FMCG: The trouble with Heinz

Tart-style beans on toast. The second made it into only a handful of the
broadsheets; Nelson Peltz, a controversial American corporate raider who
has built his shareholding in Heinz beyond the required 5%, was
proposing five new additions to Heinz's board of directors, including
himself and Australian golfer Greg Norman. This coincided with Peltz
suggesting his own plan to boost Heinz's profits.

The two tales are more related than they might appear. The pressure to
boost profits has had many effects on the staffing and marketing
strategy of the company in recent months. And as Heinz chairman,
president and chief executive officer Bill Johnson mounted a spirited
defence of his strategy to Wall Street, it did no harm for it to be set
against a global publicity blitz promising innovation.

Heinz's ownership battle has particular resonance in Europe, where 36%
of the company's profits are derived. The central plank of Peltz's
argument - that Heinz's management has lost the plot - is based on the
fact that revenue, gross profit and shareholders' returns have fallen
over the past eight years. In Europe, Heinz's performance has been
distinctly worse than that of its grocery rivals, with a 14% fall in
operating profit in 2004.

Heinz took drastic action in an effort to get back on track.

It instigated a Unilever-style plan to consolidate European activities
into three divisions - baby food; ketchup, condiments and sauces; and
convenience meals (soups, beans) - putting the 'for sale' sign over
businesses that fell outside these categories. It also bought HP Foods
to bolster its sauces portfolio.

Of the cast-offs, John West was sold to merchant banker Lehman Brothers,
while the Linda McCartney brand has just been bought by Hain
Celestial.

Heinz was less successful in its attempt to rid itself of its licence to
produce Weight Watchers-branded frozen ready meals. After failing to get
a high enough offer it has decided to keep the business, installing
former HP managing director John Garnett to grow the division by
investing in new products.

The European action plan has led to constantly revolving doors at
Heinz's Hayes Park head office. The business has had three UK chiefs in
one year; when managing director Stefan Barden left in May, he was
replaced by Jane Miller, who was parachuted in from the Pittsburgh head
office to instigate a programme of heavy cost-cutting and given an
enhanced title of president. She froze Heinz's £11m advertising
budget and made seven of the company's 10-strong central marketing
department redundant, including vice-president of brands Scott Garrett.
But Miller failed to achieve the tough targets she had been set by
headquarters in Pittsburgh and resigned two months ago. Sources suggest
that her background in the US grocery business had not prepared her
sufficiently for the bargaining strength of the UK supermarkets, and her
tough stance when trying to reduce Heinz's trade spend had not gone down
well.

Her replacement, David Woodward, a former sales director at Procter &
Gamble, starts at the end of June, followed within weeks by a new chief
marketing officer, Suzanne Douglas.

There have also been changes at European level, with European president
and chief executive Joe Jiminez replaced by Scott O'Hara in May.

Loyalty disrupted

The management upheaval and savage cost-cutting, all aimed at staving
off a takeover, have taken an inevitable toll on the strength of the
Heinz brand's relationship with consumers, say observers. 'Heinz is an
iconic brand that used to be part of the fabric of our culture,' says
Pete Edwards, who ran Heinz's media planning and buying at Starcom for
three years until July 2004 and is now partner at communications
planning agency Edwards Groom Saunders. 'But the heart of the brand has
not been supported and people have fallen out of love with it.'

A spokesman for Heinz denies that the company has neglected the
relationship between brand and consumers, pointing to a study by Bath
University last year which found that Heinz Beans and Soup were the top
'most preferred' grocery brands. However, with a sample size of only
872, the research would not be considered statistically reliable by most
market researchers.

A look at the performance of Heinz's key products over the past two
years also questions consumer brand loyalty, especially in light of the
one metric Heinz needs most urgently - sales growth. Although Heinz
Beans, the company's biggest single revenue stream, has a 63% share of
its market and saw 5% growth last year, the firm's other major revenue
contributor, soups, slipped by 2.5%, according to ACNielsen. Rival
Baxter's took all the advertising share of voice and a subsequent brand
growth of 14.3%.

The really bad news - the area in which Heinz is doing so miserably that
it is showing up as a notable negative effect in its group financial
results - is frozen food. Heinz has shed £25m worth of sales in
this sector over the past four years through both its own brand and
products sold under the Weight Watchers from Heinz banner. Although the
overall frozen sector is suffering, Heinz's 29% sales fall is double
that of market leader Unilever.

