Kettle Foods - History

History

The company was founded by Cameron Healy in 1978 as the N.S. Khalsa Company; it produced its first potato chips in 1982. In 1988, following a motorcycle trip taken by the company's founder and his son, Kettle Foods established a UK branch in a converted shoe factory in Norwich; the branch moved five years later to a newly-built factory on the outskirts of Norwich, its current UK home.

In 2003, the company installed the largest solar array in the Pacific Northwest to use more green energy at their Salem plant. In September 2007, the company opened its second US production facility in Beloit, Wisconsin, lured there by $500,000 in state economic development money. Kettle built the first manufacturing plant to be awarded gold certification in the LEED program from the United States Green Building Council.

The company was sold in 2006 to a private equity group, Lion Capital LLP, for $280–320 million.

In October 2007, campaigns were launched on Facebook calling for a boycott of Kettle Foods products following allegations that the company was attempting to dissuade workers at its Norwich factory from joining trade union Unite. The company denies the claim but acknowledged that it has taken advice from Omega Training, a UK subsidiary of U.S. company The Burke Group, specialists in union avoidance.

In August 2008, California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced a settlement with Kettle Foods, the maker of Cape Cod Potato Chips, and Frito-Lay, for violating the state's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act; the state alleged back in 2005 that the potato chips from those companies failed to document that they contained high levels of acrylamide, a carcinogen. Kettle Foods paid $350,000 in civil penalties and costs and agreed to cut their potato chip's levels of acrylamide to 275 parts per billion by 2011, an 87% reduction.

Lion Capital put Kettle Foods up for sale in December 2009, with an asking price of around USD $700 million and in February 2010 sold it for $615 million to California-based Diamond Foods, which owns brands such as Pop Secret. The sale was finalized in the following month.