In the spring of 1903, a young Canadian food clerk arrived in Chicago with sixty-five dollars in his pocket, having been quietly stripped of his partnership in a Buffalo cheese company by partners who dissolved the firm without his knowledge while he was away supervising their Chicago branch. He was twenty-eight years old, far from the family dairy farm in southeastern Ontario, and suddenly a stranger in the largest food market in North America with no business, no warehouse, and no prospects beyond what he could buy with a sum that equaled roughly two months of his old salary at the general store in Fort Erie. What he bought was not a business, not a building, not a trademark. He bought the right to own a horse.
The horse was named Paddy, a detail the company kept and repeated for decades because a horse with a name is a story, and the man selling processed cheese to the armies of the United States understood the value of a story. Before the market opened each day, he would go to South Water Street, the wholesale district along the river, buy as much cheese as his money allowed, load it onto a rented wagon, and take it through the immigrant neighborhoods that were growing faster than any municipal system could serve. He sold to small grocers, to peddlers, to the Germans and Poles and Bohemians and Swedes who ran shops the size of a sitting room and kept their accounts in a single ledger. Not cheaper cheese, and not better cheese, but smaller quantities delivered often enough that the grocer’s money never ran out before the cheese spoiled.
He had grown up in a Mennonite household that carried the family name from Germany to Pennsylvania to Upper Canada across three generations, and the simplicity of that tradition stayed with him. He was born James Lewis Kraft on December 11, 1874, the second of eleven children, in a farmhouse on Bowen Road in the flat plains north of Fort Erie. His parents, George Franklin Kraft and Minerva Alice Tribble, ran a small dairy farm like most of Welland County in the 1870s, and their gravestone still bears the name with two F’s. Their son dropped one of them when he founded his company, and in that small deletion lies the story of a name separating from its family.
He attended the modest schoolhouse the county called School Section Number Nine on Airline Street, and the records show nothing remarkable about him. What the records do show is that in the last years of the century he was working as a clerk in Richard Ferguson’s general store in Fort Erie at five hundred dollars a year, weighing goods for neighbors and learning the single lesson no school in Welland County could teach. The lesson was that a grocer’s problem is never the customer and never the product, but the gap between them, the spoilage and waste, the working hours that turn good goods into rubbish. Cheese was the worst of all.
It arrived in large cloth-wrapped wheels of cheddar from Ontario and Wisconsin, and the grocer who cut into a wheel started a clock he could not stop. The cut surface dried and cracked, mold spread across the rind, the flavor faded, and in July everything could spoil within days in a store with no icebox, because most stores had none. In 1902, Kraft crossed the river to Buffalo and took a position as secretary and treasurer of the Shepard Cheese Company, a small ambitious firm. Within a year he had invested his savings and become a partner.
Then the partnership collapsed behind his back while he was in Chicago, and he was left with nothing but the sixty-five dollars and the understanding that a grocer’s problem had become his opportunity. For ten years he had watched cheese spoil. Now he would build a business around the gap between the cheese maker and the grocer’s counter. The early years were hard.
A letter survives from August 2, 1904, written to a friend named Wilfred, and it is the most revealing document of his early life because it is neither humble nor triumphant. He wrote that he did not have a relatively large business at present, and then wrote that he knew what he could do and honestly expected that within five years he would own one of the best wholesale cheese businesses in the city. A man does not write such a sentence unless he is enduring humiliating circumstances. The humiliation was arithmetic.
Established wholesalers had warehouses, permanent credit lines, and long-standing relationships. He bought at the same prices without their volume, and his product was still perishable because he had changed nothing about the fundamental chemistry of a cheddar wheel. He sold faster, which helped, and he sold it in better condition, which helped more. But he was still racing time.
By 1907, with the business faltering during a year of acute financial crisis when New York banks suspended payments and credit dried up across the country, he sat down and decided to make God a partner. The phrase appeared in Baptist publications for half a century and in company speeches for longer. The practice behind it was real. He paid his tithe, taught Sunday school, and ran his business as if the books would be examined by someone other than an accountant.
