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Uncle Warren Strikes Again: Kraft Heinz Cuts 2,500 Jobs
Thanks, Uncle Warren.
The Kraft-Heinz merger engineered earlier this year by everyone’s favorite folksy octogenarian billionaire along with 3G will cost some 2,500 people their jobs, as the combined entity looks to cut costs.
CEO (and 3G partner) Bernardo Hees has already slashed jobs on the Heinz side of things, so now it’s apparently time for Kraft employees to do their part to facilitate merger "synergies."
Spokesman Michael Mullen says affected workers are in the U.S. and Canada and were to be notified in person.
About 700 of the cuts were coming at Kraft's Northfield, Illinois, headquarters. The company would not specify where other cuts were taking place.
The Kraft Heinz Co. said it has a total of around 46,600 employees.
The job cuts are not surprising, given the reputation of the company's management on Wall Street.
The combination of Pittsburgh-based Heinz and Kraft earlier this year was engineered by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital, which has become known for its tight cost controls.
Together, the two U.S. food giants own brands including Jell-O, Heinz baked beans and Velveeta that are facing sales challenges amid changing tastes. Their combination was nevertheless seen as attractive because of the opportunity to save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by combining functions like manufacturing and distribution.
In a statement, Mullen said Wednesday the job cuts were part of the company's process of integrating the two businesses and "designing our new organization."
"This new structure eliminates duplication to enable faster decision-making, increased accountability and accelerated growth," Mullen said. He said employees will be given severance benefits of at least six months.
More, from The Chicago Tribune:
Kraft Heinz on Wednesday said it will lay off 700 workers at Kraft's corporate headquarters in north suburban Northfield, part of a cost-slashing plan that will cut the combined company's headcount in the U.S. and Canada by 2,500 jobs.
Employees affected by the cuts, which have been expected for months, will receive "generous" severance benefits that last at least six months and outplacement services, said Michael Mullin, Kraft Heinz's senior vice president of corporate and government affairs. The cuts take effect immediately.
"As we work to build something special at The Kraft Heinz Company, the leadership team has examined every aspect of our business to ensure we are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible," Mullin wrote in an email. "We have developed a new streamlined structure for our organization to simplify, strengthen and leverage the company's scale. This new structure eliminates duplication to enable faster decision-making, increased accountability and accelerated growth."
On Monday, Kraft Heinz affirmed its commitment to cut costs by $1.5 billion by the end of 2017. As part of its merger, the company said it expected to reduce its existing workforce.
The layoffs -which are a follow up effort to other new cost cutting initiatives such as a directive which requires employees to use both sides of the paper - will reportedly save the company a cool $1.5 billion over two years.
Sure beats spending $1.4 billion on wage hikes.
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No surprise, that's Buffet , Obama's favorite cock sucking cronie. Perhaps punk ass should follow the lead and close down the IRS FBI DOE EPA DOT NSA DOJ DOHHS DOD HLS and queer for shit SCOTUS. That would be a nice fucking start.
Yup, good work.
Layoff List: http://www.dailyjobcuts.com
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American GRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDD !!!
$75 BILLION Is Not Enough, No No No, I Need $125 Billion, No, $175 Billion, Yah, Ahhhhhhh.
Not HUMAN... Some Kind Of Alien Life-form Implanted Here By Mistake.
He needs the money to pay for more Black baby abortions at Planned Parenthood organ harvesting facilities.
It's just plain ol' Capitalism. Nothing more, nothing less. What are you a commie? Or a commie-socialist-pinko? This is America! Every man woman and child for himself. And as the man-who-walked-on-water said: If you can't walk, sink. Glory Glory Glory.
Yep, 2500 lives affected so they can add a penny to the bottom line so the execs can get their fat bonuses. Same as it ever was at large corporations.
Jobs that produce negative value, that is, simply destroy capital to create credit/money whose sole purpose is to destroy yet more capital, must be eliminated as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. Consumerism must be smashed and pulverized between falling incomes and rising expenses. We still have about 90% of this absurd Keynesian cargo cult make-work "labor" market to go. Nature does not negotiate.
We buffeted some folks!
We Warrend some folks!
No Demand
Private Equity kills jobs, especially so in a shrinking economy.
