Genius Bread

Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne is founder of Genius Bread, the gluten free bread for people who are coeliac.

Lucinda is a trained Michilen star chef and cookery book author. She started her business only 9 months ago after she was unable to find any good bread for her 7 year old gluten intolerant son to eat. After three years of baking bread every day to find the right ingredients she finally discovered what she was looking for.

Thereafter she managed to find funding to produce this recipe from an influential friend who was also gluten intolerance and who liked what she made. With the funding and the contacts she was given by him to help build the brand Lucinda has managed to spread her business far and wide within a few months.

In around 6 months she was able to sell her products in major supermarkets by proving her ability to mass produce the items and promote them herself in the markets. She took her products to a bakery who already made gluten free foods and they were willing to make her bread.

Gluten free bread was already available before Lucinda came up with the idea, however with her improved recipe making the bread fresher and more digestible, she claims to have grown the market be another 45%. Her bread is even enjoyed by those who are not coeliac but enjoy the texture and qualities of her product.

The bread cost £2.50, a lot higher than the usual range of bread, perhaps due to many of the ingredients being imported. Plans are being made by the company to lower the costs by introducing automated machinery to increase efficiency.

Plans are also being made to introduce 18 more products to Genius Bread, from scones to croissants and others, but without wanting to over stretch this new business before it has the resources.

Genius Bread

Kraft Takeover Cadbury

An icon of British companies, Cadbury, has been bought out by the American food company Kraft. After many weeks of haggling Cadbury finally accepted the increased offer of £11.5 Billion.

Kraft had to borrow a lot of the money and now people fear they may compensate by cutting many jobs.

Professor Chris Bones of Henley Business School is an ex-worker of Cadbury. He says that Kraft may owe around £7 Billion in debt. On top of this they will probably have to pay hundreds of millions of pounds on fees to advisers and other bodies. He says that this will have a huge repercussion on their future expenditure and means there will most likely be cuts in jobs, investment, research and development and other important areas.

Many workers of Cadbury may be upset, however shareholders seem to be quite happy with the takeover as they are being offered decent prices for their shares.

Big takeovers like these are not always known to work. With Krafts heavy spending, some question the possibility of it failing. However Kraft is convinced about this move. They say that by joining the two companies they'll be able to save a lot more money by cutting overhead costs and the like. Yet the main benefit they will get is through opening their market to where Cadbury runs and where they originally didn't.

Source: Working Lunch, BBC. (19-01-2010)

Kraft Takeover Cadbury

Cadburys and Kraft

The chocolate making company Cadbury have been approached by a number of companies for a possible takeover and have thereafter raised their forecast for sales and profitability.

Recently, Kraft, the American food giant, gave a hostile bid of £10bn which Cadbury have disagreed with. They say that Krafts existing offer considerably undervalues Cadbury.

Since the approach from Kraft, Cadburys share prices have rocketed up significantly.

Cadburys and Kraft