The timing mattered, because 1907 was the year small businesses failed everywhere for no reason other than their size, and he did not fail. By 1909 the wholesale trade had grown beyond what one man and one horse could handle, so he did what men from large families do when they need reliable labor. He summoned his brothers. Charles Herbert, Frederick, Norman, and John Henry came from Ontario to a rented Chicago operation that had nearly gone bankrupt twice.
Together they formed J. L. Kraft and Brothers. James was thirty-four years old, took the presidency, and held that office or its successor without interruption until his death.
The brothers became executives and remained so, which would matter enormously later, because none of them ever became an owner in the way that the founding families of Ford or DuPont or Hershey were owners. They were employees who carried the family name. In 1911 he became an American citizen, closing the Canadian chapter legally, while keeping the accent and habits of a Welland County farmer for the rest of his life. In 1912 the company began advertising cheese in national magazines, nearly unheard of in a trade that did not consider cheese a branded commodity at all.
And quietly, he began spending money he could barely afford on a problem nobody had asked him to solve. The problem was the cheese wheel itself. He had spent almost a decade trying to control spoilage, increase speed, sell smaller quantities, shorten the distance between cheese maker and grocer’s counter, and every one of those measures was a temporary fix. In a room behind the Chicago plant he began heating cheese and watching it fail.
When heated, the fat separated, the solids clumped, the emulsion broke apart, and what remained was an oily ruin that no grocer would touch and no customer would eat. He took inspiration from milk. Milk had been pasteurized for years, heated to kill the organisms that spoiled it, and the dairy industry had been reorganized around that process. But cheese resisted the treatment for a mechanical reason, not a biological one.
Cheese crumbled when heated. What he discovered, through a process the surviving record describes only by its results, was that the crumbling could be prevented by force. If the cheese was stirred at high speed while heated, agitated enough to keep the fat suspended in the solids rather than allowing it to clump, the emulsion held. The heat killed the organisms that caused ripening and spoilage.
The stirring kept the texture intact. What came out of the kettle was a substance that was no longer cheese in the traditional sense, and no longer perishable in the traditional sense either. It was uniform. A grocer could promise something, and a customer could get used to it.
Habit is the only permanent asset in the grocery trade. The great flaw of cheddar as a national product had never been its spoilage but its inconsistency. A sharp wheel, a medium wheel, a poor wheel. The grocer could not promise, and the customer could not get used to anything.
Kraft’s product tasted mild and tasted identical in Sacramento and Savannah, and it lasted. He was not the first to make such a thing. Two Swiss food chemists, Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler, had treated Emmentaler cheese with sodium citrate in pursuit of longer shelf life and better melting, work that predated the American effort. What Kraft got was the first American patent, and in the American market a patent is not a discovery but a fortress.
In the year the European war broke out, the company opened its first cheese plant in Stockton, Illinois, moving from trading other men’s products to manufacturing its own. By that time it distributed about thirty varieties under the Kraft and Elkhorn labels. During the following year the new pasteurized cheese was produced commercially for the first time, worth nearly five thousand dollars. It was packed in small tin cans with keys that rolled back the lids.
The can was not secondary packaging but the product itself, because a sealed metal container filled with cheese that needed no refrigeration was, for the first time in this commodity, a unit of cheese that could be shipped aboard a ship. Most of that first production went to India and East Asia, a sign of how clearly he understood what he had built. On June 6, 1916, the United States Patent Office issued patent number 1,186,524, titled “Process of Sterilizing Cheese and an Improved Product Produced by Such Process,” to James L. Kraft of Chicago.
He received a similar Canadian patent four years later. The legal wording mattered: it claimed sterilization, not invention, and a process, not a recipe, and a process was something a court could defend. Competitors could make processed cheese if they wished, and many tried, but they could not make it the way Kraft wanted without taking a license from the man who had failed for ten years in a back room. Within twelve months the business multiplied thirtyfold, transforming from a company dependent on a cart route and religion into a manufacturer with a legal monopoly on the only cheese in America that could be stored in a warehouse without worry.
