Divestiture and Growth
In 1995, Loblaw divested the last of its retail holding in the United States while Galen Weston oversaw the expansion of Canadian retail operations. Loblaw bought 80-store Agora Foods of Atlantic Canada for $81 million in late 1998 and soon thereafter announced the purchase of Quebec-based Provigo for $1.7 billion. Meanwhile, George Weston Limited continued to move away from resource-based industries. A decade earlier, White Swan tissue had been sold for $110 million and in 1998 the rest of E.B. Eddy Forest Products was divested. East and West coast fish processing operations, namely British Columbia Packers and Connors Brothers of New Brunswick, were also sold.
Weston greatly expanded the company’s American bakery operations with the purchase of Bestfoods Baking Co. from Unilever for (U.S.) $2.7 billion in 2003. With nineteen plants, Weston’s acquired brands that included Entenmann’s, Thomas’ English Muffins, and Arnold Bread.
Read more about this topic: Galen Weston
Famous quotes containing the word growth:
“I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)