Kraft wields the axe at Cadbury HQ
CADBURY-owner Kraft Foods is set to axe almost three-quarters of the confectioner’s head office workers, reports suggested today.
According to The Independent newspaper, the US food giant has begun a redundancy consultation with 120 staff at Cadbury’s head office in Uxbridge.
The move means just 45 of the 165 people who work in the management and administrative centre have been found jobs elsewhere in the Kraft organisation.
Many of the staff affected where thought to be unwilling to relocate to Kraft, which is based outside Chicago. There were also suggestions that many staff were unhappy to continue working for the firm once it had transferred to foreign ownership.
The redundancies are not unexpected. Kraft said after it completed its £11.5bn takeover of the Bournville firm in January that synergies would mean certain staff becoming surplus to requirements.
Kraft has carried out a restructuring of the Cadbury – and its own – operations since completing the takeover.
It has announced the closure of the Kraft offices in Cheltenham and the upgrading of the Bournville site to a global centre of excellence for R&D.
However, a question mark remains over the fate of manufacturing jobs in Birmingham.
Kraft was forced into an embarrassing U-turn over its initial promise to retain the firm’s production facility at Keynsham, near Bristol, when it first took over the confectioner.
The humiliation heaped upon the company became even worse when senior executives were grilled by a Commons committee and then severely reprimanded by city watchdog The Takeover Panel for its handling of the affair.
Kraft was forced into apologising for its actions and it has become the focus of criticism ever since.
It has promised workers in Birmingham there will be no manufacturing jobs withdrawn for two years, however, what happens after that is unclear.
There are worries that the US firm in an effort to cut costs, will look at relocating manufacturing to cheaper countries.
There are also concerns that the loss of many talented managers from within Cadbury will undermine the confidence of investors in Kraft.
Since takeover, Cadbury has lost several senior managers including chief executive Todd Stitzer and his finance director Andrew Bonfield, who resigned within days of Kraft’s takeover.
Advertising guru Phil Rumbol, the man responsible for the famous Gorilla commercials, also quit as have another five executives including chief strategy officer Mark Reckitt.
The newspaper today quoted a Kraft spokesman as saying: “We always were clear that the global head office would be in Chicago and therefore that the UK based head office employees would go into a consultation about redundancy.”