Then the war arrived. In the spring of 1917 the United States declared war on Germany and began assembling an army of millions, feeding them, and transporting them across the Atlantic. Somewhere in the supply offices of the War Department, a quartermaster began wondering whether any cheese could be shipped in bulk, stored without ice, carried in a ration, and opened in a trench. There was only one, and it was patented.
The army shipped nearly six million pounds of canned cheese to the armed forces during the American intervention. The number transformed a Chicago company into a national supplier within eighteen months, because government purchases of that scale guarantee demand, which allowed the company to expand capacity without fear, guarantee payment, which allowed the company to borrow against it, and guarantee distribution to a generation of young Americans who would return home in 1919 having eaten the product for a year. The soldiers who ate Kraft cheese in the trenches were the same homeowners who bought it in the 1920s, and the government had funded the taste test. The war also removed the retailer from the economic equation entirely.
For the duration of the contracts, the customer was a government agency demanding quantity, uniform quality, and tolerance for shipping. Every one of those requirements pushed the company away from the craft with which it had begun and toward factories. Once the soldiers came home, the company had learned to think of cheese as a manufactured commodity with specified tolerances, and it would never think otherwise. After the armistice, the company marketed the product in five-pound loaves wrapped in foil and packed in wooden boxes, a form designed for the American grocer rather than the quartermaster.
The loaf did for the delicatessen shelf what the tin can had done for the ship’s hold. Advertising spread everywhere, from magazines to radio, carrying a message centered on certainty rather than taste. The woman who bought a loaf of Kraft in 1924 was buying a promise that the cheese in her kitchen would behave as the last loaf behaved. Standardization is a commercial argument disguised as convenience, and the American food industry of the twentieth century was built on it by Heinz, Campbell, Borden, and Kellogg.
Kraft promoted reliability in cheese, which, unlike soup or cereal, was a symbol of local production. By the early 1920s the company operated plants, employed thousands, advertised nationally, and exported internationally. Its founder became wealthy for the first time in his life at about fifty. He bought land in the forests of northern Wisconsin near the company’s new plant at Antigo, because the countryside reminded him of Ontario, built a summer home on a lake he called Kraftwood, and filled it with his wife, his daughter, and his friends every summer.
He invested in a golf-and-tennis resort project in Lake Wales, Florida, with a couple named Carl and Bertha Hinshaw, until the Florida real estate collapse and then the stock market crash of October 1929 ended his interest entirely, leaving only a Spanish-style house that locals still call the Kraft House. He gave generously to his church. What he did not do was build the machinery that turns new wealth into lasting social status: no Fifth Avenue mansion, no marriages into old families, no endowed institutions carved with his name in stone. In the boardroom, at the very moment his personal fortune became large enough to found a dynasty, he began instead a series of transactions that would end with his family empty-handed.
In 1927 the company acquired the maker of Velveeta, a soft processed cheese that would become one of the most enduring and disputed American food products. In 1928 came the merger that changed the company’s course, with the Phoenix Cheese Corporation of New York. Phoenix brought a cream cheese brand named after a city where it had never been made, Philadelphia, founded in the 1870s and enjoying a quality reputation that the Kraft name, associated with cans and loaves and mild uniformity, could not achieve on its own. The merged company, Kraft-Phoenix Cheese, had prospective sales of about sixty million dollars a year, making it the largest cheese company in the world.
The deal established a habit the company would be known for later, growing by acquisition rather than innovation. Two years after that, the acquirer was acquired. National Dairy Products had been founded in 1923 by Thomas McInnerney, a former ice cream executive who saw early the possibility of consolidating the fragmented American dairy industry. Before the end of the decade it had acquired dozens of regional companies across the country.
Through a stock deal in 1930, National Dairy acquired Kraft-Phoenix to become the largest dairy company in the United States. James Lewis Kraft was fifty-five years old, the company bore his name, and from that year he was an executive of a company controlled by others. He kept the presidency of the Kraft division, later the chairmanship of the board. He kept his office, his authority over the cheese business, and his position as the company’s public face and moral symbol.
