History
United Biscuits was formed in 1948 from the merger between McVitie & Price and MacFarlane Lang.
In 1972, it acquired Carr's of Carlisle, makers of the eponymous Table Water biscuits.
The Company owned the Wimpy Bar fast food restaurant chain between 1977 and 1989. It also acquired the chilled food company Ross Young's in 1988.
The Company was acquired in May 2000 by Finalrealm, a consortium of financial investors, as well as Nabisco Holdings Corporation: as part of the transaction, UB acquired Nabisco's European businesses.
The Company sold Young's Bluecrest in 2001, in order to concentrate on the sweet biscuit sector.
In September 2004 the Company bought the UK portion of Groupe Danone's Jacob's Biscuit Group for £240 million.
In July 2006 it sold its Southern European biscuits business to Kraft Foods, which in turn left the owner syndicate.
In October 2006 the Company was sold to a consortium made up of the Blackstone Group and PAI Partners. The deal was completed in December 2006.
On 2 November 2007, UB issued a recall on its Crawford's Bourbon Cream biscuits, due to the possible presence of small pieces of thin metal wire in the biscuits.
Read more about this topic: United Biscuits
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)