ConAgra Foods, Inc. is an American packaged foods company headquartered in
Omaha, Nebraska. ConAgra makes and sells products under various brand names that
are available in supermarkets, as well as restaurants and food service
establishments. History
ConAgra was founded in 1919 by Frank Little and Alva Kinney, who brought
together four grain mills as Nebraska Consolidated Mills. Initially
headquartered in Grand Island, Nebraska, it moved to Omaha in 1922. The company
ran at a profit until 1936, when Kinney retired. In 1940, the company began
producing flour at its own mill, and in 1942 ventured into the livestock feed
business. That year president R.S. Dickinson opened the company's first
out-of-state facility in Alabama with a flour mill and animal feed plant.
After researching new uses for its flour, NCM funded the establishment of
the Duncan Hines brand of cake mixes in 1951 as a way to market more flour. This
venture was very successful, leading the company to its current place as the
third largest flour miller in the U.S. However, this did not lead NCM to
consider other food ventures, and instead it sold its assets in Duncan
Hines to Procter & Gamble in 1956. As American households purchased more and
more prepared and instant foods in the 1950s and 1960s, NCM chose not to expand
into the businesses that used its flour, instead turning in the opposite
direction and focusing more on raw foods like poultry and expanding its livestock
feed business. In 1971, Nebraska Consolidated Mills
changed its name to ConAgra, a portmanteau of con for consolidated and
agra, similarly short in English for agriculture. The 1970s brought the
company to the brink of ruin as it lost money expanding into the fertilizer,
catfish, and pet product industries and as commodity speculation wiped out
ConAgra's margins on raw foods. In 1974, C. Michael "Mike" Harper, an experienced
food industry executive, took over the firm and brought it back from the brink
of bankruptcy. Nonetheless, ConAgra's business model left it at the mercy of
volatile commodity prices. In response, the company set off on a two-decade-long
buying spree, purchasing over one hundred prepared food brands, starting
with its 1980 purchase of Banquet Foods. It moved heavily into the frozen food
business and the packaged meat industry, and then picked up a selection of other
brands from firms like RJR Nabisco and Beatrice Foods among others, as the
leveraged buyouts of the 1980s resulted in the divestiture or breakup of many
major American consumer product firms. In 1993 alone it purchased $500 million
in smaller firms, and in 1998 it purchased another $480 million in brands
from Nabisco. On May 23, 2001, ConAgra Foods Inc said
it would restate its earnings for 1998, 1999 and 2000, due to accounting and
conduct matters at its United Agri Products Cos unit. For fiscal 1998,
revenues was cut from $24.27 billion to $24.19 billion.
On March 24, 2005, ConAgra Foods Inc said the results for fiscal 2003 and
2004 would be restated to reflect a reduction in after-tax profits of $150
million to $200 million in total. On November 27, 2012, ConAgra officials
announced they were purchasing Ralcorp, pending Ralcorp shareholder approval,
for approximately $4.95 billion. Stockholders of Ralcorp Holdings Inc.
would receive $90 per share. The deal completed in January 2013 and made
ConAgra the largest private-label packaged food business in the United
States. On July 14, 2014, ConAgra announced that
it has acquired TaiMei Potato Industry Limited, a potato processor in Shangdu,
Inner Mongolia. This acquisition expands ConAgra Foods’ Lamb Weston® operations
in a market that has growing demand for frozen potato products.
On October 1, 2015, ConAgra announced that it would cut about 1,500 jobs and
relocate its headquarters to Chicago as part of a restructuring plan.
Governance The board of directors are: Mogens C.
Bay, Stephen G. Butler, Steven F. Goldstone, Joie A. Gregor, Rajive Johri,
W. G. Jurgensen, Richard H. Lenny, Ruth Ann Marshall, Gary M. Rodkin, Andrew J.
Schindler, and Kenneth E. Stinson. Products
ConAgra produces a wide array of food products including cooking oil, frozen
dinners, hot cocoa, hot dogs, peanut butter and many others. Some of
ConAgra's major brands include Hunt's, Healthy Choice, Marie Callender's,
Orville Redenbacher, Slim Jim, Reddi-wip, Egg Beaters, Hebrew National,
P. F. Chang's, and Bertolli ready meals. Partnership with Feeding America against
child hunger The nonprofit ConAgra Foods Foundation
has pledged a five-year commitment of $10 million to Feeding America to fight
child hunger. Additionally, ConAgra Foods founded the Child Hunger Ends Here
campaign in 2013 that would donate up to 3 million meals equivalent to Feeding
America by donating one meal per code submitted to the campaign’s website by
consumers of the firm’s products along with the zip code of the desired service
area for the donation. For promotion of the campaign, Tori Kelly composed the
original song “Fill a Heart”, performed by himself as well as Amber Riley and
Cody Simpson, two of other supporting artists of the campaign. Carly Rae
Jepsen also supports the campaign, her manager Scooter Braun stating, “Child
hunger is a problem we cannot ignore, and it is a privilege to work with
ConAgra Foods to make a real difference right here in America”.