His brothers kept their positions beside him. What he lost was control. There was no confiscation, no defeat, no boardroom ambush, because he sold voluntarily in exchange for a stronger balance sheet in the middle of a merger wave. In 1930 that looked like wisdom, not surrender.
But the result was that the family lost what families in such circumstances are supposed to value above all: the power to say no. He had twenty-three years of working life remaining, and they were productive years. Under his management the company introduced Miracle Whip in 1933, displayed at Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition as a cheaper alternative to mayonnaise at the depth of the Depression, and it became one of the best-selling products of the century. Then came Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, a box containing dried macaroni and a pouch of powdered cheese for nineteen cents, marketed with the claim that it would feed a family of four.
Rationing and supply shortages turned the box into a staple, and the company sold tens of millions of units. The same year brought Parkay margarine. In 1949 came Kraft Deluxe processed cheese slices, and in 1952 Cheez Whiz, the last new product launched in the founder’s lifetime. The Kraft Music Hall radio program became one of the most listened-to shows in the country.
Advertising on that scale also shifted the locus of trust from the shopkeeper who had always vouched for his goods to a printed brand produced hundreds of miles away. Brands became the asset, not factories, not patents that expire, not distribution contracts that get renewed, and certainly not the family, the names on the packages and the willingness of a woman in the grocery aisle to choose the familiar box. He had married Pauline Elizabeth Platt of Chicago in 1910, the year after founding the company, and the marriage lasted until his death. They had one child, a daughter named Edith, born around 1916, the year of the patent.
In a family of eleven children, one daughter was not enough to found a dynasty, and the Kraft family never possessed the numbers, the trust funds, or the shareholdings required to become what that term suggests. His life outside work revolved around two things. The first was the North Shore Baptist Church of Chicago. Raised Mennonite, he converted that inheritance into Baptist practice, and his faith took administrative rather than spiritual form.
He founded the men’s Sunday school class and served as its superintendent for roughly four decades. He served as acting president and treasurer of the International Council of Religious Education, vice president of the American Bible Society from 1926, and a trustee of a Baptist theological seminary. With a parishioner, C. J.
Howel, founder of Orange Crush, he gave fifty thousand dollars of his own money, matched by Howel, to build Baptist churches in poor neighborhoods. His second organizing passion was stranger. He collected jade, with a seriousness that rivaled a second career. It began with carved Chinese pieces, common among the wealthy of the era.
Then it became something like prospecting, as he became convinced that American jade was being neglected. On business trips he would ask his driver to stop the car so he could examine roadside gravel. Over the years he owned jade mines in Alaska and California and learned to cut and polish the stone himself in a workshop. A businessman in his sixties bent over a gem-polishing wheel.
What he made were rings, setting polished American jade in rings he gave to employees who had gone beyond their job requirements. Those rings passed to craftsmen’s families and their descendants as heirlooms, a form of estate planning no lawyer recognizes and no probate court records. He wrote a book about it, “Adventure in Jade,” and became the authority on American jade. The two passions met in a window.
In the craft chapel of the North Shore Baptist Church there is a stained-glass window made entirely of American jade, about two meters long and one meter wide, assembled from 446 individual pieces in colors the ancient Chinese carvers gave names like “crimson rose” and “date skin” and “sky after rain,” centered on a rare piece of white jade. It faces east to catch the morning light. It is the closest thing to a monument James Lewis Kraft built for himself, and it is not in a museum or a palace or a university bearing his name. He died on February 16, 1953, at Wesley Memorial Hospital in Chicago after a short illness of pneumonia complicated by a heart condition he had suffered for years.
He was seventy-eight, honorary chairman of the company. The New York Times obituary called him the man who had convinced the public of the importance of cheese. He was buried in Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois, under a modest gravestone. What happened to the money?
The honest answer requires admitting what the record does not contain. There is no famous Kraft will, no published valuation of his estate, no family office, no family trust, no Kraft Foundation of the kind Rockefeller, Ford, and Mellon created, and no Kraft heir appears on any list of wealthy Americans in the following decades. The record instead contains a long series of gifts to churches, seminaries, and Bible societies, forty years of unpaid Sunday mornings, a jade window in a small chapel, and a few jade rings in the homes of former employees. The wealth from his patent was real, and almost none of it remained in his family because the company had not belonged to his family since 1930.