No Demand
This only makes him qualified to run for president (see: Carly Fiorina and Mitt Romney)
This is exciting news. If this keeps up we should see unemployment below 5% before the election. That's the way it works now, right? I get so confused. Once GMO tomatoes are fully implemented, besides being wholesome and delicious with an infinite shelf life, could solve the employment problem forever.
Most supermarket tomatoes have been hybrids since the 1970s. They are already tasteless, have an infinite shelf life and their resulting seeds for replanting useless (they need to repurchase seed every year, crony farming). GMO tomatoes would be superfluous except for raking in more profits for Monsanto, limiting varieties, additional costs to the producer and added toxicity to the consumer.
Fuck Monsanto.
I get my seeds from here: http://www.rareseeds.com/
If you can grow yourself, why buy bland sameness from the supermarket when you can have diversity and ultimate taste?
Heirlooms come in hundreds of varieties (>3000), I grow about 15 varieties including chocolate stripes, yellow pear and red pear, and I see at your site chocolate pear, would be a welcome addition.
If I had to have just one heirloom, (heaven forbid), Black Krim, great slicer for sandwiches with great taste and look. Thank god though that we don't have to limit ourselves to just one heirloom variety.
"Heirloom tomatoes lack a genetic mutation that gives tomatoes an appealing uniform red color while sacrificing the fruit's sweet taste. Varieties bearing this mutation, which have been favored by industry since the 1940s, feature fruits with lower levels of carotenoids and a decreased ability to make sugar within the fruit."
A downvote? Either a Monsanto shill here or someone doesn't like Russians.
Great link. Thanks cheech!
Buffet is still alive?
Only the good die young. Eternal is evil.
Guess they have to play Katchup.
Somewhere in Omaha, a taxedermist waits anxiously in anticipation.
"It's makin' me wait"
"It's keepin' me waitin"
He better not be waiting for Soros, that's like waitng for dracula to keel over.
He lives but only for CNBC specials that kiss his cronie ass.
Do I smell another Medal of Freedom coming up for him from Barry?
Obama Honors Buffett, Bush With Medal of Freedomhttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-02-15/obama-honors-buffett-g...
Are you allowed to buy that thing twice?
No doubt all those jobless Merikans are proud of him even though, "he didn't build that."
Dept of Redundancies Dept
Low interest rates forces investors to seek yield in places they wouldn't normally go. Turns hedge funds more activist, and takes them down the road of 3G like mergers, where they cut costs so deep to return profit now (with no care whatsoever to the entity's sustainability down the road). Worked well (not) in Burger King, where management turnover is 30% on a yearly basis, all tribal knowledge is gone and sales are down (ex-acquisition growth). ImBev - shares down. Heinz has lost share on everything but ketchup and mustard.
But hey, shareholders get the profit!
Maybe Warren shouldn't pay his secretary so much, or take as many baths with Becky Quick. Kepping a young trophy bitch can be expensive.
Well since warren said himself, its a war on the middle class, in response, I will slash out everything that says Kraft of Heinz in my refridgerator. After all, do I really like the taste of french fries glopped with a tomato flavored GMO corn syrup or some fat ass creating mayonaise? nope. Does my homegrown porterhouse need something poured on it to enhance its flavor? get real. but German Mustard is pretty good with about a 10 calories per tbsp.
Go ahead and vote another ADM/ Monsato board member to the FDA , then cram your so called food and YOU eat it and wash it down with an aspartame Diet Coke you greedy, dried up old disgusting windbag..
Use mayonaisse with your fries. Much better.
Use cranberry sauce with your fries, much better. Mmmmm.
Been boycotting Kraft for decades and I hate Ketchup (disgusting).
Mergers never create jobs.
There is a special case though...
Mar-i-age creats lots of work ;-) not jerbs though....just work...lot's of it....
Quite the opposite. By the time I turned 35, I'd been through 4 corporate "mergers" and lost my job in each one. The last one generously offered to allow me to move from the Atlanta area all the way out to Seattle area but my 4 years of tenure and pay raises would be reset so it would have been a pay cut & going to an area with a much higher cost of living. I took the severance package instead....mergers suck unless you're on the side initiating the 'merger' because all redundancies seem to favor the larger of the two being 'merged'.
http://supermarketnews.com/ap-bankruptcy-2015/ap-issue-layoff-notices-al...