Criticism = Environmental issues=
ConAgra has been criticized for its lack of response to global climate change. A
2006 report by Ceres, a non-profit organization that works to address
global climate change and other sustainability issues, entitled
"Corporate Governance and Climate Change: Making the Connection", measures
how 100 leading global companies are responding to global warming. Companies
in the report were evaluated on a 0 to 100 scale. ConAgra scored a total of 4
points, the lowest of any of the food companies rated. In a 2009 ranking by
Newsweek, ConAgra ranked 342nd out of America's 500 largest corporations in
terms of overall environmental score. In 2003–2004, ConAgra participated in a
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency voluntary investigation and clean-up
program. Through the program, the company cleaned up a property previously
used for lithium ore processing and constructed a new 80,000-square-foot
office/warehouse building. This voluntary program offers "future
liability protection". On January 7, 2014, a California
Superior Court found that ConAgra and its co-defendants were liable in
creating a public nuisance due to lead-based paint the companies sold. Ten
local governments in California filed the suit and the court ordered ConAgra,
NL Industries and Sherwin-Williams to pay $1.15 billion to remove or abate the
lead in homes located in those cities and counties. Although ConAgra never
produced paint, it assumed the liabilities of W. P. Fuller & Co., a San
Francisco-based paint producer, through a series of acquisitions.
= Labor issues= In May 2003, ConAgra and its subsidiary
Gilroy Foods agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle charges of hiring
discrimination brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The
charges involved a July 1999 Teamsters strike at a plant in King City,
California, then owned by Basic Vegetable Products LP but later
purchased by ConAgra. In August 2001, the company successfully negotiated with
the union to end the two-year strike with a new contract that would recall
workers based on seniority. However, the recall process excluded workers who were
on leave at the time of the purchase including those out due to work injury
or pregnancy. Others were denied jobs due to a history of previous injury or
illness, despite their having no restrictions on returning to work.
According to the EEOC, most of the 39 workers who were excluded from the
recall process had been working at the plant for 10 to 30 years and were
primarily Hispanic and female. The company's Greeley, Colorado, plant
had been cited almost 10 times from 1999 to 2002 for violating worker safety.
In July 2004, 6 people were killed in a shooting inside the ConAgra Foods plant
in Kansas City, Kansas. = Fraud and bribery=
In 1997, ConAgra pled guilty to federal criminal charges that its Peavey Grain
unit illegally sprayed water on stored grain to increase its weight and value
and also bribed federal inspectors. The company agreed to pay $8.3 million to
resolve the charges, which included a $4.4 million criminal fine, $3.45
million as compensation for illegal profits and $450,000 to reimburse the
U.S. Department of Agriculture for storage and investigation expenses.
ConAgra had also paid $2 million to settle a related civil case filed by a
group of Indiana farmers. Multinational Monitor, a corporate
watchdog organization, named ConAgra one of the 'Top 100 Corporate Criminals of
the 1990s'. = Demolition of historic site=
In 1988, ConAgra threatened to relocate from Omaha to Denver, Chicago or
Minneapolis if the city didn't help find a new location for its headquarters.
Charles Harper requested that the city of Omaha demolish the historic site, one
of the largest on the National Register of Historic Places. Omaha approved the
demolition of over 20 historic structures in Jobbers Canyon Historic
District, a 19th-century warehouse district along the banks of the Missouri
River in Downtown Omaha, Nebraska. The demolition made room for a sprawling new
corporate campus and headquarters, and prompted protests and lawsuits from
historic preservationists. Charles Harper, the chief executive of ConAgra
at the time, described the structures as "some big, ugly red brick buildings."
The National Trust for Historic Preservation asked that the historic
legacy of a city and region not be held hostage to the narrow corporate
preferences of a single commercial enterprise, but ConAgra refused to
reconsider. The Jobbers Canyon district was adjacent to another historic
district, the Old Market, which has proved to be an important center of
cultural, tourist, and residential development in Omaha. Omaha's
then-planning director, Marty Shukert, said it was more important to keep the
city's downtown core healthy than to keep the historic district. Others noted
that the district was in disrepair and ConAgra's new headquarters have been an
aesthetic and economic improvement for the city.
