Fresh Take: Why Mars Has The Cash To Acquire Kellanova And A Whole Lot More

The food industry’s financial markets are experiencing their own heat wave. Even as major stock indexes struggled early this week, shares of chicken companies including Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride bucked the trend and rose on strong earnings news. Then, rumors started swirling that Kellanova, the Kellogg Company’s $11 billion (sales) snacking-focused spinoff, could be acquired by Mars, the world’s largest candy company as well as one of its largest privately held food conglomerates. Kellanova stock is up, as investors wonder if a multi-billion dollar acquisition could become a reality. Its market cap is about $25 billion.

But $50 million (sales) food giant Mars has the cash to make such a deal happen—and a whole lot more. Let’s look back at my exclusive story on Mars from last December, in which Mars Snacking global president Andrew Clarke told me that in the next decade, the company aims for its snacking division—which includes household candy names such as M&M’s, Skittles, Starburst, Extra and Wrigley’s chewing gums, Altoids and Dove chocolate—to double its yearly revenue to $36 billion from $18 billion.

“That gives you a sort of magnitude of where we’re at, at the moment, and we’re present across the world,” Clarke told me then. “We’re feeling very, very optimistic about the future of Mars snacking.”

With the potential acquisition news, the entire feature is worth a reread. More consolidation is coming for the food industry, and now is as good of a time as ever to remind yourself just how powerful Mars and the billionaire family behind it is, when it comes to the food all of us can access.

It’s been a funky summer for this newsletter as I’ve been recovering from my injury, and I appreciate you staying along for the ride. I’ll be off the next few weeks, taking my first actual (and much-needed!) vacation days of the year. I’ll look forward to saying ‘hi’ in your inbox once again after Labor Day!

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.