Unilever Plc is in talks to sell its food business to McCormick & Co, in what would be the biggest overhaul of the owner of Hellmann’s mayonnaise since it was founded almost a century ago.
The Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company said on Friday it had received an offer from the Maryland-based spices and seasonings maker, but that there was no certainty a deal would be achieved. Any sale would mark the biggest transaction in the history of McCormick, which is just a fraction of the size of Unilever. No details on how any deal would be financed have been provided yet.
A sale of Unilever’s food unit — which has a potential equity value of as much as €29bn ($33bn), according to Bloomberg Intelligence — would mark the end of Unilever competing with Big Food rivals like Kraft Heinz Co, Nestlé SA and PepsiCo Inc. It would also transform the multinational into a major household and personal care company on par with L’Oréal SA, Beiersdorf AG and Estée Lauder Cos.
Chief Executive Officer Fernando Fernandez, now a year into the role, has made it clear that food is no longer his main focus and he sees beauty, personal care and wellbeing as the keys to future growth.
‘Big Food’ is in a years-long shakeup as consumers, especially in the US, spend less amid high inflation and geopolitical uncertainty. Supermarkets are also gaining share in markets like the UK with high quality own-label options. Meanwhile, people on weight-loss drugs and followers of high-protein, high-fiber and low processed food diets mean consumers are buying less and choosing healthier, fresher food options.
These changes are making food less attractive to multinationals like Unilever when compared with the growth on offer in beauty and personal care, where consumers are increasingly willing to splurge on everything from multistep skin-care routines to fragrance collections.
Fernandez has already said he wants to generate two-thirds of Unilever’s turnover from brands like Dove soap, Liquid IV hydration sachets and Dermalogica skin care in the medium term, up from about half of revenue currently.
Diversification “largely made sense” in the 1990s and into the 2000s when bigger was better for consumer groups, according to Bernstein analysts led by Callum Elliott. That model has changed: “The benefits of scale across categories no longer outweigh the drawbacks of complexity,” he wrote Friday.
Unilever has been moving toward a more simplified model, with less reliance on food, for the past decade. It has already sold its tea arm, its global spreads division which included I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!, and more recently snack brand Graze and fake-meat maker The Vegetarian Butcher.
Last year, Unilever spun off its ice cream business into the Magnum Ice Cream Co, retaining a nearly 20% stake, and it has ear-marked a further €1bn and €1.5bn in small food brand disposals.
Still, Unilever is unlikely to let its remaining “highly attractive” food division go cheaply. The unit is still home to strong brands, including Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which has dominant market shares in the US and Brazil, and Knorr stock cubes, Unilever’s second best-selling brand overall just behind Dove.
Any deal will be a significant test for McCormick too, a company whose market capitalization of $14.5bn is dwarfed by Unilever’s more than £101bn ($135bn) value.
The company started out in 1889 selling root beer in the US before becoming a large maker of spices and seasonings like Old Bay. Known for its red-and-white tins of spices and herbs, McCormick is now pushing to become the biggest player in the condiment aisle globally.
McCormick has been acquiring local leaders in markets like the UK and Poland in recent years, expanding beyond spices to become a major seller of products like hot sauces and flavored mayos, which are popular especially among younger consumers.
The biggest push into condiments came in 2017 when McCormick bought Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc’s food division, RB Foods, for $4.2bn, giving it the crucial brands French’s mustard and Frank’s RedHot sauce. McCormick about a decade ago attempted to buy Britain’s Premier Foods, owner of Bisto gravy, but no deal took place.
Merging Unilever’s food business with McCormick “would be far from straightforward,” Chris Beckett, an analyst at Quilter Cheviot, wrote after the news. “This gap in scale, alongside McCormick’s present gearing of 2.7x, means any deal would likely be complex.”
Analysts earlier this week cautioned that while a sale of food would provide a boost for Unilever shareholders and allow the company to focus on faster-growth areas, it could also potentially be a distraction for management in the near-term.
“At some point, Unilever will need to rip off the Band-Aid and one could argue there is never a good time, but we don’t think the timing is now given everything else going on,” Barclays’ Warren Ackerman wrote.