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We’re writing this on the eve of Kraft Heinz’s (KHC) investor day, by design. The poster companies for conglomeration in food were always General Mills (GIS) and Conagra (CAG). As we walked through in The Great De-Conglomeration, Mills once owned Parker Brothers, Eddie Bauer and Red Lobster and built the submarine that explored the Titanic. Conagra owned commodity brokerages, craft stores, a sewing-needle distributor and a business selling charcoal and lighter fluid. Both have spent decades shedding.
Kraft Heinz is the poster company for what came next. The 2015 merger of Kraft and Heinz wasn’t really the old-style conglomeration. It was still all food, and on paper it sat inside our “pick your corners” corollary. But it proved too large and still too disparate... European foodservice, U.S. packaged grocery and several unrelated commodity businesses like coffee, cheese, meat and nuts. It was far too many corners. What followed was a $15 billion write-down in 2019, a plan in September 2025 to split the company in two, a new CEO who paused that split in February, Berkshire Hathaway registering its entire 27.5% stake for a possible sale (it says it’s in no rush, but the paperwork is done), and last week the sale of the coffee business to private equity.