Harry Schuhmacher, from Beer Business Daily, is reporting that at long last, Pabst Brewing may have finally found a buyer. The new buyer is C. Dean Metropoulos, formerly of Pinnacle Foods, a food brand giant that he sold last year for $2 billion.
For several years, Pabst has been owned by a non-profit charitable foundation in Northern California, the S&P Company of Mill Valley. The I.R.S. has been insisting since at least 1996 that S&P must sell off Pabst, but they’ve been unable to find a qualified buyer. As a result, the I.R.S. has been granting them extensions while they’ve continued to search for a buyer.
Harry’s take?
He is “adept at revitalizing neglected brands like Chef Boyardee canned pasta, Pam cooking spray and Dennison’s canned chili—and for getting shelf-space mileage out of stronger brands like Bumble Bee canned tuna. ‘I look at all kinds of acquisitions, but I narrow it all down to the strength of the businesses I am already in,’ Metropoulos says to Forbes. Sounds like the right man for the job.
UPDATE: The news from Beer Business Daily is now posted publicly for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
“For several years, Pabst has been owned by a non-profit charitable foundation in Northern California, the S&P Company of Mill Valley”
S & P (which at the time owned General, Falstaff and Pearl) bought Pabst in 1985. That company’s shares were transferred to the charity Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, after the death of S &P’s president, Paul Kalmanovitz, and then his wife, about a decade ago.
In some respects, the “real” Pabst company ended a few years earlier, after a complicated year and half long, three way merger and then spin-off. Heileman bought Pabst and Pabst bought Olympia (which at the time was Oly, Hamm’s and Lone Star) in 1981. Heileman then spun off a “new” Pabst (to keep one step ahead of the anti-trust regulators) but kept the hottest brands (Henry Weinhard, Lone Star and those breweries) as well Pabst’s most modern brewery (in Pabst, Georgia – soon to be re-named “Perry, GA” on Heileman labels).
At the time, Pabst was a 15 million barrel brewery (and Olympia itself was brewing 6m bbl a year) – a far cry from today, when Pabst (even with the addition of dozens of more brands via Stroh and Heileman) sells in the 5-6 million barrel range.