Kraft and Heinz are Merging, Cutting Jobs, Making Food Cubes

Big news in “brightly colored viscous liquid foods:” Heinz is buying Kraft and, with their powers combined, are becoming Kraft Heinz.

First of all, I am extremely grateful that somebody decided to put a space between Kraft and Heinz, instead of going for the oh-so-trendy KraftHeinz. (In the future, when they make fun of the 2010s in movies, they’ll simply cut to a company with a CamelCase name.)

What do we know about this plate-cleaning merger? The Washington Post has the details:

The marriage of Heinz with Kraft, orchestrated by legendary investor Warren Buffett and a team of Brazilian buyout kings, would produce a household-name powerhouse that its new leaders said will slash jobs and an estimated $1.5 billion a year in costs.

Brazilian buyout kings! Warren Buffett! Slashing jobs! Oh, wait, that last one’s a bummer. Why do we need to slash jobs?

Kraft, which counts processed cheese as its biggest seller, saw profits plunge more than 60 percent last year, to $1 billion.

Got it. As the WaPo explains, people just aren’t as interested in eating processed cheese anymore, and prefer “simpler, more natural fare.” The merger will launch a new era in slimmed-down Kraft Heinz manufacturing:

With that leanness, the new company is expected to invest in sprucing up its healthful image. Kraft has already pushed to remove artificial coloring from some of its cheeses, and last year it unveiled an Oscar Meyer meat-and-cheese-cube combo called the P3 Portable Protein Pack.

Awww, I knew we’d get to a ridiculous name sooner or later. Please tell me the meat and cheese are pressed together into the same cube. Don’t make me eat my meat cubes and my cheese cubes separately, like an animal!

Look, I am all for company mergers and new product innovations. Less for slashing jobs. But if we’re merging Kraft and Heinz, I don’t want Lean Cuisine (which is a Nestlé product anyway). I want macaroni and cheese that tastes like ranch dressing. I want pink Velveeta. I want an Oscar Meyer weiner with cheese, ketchup, and mustard packed right into the middle of the hot dog. We have entered a world where two companies could make “putting ketchup on a hot dog” obsolete, because the ketchup would already be in the hot dog.

Embrace what you do well, Kraft and Heinz. That’s all I ask. That, and the hope that you never give in to the temptation to remove the space from your new name.

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