Consolidated Foods
 |
|
| Public | |
| Traded as | : SLE |
| Industry | Consumer goods |
| Fate | Split; assessments sold by Unilever and SC Johnson and Son |
| Successor |
Hillshire Brands D.E Master Blenders 1753 |
| Founded | 1939 |
| Defunct | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Downers Grove, Illinois, US |
|
Key people
|
Jan Bennink (Chairman) Marcel Smits (CEO) |
| Products | Food, beverage, and household and body care products |
| Website | www |
The Sara Lee Corporation was an American consumer-goods company based in Downers Grove, Illinois. It had operations in more than 40 countries and sold its products in over 180 nations worldwide. Its international operations were headquartered in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Sara Lee is also the brand name of a number of frozen and packaged foods, often known for the long-running slogan "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee," often incorrectly reported as "Nobody does it like Sara Lee."
While the company traced its lineage to 1939, when Nathan Cummings acquired C. D. Kenny Company, a wholesale distributor of sugar, coffee, and tea in Baltimore, the Sara Lee Corporation was actually the descendant of a Chicago grocery store called Sprague, Warner & Company. This enterprise, which started on State Street in Chicago, was founded during the Civil War by Albert A. Sprague and Ezra J. Warner. By 1909, Sprague, Warner & Company was one of the leading wholesale grocery companies in the United States, famous for house brands such as Richelieu, Ferndell, and Batavia. In 1942, this company was acquired by the Canadian-born Cummings. The new Chicago-based company, at first called Sprague Warner–Kenny Corp., ranked as the largest grocery wholesaler in the United States. Annual sales grew from about $20 million in 1942 to $120 million by 1946. After changing its name in 1945 to Consolidated Grocers, Cummings's company became the Consolidated Foods Corporation in 1953.
In 1956, the company bought a company known as Kitchens of Sara Lee, which became one of the company's best-known brand names. Management adopted the brand name as the name of the corporation as a whole in 1985. As of 2005, Sara Lee Corporation had operations in more than 40 countries; sold food, beverage, and household products in over 180 countries; and had some 137,000 employees worldwide.
On July 4, 2012, Sara Lee Corporation was split into two companies—one for North American operations which would be renamed Hillshire Brands (the Sara Lee name would continue to be used on bakery and certain deli products distributed by Hillshire Brands), the other for international beverage and bakery businesses named D.E Master Blenders 1753.
Prior to 1985, The Sara Lee Corporation was called Consolidated Foods, of which Sara Lee was the best known brand. Consolidated Foods had bought a Chicago bakery chain called Kitchens of Sara Lee in 1956 from Charles Lubin. Lubin had named his bakeries after his daughter, Sara Lee. She was born in 1941, and now goes by her married name, Sara Lee Schupf.
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Wikipedia