Word: creamed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...goal, but he's moving quickly. He has ratcheted up internal growth targets and spent about $15 billion on acquisitions in the past two years, mainly in the U.S., which now accounts for about 25% of Nestle's sales. He has gobbled up companies including Dreyer's ice cream, Chef America and, biggest of all, the pet-food company Ralston Purina. Some analysts have questioned whether Brabeck is paying too much for his conquests and taking on too much debt amid a global slump that is lingering longer than expected. But at the same time, Brabeck has moved to boost...
...typical of Brabeck that these moves, while significant, aren't billed as any kind of revolution. Brabeck has spent his entire professional life at Nestle, working his way up from lowly ice-cream salesman, and he's respectful of the 136-year-old company's traditions. Just as in the mountains, he moves with care. "Peter Brabeck lives life to the full, but he's circumspect," says Vreni Spoerry, 64, a nonexecutive Nestle director for the past decade. "He's good at anticipating what might happen and seeing where the risks lurk...
...operational efficiency with a relatively complex business structure. This is what I think real management is all about. The other thing is much too easy." Rather than narrow its focus, he believes that a well-managed and flexibly organized consumer-goods company can sell dog food and ice cream--as well as coffee, water and candy--and gain advantages in marketing, purchasing and distribution over more specialized firms...
Brabeck didn't set out to be the CEO of Nestle when he began selling ice cream in his native Austria 35 years ago. He says he didn't even know that the company he worked for, Findus, was owned by Nestle at the time. "His ambition was to experience Latin America, to have an adventure there," says Gottfried Truppe, his college roommate. Why the fascination with Latin America? "The wide-open spaces and high mountains," Brabeck says. It was also far from home--and far from the mountaineering tragedy he had just lived through...
...nephew amassed in a century of obsessive collecting. But it will, Stacey hopes, give readers the kind of thrill she felt when she began opening the thin drawers of Macleay Snr's purpose-built cabinets, "and they're all full of butterflies. One's got all cream ones, the next is orange, then spotted ones, and you keep going, Wow. Oh, God. Look...