Moar bullish news from the Jobless rekovery.
But wait. Isn't Buffett's fortune mainly virtual, because it is stuck into highly overvalued stocks that would immediately collapse should he ever sell them all in one?
Concentration And Centralization Of Capital.
"ensure we are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible,"
Translation: We want to maximize profits from the costly merger
He can get new tires for his old pick-up truck now.
Yeah, but some layed off will no long be able to pay Buffet's 14% trailer home mortgage... Take that WB!!
What a folksie guy...right CNBC?
And poor Joe on the ketchup pak line was saving up to put skirting on his Clayton trailer home.
A generous severance package will contain some ketchup packets and othe Kraft goodies. Total retail value of $20.
Well, you don't need as many people putting macaroni in boxes if you don't put as much macaroni in the box as you used to.
Tax inversions, levered M&A. It is why he keeps insisting the Fed doesn't raise rates. More for him.
This year: We let go of our most veteran employees because they were the most costly
Next year: We cant find skilled labor.
Free Fudgesicles.
That Baby Tomato beaten to a pulp can only be fiction, tomatoes can't walk.
It's okay. The fired employees will receive "generous severance benefits". Who didn't see this coming? Generous? That's too funny.
That old fucker has cut quite a swath through the middle class everytime he 'buys' a company, Sees Candy, Mohawk carpet, BN, and now Heinz.
I can imagine four homeless bums under an overpass in a driving rainstorm sharing stories someday...gotta be a joke in here somewhere. "you think you got it bad" kind of thing..
I hate his crony ass, but I cannot argue with him trying to run an efficient business.
prick with kittens and an ice cream cone for photo ops
"can we make that a white kitten ?" - Wag the Dog
Didnt he fund obama...
There are plenty of reasons for me to beat up on Buffet and other malignancies like him. This layoff at Heinz is not one I condemn him for. With any merger, consolidation occurs, meaning layoffs and merging of facilities. The political favoritism he engages in is what irritates me.
Name brands like hienz will suffer badly. Who will spend twice as much on a name brand? Their whole market position will be destroyed. They'll be forced to rely on their generic low cost brands they own.
I don’t think there are hundreds of Ketchup manufacturing plants in the world.
Most likely, Heinz cold packs for the off-brands.
Denise Austin Slideshow / The Ketchup Songhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIDTgpLJHAI&spfreload=10
Whats he thinking? Those fuckin tomatos dont pick themselves!
Kraft/Heinz all mechanized, just a few people pick tons an hour (and their hands never touch a tomato)
Middle management job losses.
WILL someone PLEEZE cut goddamn government jobs, I mean SLASH and BURN the useless FUCKERS...I apologize for the profanity, but it is certainly deserved....
We need a Thunderdome event with Soros vs. Buffet
All across America, the elite set up M&A deals with cheap money and then slash the workforce in the name of 'efficiency' or 'synergy' or some other bullshit term, picked out of the standard, post-merger speech box. So now you have 2,500 more employees that are going to cut back on their spending. Spending on groceries, cars and a wide array of other things. With U.S GDP being driven as Consumer Spending at 70%, how is this kind of crap good for the economy?
self immolation
Grandpa why did you take those two companies, put them together and ruin all those people's lives? Well Johnny its what makes America great. Corporatism. By ruining all those lives we were able to add 5 cents per share value and increase my bank account yet again. But don't worry Johnny those people can emigrate to china where I offshored the rest of the jobs.
You cannot take it with you Warren.
So, do u believe in capitalism now punk? Do ya, do ya!
This isn't Capitalism.
It's control of Capitalism.
The answer is to stop buying Kra(p)ft products. The Kraft Diner is garbage 9 times out of 10. I buy an American brand mac and cheese that costs 3 times as much but is 5 times better or PC mac and cheese which costs less and is better.
There are better and cheaper katchup brands than Kraft. Sorry for the remaining Kraft employees but that's life.
Why is it the only brand of malt vinegar I can find is Heinz? Anyone know of a different brand?
Anti-Trust, anyone?
At this rate, we'll all be eating Soylent Green...