He spent the rest of his life giving away what remained to institutions that paid no dividends. Charles Herbert Kraft, the brother who rose highest, ran operations in the founder’s final years, and when the last brother left executive office, the family’s existence in the company it had founded ended. No member of the Kraft family ever led the company again, and none was asked to. The brothers had come from Ontario as farm boys and retired as salaried employees of a large corporation, comfortable and unknown.
Compare that to what happened in the same decades at Hershey, where a trust kept the company as the founder wanted it, or at Ford, where the family retained a separate class of voting shares for the explicit purpose of making sure no one could outvote them. Those arrangements were available to anyone who wanted them badly enough to accept slower growth. The Kraft family did not want them. There was no succession crisis because succession requires a right, and the family had surrendered that right in the National Dairy deal while the founder was still in early middle age.
What disappeared along with the right was something harder to grasp than money: the family’s ability to impose its preferences on a company against the preferences of the market. A controlling family can refuse to close a plant in its hometown, refuse to sell the division bearing the founder’s name, accept lower returns for continuity. Professional managers answer to scattered shareholders and have no right to do any of these things. The record of the next seventy years is essentially a record of decisions at which no descendant was present to object.
Meanwhile the company entered the era of the American management doctrine that a corporation should be a portfolio rather than a single business. National Dairy was an aggregation of regional milk and ice cream operations with a cheese division attached. By mid-century, the cheese division was the only part anyone outside the industry knew. The parent company acknowledged the fact in 1969 by changing its name to Kraftco.
In 1976 it went further and became simply Kraft. The founder had been dead sixteen years when the company that bought his company adopted his surname as its legal identity. No member of his family was in a position to be consulted, honored, or compensated. The name had become separable and transferable, an asset like a brand portfolio or a truck fleet.
In 1980 Kraft merged with Dart Industries, a conglomerate whose portfolio included Tupperware plastic containers, Duracell batteries, West Bend appliances, Wilsonart plastic laminates, and Thatcher glass. The combined entity was called Dart and Kraft. For several years the name of an Ontario farm boy appeared in the corporate title beside battery manufacturing and kitchen storage. The logic was diversification, and it did not survive the capital markets of the 1980s.
Investors realized that conglomerates traded at a discount to the sum of their parts, and the only way to capture the value was to break them apart. In the middle of the decade, Dart and Kraft did to itself what any hostile acquirer would have done, spinning off its non-food businesses, except Duracell, into an independent company called Premark International, and renaming itself Kraft Incorporated. The name had been separated and evaluated. In the fall of 1988, Philip Morris, the tobacco company in Richmond, Virginia, facing declining cigarette consumption, mounting litigation, and tighter advertising restrictions, saw Kraft’s predictable cash flows as the solution to its problem of generating cash faster than it could find places to invest it.
In mid-October it made an unsolicited cash offer of about twelve billion dollars. Kraft’s board resisted, a bidding war followed, and within two weeks the price was raised to 106 dollars a share, valuing the company at about thirteen billion dollars. It was the largest non-oil acquisition in American history up to that time, creating the largest consumer products company in the world. The factories, inventories, and receivables made up a small part of that price.
Most of it was paid for intangibles: the words printed on packages and the habits those words had established in a hundred million homes. Accountants call the difference between the price paid and the tangible assets received goodwill, and they list it on the balance sheet of the acquiring company. A cigarette company had to record the true value of a deceased Canadian’s name in a legal document. The company then merged its two food subsidiaries into Kraft General Foods, with sales of about thirty billion dollars.
For the next decade, the cheese business founded by the Baptist Sunday school superintendent was a division of a cigarette manufacturer, its profits used in part to fund the legal defense of an industry facing the largest civil suit in American history. That arrangement was not mentioned in the advertisements. The separation came in stages over six years. First Philip Morris sold 280 million shares of Kraft in what was then the third-largest public offering in history, keeping about 88 percent.
