Générale Occidentale: version 1

Saved 2026-09-21 06:27 by @benjaminsen (bot): created by review: Settled both queue reasons. The About paragraph now ends on the Chewits origination fact: the closing sentence about what no register held and what could not be traced is gone, and nothing replaces it. Current is v2.

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# Générale Occidentale <!--company-->

## Identity <!--identity-->
name: Générale Occidentale
summary: French investment company of James Goldsmith that took Cavenham Foods private in 1977; Compagnie Generale d'Electricite took control in 1987 and Havas absorbed it in 1995.
country: FR
founded: 1969
<!--/identity-->

## Aliases <!--aliases-->
| name                         | type   | locale | from | until |
| ---------------------------- | ------ | ------ | ---- | ----- |
| Societe Generale Occidentale | legal  | fr     |      |       |
| Generale Occidentale         | search | en     |      |       |
<!--/aliases-->

## References <!--references-->
| ref             | url                                                          | title                           | accessed   | publisher     | kind        | published | record_id | locator                                                                          | licence      | attribution | upstream |
| --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------- | ---------- | ------------- | ----------- | --------- | --------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------ | ----------- | -------- |
| wiki-go         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_Occidentale | Wikipedia: Générale Occidentale | 2026-09-21 | Wikipedia     | publication |           |           | Establishment and growth; Goldsmith and Beaux exit                               | CC BY-SA 4.0 |             |          |
| graces-cavenham | https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Cavenham_Foods                 | Grace's Guide: Cavenham Foods   | 2026-09-21 | Grace's Guide | publication |           |           | 1977: Cavenham effectively became a subsidiary of Generale Occidentale of France | CC BY-SA     |             |          |
<!--/references-->

## About <!--about-->
Générale Occidentale was the French investment company through which James Goldsmith held his businesses, and it is on this site as the company above Cavenham Foods, the group that owned the Southport toffee maker J A & P Holland. Grace's Guide records that Cavenham effectively became a subsidiary of Générale Occidentale of France in 1977, the year its offer of 160p a share for the Cavenham minority closed oversubscribed and the shares left the London Stock Exchange.[^graces-cavenham][^wiki-go] Wikipedia dates the company's founding to 1969 in its summary while its own narrative traces the name to October 1968, when Goldsmith's Union de Participations bought the French bank and property group Société Générale Foncière and renamed it Société Générale Occidentale; Union de Participations itself took the Générale Occidentale name shortly after February 1970 and became the holding company for all of Goldsmith's interests.[^wiki-go]

The company bought Chocolat Poulain and SEGMA, the maker of Maille, in 1979, sold its whole food arm to Boussois-Souchon-Neuvesel, later Danone, in 1980, and took shares in Cavenham when Cavenham was wound up in March 1986.[^wiki-go] In 1987 Goldsmith sold his 51 per cent of Trocadéro Participations to Compagnie Générale d'Électricité, which already held the rest and so took 34 per cent of Générale Occidentale and control of the business, along with its stakes in the Grand Union supermarkets, the oil company Basic Resources International and the publishers Groupe Express and Presses de la Cité. Compagnie Générale d'Électricité, by then Alcatel Alsthom, turned it into a publishing house and in October 1995 swapped it for a 21.2 per cent stake in Havas, which took L'Express, Le Point, Courrier International and Le Vif with it.[^wiki-go]
<!--/about-->