Sales troubles cannot, of course, be blamed solely on the withdrawal of
marketing communication support. The company is, to a great extent,
hampered by the fact that most of its products are fighting in mature
markets with heavy own-label penetration. But, say insiders and Peltz,
the European division of the company has failed to be proactive about
tackling this problem, with little home-grown innovation to create
excitement in the aisles. The standout innovation - the much-lauded
top-down ketchup bottle - was a hit in the US before it was brought to
the UK.

Heinz's cost-cutting has not meant a freeze on innovation and brand
support alone; it has also indirectly aided competitors by flooding the
recruitment market with experienced marketers. Premier Foods, which
created a wealth of publicity late last year with the launch of its
Branston Beans, has employed a number of marketers made redundant by
Heinz.

The outflow is continuing - one observer close to the company reports
that resignations from Heinz's commercial teams have recently been
running at about one a fortnight. The exception is the new UK marketing
chief; Suzanne Douglas has just spent three years as the general manager
of marketing at Heinz Australia, well-regarded internally for its
ability to achieve growth in key categories by more than 10% during her
tenure.

Douglas' brief is wider than that of the previous top marketer,
Garrett.

While he led a central marketing department that supported the work of
the category teams, Douglas will have the four category commercial
directors Clodagh Ward (sauces), Ben Pearman (beans and pasta meals),
Gary Power (soups) and Steve Turner (infant feeding) reporting to
her.

This promises to be a far more effective way of structuring the
department than the previous system, say insiders, because the marketing
function will be integrated more closely with the commercial side. Heinz
has always been a heavily sales-oriented company, with marketers much
more involved with the product and price aspects of the job and less
with the communications elements than at other grocery giants.

Heinz's existing culture is one of preoccupation with reaching stringent
quarterly sales and profit targets. Teams are arranged by category and
marketers work for commercial managers in each. Achieving retail
listings is paramount. One of the major motivations for Heinz's
acquisition spree a few years ago (which saw it buy the very brands now
sold) was to give it a wider portfolio in order to leverage better deals
with supermarkets.

This emphasis on sales, together with the fact that its major brands are
all fighting strong retailer brands, has also led to the heavy
investment in retailer promotions that Peltz has flagged up as being too
high.

Every grocery brand has to budget for these in-store activities - they
are essential to gain listings as well as often being highly effective
in reaching consumers at the point of making a purchase decision. But
the problem is that Heinz's scale has become unwieldy. It is thought to
spend up to three times its average consumer marketing budget on
in-store spend - up to £30m.

Making the trade budget work harder - and reducing it - will be a top
priority for incoming commercial directors Woodward and Douglas, along
with new vice-president, channels, John Hans, who will need to carefully
study the effectiveness of individual elements in order to prioritise
the activity that shifts product and aids listings (see box, page
28).

Risk assessment

Tackling the trade spend is just the most tangible area of concern.
Douglas will also need to address what insiders describe as Heinz's
intrinsically conservative culture in order to achieve growth in
categories that have been under-performing, such as soup.

Risk-aversion runs deep within the company, says Garrett. 'There is no
culture of new product development. The problem is that while there are
only one or two people who can sign off on such activity, the power of
veto is widespread. It took me two years to go from idea to launch - by
that time the market had moved on, the need for it had passed.'

Garrett was keen for Heinz to assert its category leadership positions
by innovating through extensions. Although he was frustrated by the
process and saw many ideas sent back to the drawing board, he launched
Mean Beanz last year. The spicy range has been credited with bringing
some value back into the firm's beans sales, offsetting price falls on
the main brand, and is now set to launch in Australia.

Despite its success in boosting margins on beans, Garrett is realistic
in describing Mean Beanz as 'just a line extension. What Heinz really
needs to tackle is the fact that its products sit in aisles that
shoppers make few trips down. It needs to extend the brand into
different aisles.'

Lost initiative

Heinz's culture means that the company has been more likely to cost-cut,
rather than innovate its way out of a crisis. Inevitably, this strategy
fails when rivals become more proactive. Last autumn, when Heinz was in
the midst of its advertising purdah, it was caught out by Premier Foods,
which conceived its Branston Beans launch in a matter of months. Premier
had lost the licence to produce HP beans when it sold the brand to Heinz
and created the Branston product to replace it. Although figures suggest
that Premier has taken share more from own-label than Heinz, the launch
illustrated how easily Heinz is caught napping.

