded Gildy...in fact I was looking at Hershey's today (as you do) and the set up is very similar to Cadbury's (started by religious "radicals", loads of money to charities and good causes, "village", town named after them etc...)

The Great Gildersleeve said...

At last my computer is working again :-)

I keep getting the blue screen of death...

Well Span, there has been other takeovers which caused problems...Rowentree's and Terry's of York(I think Nestlé took them over)

I don't know about Rowentree but Terry's are no longer based at York.

What happened to Fry's?

If you keep taking over brands that are popular with the public you can only really fail if you start changing the product or annoy the consumer in some way.

As for Cadbury's I'm sure that they took over some brnads or manufactured certain products under license.

Now, of course if they relocate or change the conditions or pay rates of the workers at Cadbury's in time that will not be good but I suspect it's enevitable.

Kraft has not been around as long as Cadbury's but it has quite a history all the same and sponsored a number of the top rated radio shows in the States in the 40's and 50's and the owner/founder was quite religious and always gave some kind of speech at the end of the Christmas programme.

But maybe back then Kraft was founded on a similar principle as Cadbury's and Hershey's but there will have been many changes at boardroom level since then and business models will have changed.

I tried some Hershey's once and prefered Cadbury's but I also like Mars products. I like most chocolate and to judge Hershey's on one product isn't really fair.

Span Ows said...

If you look at the number of times Kraft have renamed or bought a company and sold a company the list is very long...but they're still there and still getting stronger so I guess Cadbury's will prosper.

Re blue screen of death...that is VERY bad (if t keeps happening. Maybe your comuter needs a "tune-u/clean-up".

The Great Gildersleeve said...

I hope the problem is fixed now and it could've been a memory problem. I had the computer updated, formatted and extra memory added last week so it may just be a continuation of the repair from last week. So far it seems to be working again.

I don't think that Nestlé have suffered with their take over of various products...it seems to be the way to go.

So many products that we see as being British are anything but.

Paul said...

Frys is part of Cadbury's Gildy.