Beatrice Foods
 |
|
| Fate | Acquired by ConAgra Foods |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1894 |
| Defunct | 1990 in US |
| Headquarters |
Irvine, California Downers Grove, Illinois Chicago, Illinois |
| Products | Food, Chemical, Consumer Products |
Beatrice Foods Company was a major American food processing company. In 1987, its smaller international food operations were sold to Reginald Lewis, a corporate attorney, creating TLC Beatrice International, after which the majority of its domestic (U.S.) brands and assets were acquired by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR), with the bulk of its holdings sold off. By 1990, the remaining operations were ultimately acquired by ConAgra Foods.
The Beatrice Creamery Company was founded in 1894 by George Everett Haskell and William W. Bosworth, by leasing the factory of a bankrupt firm of the same name located in Beatrice, Nebraska. At the time, they purchased butter, milk, and eggs from local farmers and graded them for resale. They promptly began separating the butter themselves at their plant, making their own butter on site and packaging and distributing it under their own label. They devised special protective packages and distributed them to grocery stores and restaurants in their own wagons and through appointed jobbers. To overcome the shortage of cream, the partners established skimming stations to which farmers delivered their milk to have the cream, used to make butter, separated from the milk. This led to the introduction of their unique credit program of providing farmers with hand cream-separators so they could separate the milk on the farm and retain the skim milk for animal feeding. This enabled farmers to pay for the separators from the proceeds of their sales of cream. The program worked so well, the company sold more than 50,000 separators in Nebraska from 1895 to 1905. On March 1, 1905, the company was incorporated as the Beatrice Creamery Company of Iowa, with capital of $3,000,000. By the start of the 20th century, they were shipping dairy products across the United States, and by 1910, they operated nine creameries and three ice cream plants across the Great Plains.
The company moved to Chicago in 1913, at the time the center of the American food processing industry. By the 1930s, it was a major dairy company, producing some 30 million US gallons (110,000,000 l) of milk and 10 million US gallons (38,000,000 l) of ice cream annually. In 1939, Beatrice Creamery Company purchased Blue Valley Creamery Company, the other Chicago-based dairy centralizer. This acquisition added at least 11 creameries from New York to South Dakota. Beatrice's 'Meadow Gold' brand was a household name in much of America by the beginning of World War II. In 1946, it changed its name to Beatrice Foods Co. and doubled its sales between 1945 and 1955 as the post-war baby boom created vastly greater demand for milk products.
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