Given the constant pressure from his corporate stalker Peltz, chief
executive Johnson has had to come clean about this limitation of the
Heinz style of business. He recently admitted 'we could have moved
faster'. And this is exactly what Heinz needs to do. On June 1 it
announced a full-year sales increase of 6.7% to $8.6bn. But net
profit fell from $752m to $645m, a drop of 14.2% and
profits in the fourth quarter fell by 19%.

Weak sales in the UK frozen-food division were flagged as a negative
contributor, as was pricing pressure in Europe. Fourth-quarter European
profits were kept afloat only by the reduction in marketing
expenditure.

In a separate announcement, Johnson revealed a two-year growth plan that
won't actually begin until the start of 2007. Four factories will close
in Europe, which will account for the majority of the 600 job cuts.

Central to the plan is a promise to reduce trade spend, referred to as
'deals and allowances', by £145m. A 'significant portion' of this
is planned to be cut in Europe. This figure is half the $300m
demanded by Peltz, but Johnson has condemned that plan as 'unrealistic',
a judgment supported by UK grocery experts.

Much of this saving will be funnelled into consumer marketing; Johnson
promises a rise across the firm of 18.7% in this area. A 'double-digit'
increase in research and development over each of the next two years
will prioritise healthier products - Heinz has already started on this
path in the UK with lower-sodium beans and soup, and wholemeal canned
pasta.

Following the US model

All the proactive development rests on Heinz's ability to cut trade
spend.

But a closer look at how it hopes to do that raises questions. The
company aims to replicate the US trade management model in the UK, yet
the two markets are very different, suggesting that Heinz has failed to
learn from Miller's inability to transfer her American grocery
experience to the UK market.

Wall Street critics have not been placated by Johnson's plan. One US
fund manager described Heinz as a 'pretty bloated and happy company',
condemning its plan as 'baby steps' compared with Peltz's radical
steps.

That said, marketing support is starting to crank back into action in
the UK; a TV campaign for tomato ketchup was recently launched, created
by Beattie McGuinness Bungay, the agency that has been working on ads
for HP Foods. This reinforces the brand leadership with the line 'We
don't have to play ketchup', while emphasising the quality of
ingredients. There are also rumours that an advertising campaign is
being planned to support the main Heinz brand.

With analysts predicting that Peltz will not stop in his campaign to
influence the strategic direction of Heinz, the company's marketers will
have to work against a backdrop of uncertainty for some time yet.

DATA FILE - MARKET SHARES



SOUP BRAND SALES (pounds m)



2004 2005 % chng

1 Heinz 162.5 158.4 -2.5

2 Baxters 42.9 49.1 14.3

3 Batchelors 46.6 45.2 -2.9

4 New Covent Garden 37.9 39.0 3

5 Campbell's 13.7 13.3 -2.9



Source: ACNielsen.

Figures are for year running Sept-Oct







SALAD CREAM BRAND SALES



2003 2005(est) % chng

pounds m pounds m 2003-05

Heinz 36 39 8.3

Waistline 2 2 -

Own-label 6 7 16.7

Others 1 1 -

Total 46 49 6.5



Source: Mintel







DATA FILE - BABY FOOD AND DRINK SALES



2002 2005 (est) % chng

pounds m pounds m 2002-05

Heinz 92.5 93.3 0.9

SMA 66.9 81.1 21.2

Cow & Gate (Nutricia) 67.2 81.1 20.7

HiPP 28.1 33.6 19.8

Milupa (Nutricia) 13.2 19.7 49.2

Organix 9.3 13.1 40.9



Source: Mintel

TRADE MARKETING CUTS

Heinz's attempt to tackle the thorny subject of how to reduce the amount
of money channelled to retailers without compromising listings is
fraught with problems. It isn't just consumer marketing departments that
hand over money to supermarkets - sales and any trade marketing
department may be spending with them too, making it difficult to track
down and analyse the total budget.

There are a wide variety of promotional and other activities that
retailers ask manufacturers to contribute to, many of which may not have
been subject to any kind of effectiveness analysis.

Agency Commercial Advantage specialises in helping manufacturers manage
trade spend. Chairman Emyr Williams says that one of the first areas his
team looks at is retailer magazines. Manufacturers can spend tens of
thousands of pounds a year on promotions in these titles 'to little
effect', says Williams. The only exception he makes is for Waitrose Food
Illustrated, which offers a valuable 'halo effect' of association for a
brand.

Other areas that manufacturers can often chip away budget savings in
include: fees for in-store promotions, fees for products being placed on
gondola ends (of aisles) and paying a retailer's 'lost' margin on a 'buy
one, get one free' promotion.