The buying and selling of food companies is always noteworthy, particularly when billion-dollar assets change hands. But focusing on corporate consolidation misses a more profound trend in the industry: the domination of individual product categories by a handful of processors.
The trend is easy to miss because the specialists don’t compete in multiple categories. In their field of expertise, however, they are the lowest-cost providers, the most highly automated, and among the fastest-growing and financially profitable players in the industry.