Any Other Business | 19 September 2009

Bourneville chocolate with Kraft cheese slices? Not a recipe I’d recommend

The £10 billion bid for Cadbury by Kraft Foods, Inc of the US has provoked little protest — other than from the chocolate maker itself, which says it would rather remain a ‘pure-play confectionery business’ than become a component of Kraft’s ‘low-growth conglomerate’. The fight will come down to price, sentimental factors such as history and culture swiftly forgotten. Cadbury, in its model village of Bourneville on the edge of Birmingham, used to be an icon of progressive Quakerism in business. Now, with its workforce shrunken and its ‘Bourneville’ brand made in France, it’s a modern company like any other, led by a tough-talking American, Todd Stitzer. But that still doesn’t make Kraft — whose chief contribution to civilisation is the processed cheese slice — an attractive suitor. In my part of the world, Kraft is remembered as the acquirer of Terry’s of York — whose dark Chocolate Orange is now made not in York but in Poland. Cadbury shareholders might care to remember a recent advertising slogan for the Kraft-owned Orange: ‘Round but not round for long.’

The Ashdown of banking

There was a time when calling someone ‘the Paddy Ashdown of international banking’ would have sounded snide. But in applying this tag to Sir Win Bischoff, who has just become chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, I mean it as a straightforward compliment. Let me explain. The two men are almost twins in age. Both led tirelessly from the front in their earlier careers — Ashdown as Lib Dem leader, Bischoff as globetrotting chairman of Schroders — but you would not have tipped either for the formidable assignments they have taken on at a time when most of their peers have retired to the golf club.