Genetically modified food In 2002, ConAgra, together with other
major food and beverage companies including PepsiCo, General Mills,
Kelloggs, Sara Lee, and H. J. Heinz Co., spent millions to defeat Oregon Ballot
Measure 27, which would have required food companies to label products that
contain genetically modified ingredients. According to the Oregon
Secretary of State, ConAgra contributed $71,000 to the campaign to defeat the
state ballot initiative. Throughout 2012, ConAgra contributed
$1,176,700 to a $46 million political campaign known as The Coalition Against
The Costly Food Labeling Proposition, sponsored by Food Producers. The
organization's goal was to oppose the California citizen's initiative, known
as Proposition 37, demanding mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically
modified ingredients. Although the Proposition was defeated,
there was strong consumer backlash against the Coalition's opposition.
Consumer advocates encouraged nationwide boycotts of coalition members, and
movements were started in several other states to enact similar labeling
requirements. As a result, ConAgra and others in the Coalition met with Walmart
to seek a nationwide labeling system for genetically modified foods, instead of
trying to defeat the measures in every state.
Product incidents ConAgra recalled 19 million pounds of
ground beef in July 2002 with E. coli bacterial contamination. It was the
third-largest recall up to that time. That meat was linked to the illnesses of
19 people in six Western and Midwestern states.
In February 2007, ConAgra recalled jars of Peter Pan and Great Value brand
peanut butter with the product code "2111" on the lid, because they were
linked to a Salmonella outbreak. Ultimately, the Centers for Disease
Control documented more than 628 individuals who were stricken with
salmonella poisoning in 47 states that could be traced back to Peter Pan and
Great Value peanut butter. Of those, 20% were hospitalized, according to the CDC,
which reported no deaths associated with the outbreak. Since Peter Pan is only
made at one plant, the recall included all Peter Pan jars sold in the U.S.
between May 2006 and February 2007. As of August 2007, 39 lawsuits had been
filed against ConAgra, seeking a total of more than $5 million in damages for
doctor bills, hospital stays, and lost wages stemming from the contaminated
food. In May 2015, the company agreed to plead guilty to knowingly releasing
products tainted with salmonella into interstate commerce. The Justice
Department fined the company $11.2 million.
On September 4, 2007, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association
recommended reduction of diacetyl in butter-like flavorings, such as those
used in popcorn, due to cases of the potentially fatal disease bronchiolitis
obliterans or "Popcorn Workers's Lung" appearing among plant workers exposed to
diacetyl fumes, as well as in one case that involved a popcorn consumer. The
next day ConAgra Foods announced that it would soon remove diacetyl from its
Jiffy Pop and Orville Redenbacher's popcorn products.
On October 11, 2007, ConAgra asked stores to pull the Banquet and generic
brand chicken and turkey pot pies due to 152 cases of Salmonella poisoning in 31
states being linked to the consumption of ConAgra pot pies, with 20 people
hospitalized. At that time, both the USDA and ConAgra decided in favor of a
consumer advisory and against a recall. ConAgra said the issue stemmed from pies
not being cooked thoroughly in older microwaves, and that the package's
heating instructions would be changed to reflect different microwaves. However,
the plant in Marshall, Missouri, where the pot pies were manufactured closed on
October 11 as well. By October 12, a full recall was announced, affecting all
varieties of frozen pot pies sold under the brands Banquet, Albertson's, Food
Lion, Great Value, Hill Country Fare, Kirkwood, Kroger, Meijer, and Western
Family. The recalled pot pies included all varieties in 7-oz. single-serving
packages bearing the number P-9 or "Est. 1059" printed on the side of the
package. By October 14, 174 cases of Salmonella poisoning in 32 states were
linked to consumption of the contaminated ConAgra pot pies, with 33
people hospitalized. Public interest groups criticized ConAgra for the delay
in issuing the recall, a decision which ConAgra defended by saying the recall
was a precaution. At the time of the recall, the USDA had still not
identified the source of the salmonella contamination. On October 17, the
Colorado Department of Public Health reported that "An investigation by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state public health
departments involved a large cluster of illnesses caused by Salmonella that
identified these products" and stated that, "Nationally, at least 211
individuals from 35 states have become ill." From January 1 through December
31, 2007, the CDC identified a total of 401 cases in 41 states.
2009 Slim Jim plants explosion On June 9, 2009 at 11:27 am ET, an
explosion rocked the Slim Jim manufacturing plant in Garner, North
Carolina resulting in the collapse of a section of the facility's roof and wall.
Four workers were killed while 67 others – including three firefighters – were
hospitalized for burns and exposure to ammonia gases. The explosion happened
when natural gas was purged into the interior of the building during
commissioning of a new, gas-fired water heater. This explosion was directly
responsible for an amendment to the National Fuel Gas Code prohibiting fuel
gas piping systems in large buildings from being purged indoors.
On March 3, 2010, ConAgra announced that the Garner plant would close in
approximately 18 months, and Slim Jim production would be moved to a plant
located in Troy, Ohio. See also
List of ConAgra brands List of United States foodborne illness
outbreaks References
External links ConAgra Foods, Inc. Web site