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Veneziano as well hey! - hopefully the buyouts won't mean a change in quality, although at some stage business factors such as "streamlining" and "economies of scale" tend to change their strategies to cater for the masses and cost reductions. That's when quality seems to suffer. In theory there should be more money for innovation as well......
at some stage business factors such as "streamlining" and "economies of scale" tend to change their strategies to cater for the masses and cost reductions. That's when quality seems to suffer. In theory there should be more money for innovation as well......
Sure, I would expect the bookkeepers and beancounters (pun intended) would be nervous... grouping all the paper-pushers out of one office and on one accounting system is the first step normally. I would hope that the businesses continue to run their retail and coffee faces as normal, no sense in breaking something that's working well now.
Apart from innovation it will also give them amazing buying power as they will be able to consume whole crops from some producers. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
If it goes the way of the wine industry, and there are real parallels with this scenario, there will be some casualties.
As Andy mentions.... admin will be shrunk as it consolidates into one corporate structure, middle management will suffer the most.
At the other end are growers..... mega corps have the power to manipulate the production of raw material. In the wine industry during the 90's
every Tom Dick Harry and Sue who had a few acres were being given preplanting contracts based on yields/clone types.
When the crash came and the big shuffle happened ( remember the so-called 'lake of wine' ? ) crops were rejected through contract 'out clauses',
which were enforced based on the same yield/quality parameters on which they were originally given resulting in a lot of growers being left out in the cold.
Farm gate prices crashed, hardly anyone could get a new contract for love, let alone money and by the late 2000's acres upon acres of marginal, good and great
vineyards were pulled out. A lot of ordinary, hard working people suffered. Sure, so did some investor vineyards, but good riddance to speculators.
A simplification yes, but the point is that RFG will have their 15 minutes in the sun and my hope is that they don't burn our third world grower brothers and sisters
and make their lives any harder than what it already is.
Andy mentioned in conversation today that RFG also owns Michel's Patisserie.
Sure, I would expect the bookkeepers and beancounters (pun intended) would be nervous... grouping all the paper-pushers out of one office and on one accounting system is the first step normally.
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