Cavenham Foods

About Cavenham Foods

Cavenham Foods was the food manufacturing and retailing group that James Goldsmith began assembling in 1964, named after his grandfather's estate in Suffolk; its first holdings were the chocolate maker Carsons, the slimming-bread firm Procea Products, the Carlisle biscuit maker Carr and Co and, in 1965, J A & P Holland, the Southport toffee maker whose sweet became Chewits.^[1][2] In the 1965 reorganisation Carr and Co bought Holland's from Cavenham and took the Cavenham Foods name, which put the group on the London Stock Exchange.^[1] It gathered its sweet businesses into the subsidiary Cavenham Confectionery about 1967, and bought Singleton and Cole in 1966, Bovril with Marmite and Ambrosia in 1971, and the Allied Suppliers store chain with Home and Colonial, Maypole and Lipton in 1972, by which time Wikipedia ranks it Europe's third largest food processor after Unilever and Nestle.^[2][1]

The group was renamed Cavenham Group in 1971.^[2] Goldsmith's French holding company Generale Occidentale, which already held a large block of the shares, bid for the minority in January 1977, withdrew, and returned in May with an offer of 160p a share that closed oversubscribed, so that by the end of that year Cavenham was private and off the London exchange.^[1] Generale Occidentale left food manufacturing in 1980, selling Bovril, Marmite and Ambrosia to the Beecham Group and the French operations to BSN, and Cavenham Confectionery was bought out by its management in 1981.^[2] Cavenham was put into voluntary liquidation in March 1986, its shareholders taking shares in Generale Occidentale.^[1]