Then in early 2007 the parent, renamed Altria, distributed the entire remaining stake to its shareholders. Kraft Foods became an independent public company for the first time in seventy-seven years. It did not last. In 2009, Kraft targeted Cadbury, the British chocolate maker, in a hostile, protracted, politically controversial campaign in a country that regarded Cadbury as a national institution.
An initial offer was rejected as an insult, a second was rejected that autumn, and in mid-January the Cadbury board accepted a revised offer valuing the company at about 19. 5 billion dollars. Within months, promises made during that battle about British factories were broken, questions were raised in Parliament, and UK takeover rules were rewritten. After two years, the expanded company decided it held two incompatible businesses, a fast-growing global snacks business and a slow steady North American grocery business, and split itself in two.
The parent company, holding the snack business and global brands, renamed itself Mondelēz International, a coined name designed to suggest a delicious world, and spun off the grocery business under the name Kraft Foods Group. What remained under his name was a portfolio of established American staples with steady sales, limited growth, and cash flows so reliable they attracted a certain type of investor. Two of them were already talking. Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett stood on one side, with a philosophy of buying good companies and keeping them for decades.
On the other stood 3G Capital, a Brazilian investment firm led by Jorge Paulo Lemann and Alex Behring, who took the opposite approach, acquiring consumer companies and cutting costs with a severity rarely seen in the American market. Their tool was called zero-based budgeting, under which every line item starts at zero and must be justified from scratch each year. The practical result in a company with decades of accumulated experience was successive waves of layoffs, plant closings, and cuts to travel, research, and advertising. Together the two firms acquired H.
J. Heinz in a deal worth tens of billions. Two years later, Berkshire’s Heinz approached the CEO of Kraft Foods Group about merging the companies. Both boards agreed within weeks, and in the summer of 2015 Kraft Heinz began trading as the fifth-largest food and beverage company in the world.
Berkshire’s stake in the merged company cost about ten billion dollars. With costs cut, margins widened and the stock rose. Analysts wrote admiring reports about the discipline. Peers wondered why they could not achieve the same results.
The method acquired the prestige that habitually attaches to whatever succeeds. The hypothesis had one condition: the process had to continue. In early 2017, Kraft Heinz made an offer for Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant, valued at about 143 billion dollars. Unilever rejected the offer outright and publicly, and within two days Kraft Heinz withdrew.
The withdrawal was an admission that there was no target large enough left. Cost-cutting is a finite resource. The merger would have provided years of new expenses to eliminate. The rejection left the partners holding two mature portfolios and a methodology with nothing left to work on.
A company can cut costs only until it arrives at the costs that generated the revenue. In branded consumer goods, those costs include advertising, product development, sales coverage, and innovation, the things that keep a fifty-year-old product attractive to a consumer who has never been compelled to buy it. Consumers were moving toward fresh foods, store brands, and smaller newer brands, anything that seemed less processed. Processing had been the company’s founding principle.
The quality that built the company, the promise that the contents of the package would surprise nobody, became within two generations the quality that young consumers paid extra to avoid. The reckoning came in late February 2019. Kraft Heinz announced a goodwill and intangible impairment charge of 15. 4 billion dollars, concentrated on two assets in particular: the Kraft trademark and the Oscar Mayer trademark.
The company cut its dividend sharply by more than a third and disclosed that the SEC had issued a subpoena in October about its accounting policies, procurement practices, and internal controls. No factory burned, no product was recalled, no patent expired, no competitor introduced a catastrophic product. The company simply declared, in the language of accounting, that the name James Lewis Kraft put on a can of cheese in 1916 was worth billions of dollars less than the company’s own books had suggested. The market reaction was immediate: the stock fell more than a fifth in after-hours trading, losing nearly sixteen billion dollars of value by the next morning.
Days later, Buffett gave an interview and said plainly that he had been wrong about Kraft Heinz in several respects and that Berkshire had overpaid for Kraft. An investigation found that years of accounting errors had understated the cost of goods sold by more than two hundred million dollars, that cost savings had been claimed improperly, and that four years of results had to be restated. The company eventually paid sixty-two million dollars to settle with the regulator, a former head of procurement was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company, another former executive paid a personal fine, and a shareholder class action settled for four hundred fifty million dollars. Slightly more than a century after a man with a rented horse discovered a way to keep an emulsion from separating, the institution carrying his name was writing checks to the federal government for its inaccurate description of its savings.
The company cut debt, sold marginal businesses, changed CEOs, and tried to reposition itself. The split of the great merger of the previous decade was being repeated across the sector, as processed food giants concluded their portfolios were too broad to manage and too dull to justify investment. Cereal makers separated snacks from breakfast, soup makers separated sauces, and the bankers who had been paid to put these companies together were paid again to take them apart. On September 2, 2025, the Kraft Heinz board unanimously approved a plan to unscramble the merger, splitting the company into two independent public entities through a tax-free spinoff.
The interim names in the announcement were revealing. One was to be called Global Taste Elevation Company, holding Heinz, Philadelphia, and the macaroni and cheese business with annual sales of about fifteen billion dollars. The other was to be called North American Grocery Company, holding Oscar Mayer, Kraft Singles, and Lunchables with sales of about ten billion dollars. The founder’s surname, adopted by National Dairy as its legal identity in 1969, was now being divided between two companies without real names, by products said to elevate taste and products left merely to feed people.
Then even that did not last. In December 2025 the company announced a new CEO, Steve Cahillane, arriving from the cereal industry where he had overseen a split of exactly this kind. In January, Berkshire Hathaway, then led by Greg Abel, filed to sell its entire stake of about 27 percent, setting up an exit from an investment it had already marked down by nearly four billion dollars. Buffett, then ninety-six, had already stated his opinion of the proposed split in a single sentence: merging the two companies had not been a good idea, and splitting them would not solve the problem.
The new CEO paused the split on February 11, 2026, telling reporters that conditions in the food industry had deteriorated, that he could not split the company and fix it at the same time, that the problems were solvable and under control, and that there was no expiration date on the pause. By spring the company told shareholders the timing of completing the whole proposal remained uncertain. By summer it took an additional goodwill impairment of more than seven billion dollars. The largest shareholder is leaving, and the company is being written down again.
One detail must be clarified, because the family name suggests it. The family that owns the New England Patriots has nothing to do with this story, does not descend from the Ontario farm, and has no connection to the cheese trade. Here any honest account must report what it found instead of what the shape of the story demands. There is no tragedy in the Kraft family in the usual sense of these narratives: no suicide, no feud, no squandered inheritance, no heir dying in a car crash, no mansion sold at auction to pay an estate tax.
James Lewis Kraft died old, honored, religious, and married, having built something great and given much of it away. His only daughter lived a long quiet life. His brothers drew executive salaries and retired. None of them, nor any of their children, owned a single dollar of the wealth this name accumulated after 1930.
The tragedy of this story lies in its structure, and it belongs to a century in which enormous wealth belongs not to families but to institutions, so that the losses, when they come, fall on pension funds and index holders. The employees of a company of sixty thousand, none of whom know the founder’s name. The family lost its name from memory and continued to earn and lose enormous sums it never saw, passing from a dairy consolidation company to a battery-and-plastic conglomerate to a cigarette maker to a Brazilian cost-cutting firm to an insurance company in Omaha, each owner drawing down what it could from the trust accumulated over a hundred years of grocery shoppers. The residents of Stevensville, Ontario, kept the farmhouse on Bowen Road.
The North Shore Baptist Church kept its east-facing jade window. The families of long-dead Kraft employees kept their polished green rings. Those are the only remaining pieces of this wealth still in the possession of people who knew the man. A farmhouse, a window, and some rings, against ledger entries of an impairment no family could bear, and none was ever asked to bear.
Everything else became a number on a downward-adjusted balance sheet. He spent his life making cheese that never spoiled, and in the end his life turned its own story upside down.
