David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…To be more resilient and productive. Exactly. A lot of the real, real richness and complexity that has for thousands of years made chocolate a super attractive food for humans, it’s in danger of being lost or being watered down. I will say, the industry is very focused on this. This is an existential, super, super important focus of Mars and the entire chocolate industry. That is the correct takeaway. Whenever you talk to people in the industry, this is what they’re talking about. All right. I have got a couple more. The first one is conglomeration and doing it well. They very early on learned how to acquire and conglomerate, how to do acquisitions, which parts to centralize—spoiler alert, very few—which parts to decentralize, actually most of them. When you are running two completely different businesses and running two completely different geographies from the first five years of your company’s existence, you end up actually developing the muscle to do this well. I think it’s very different from these companies that later in life are like, we’re going to get into XYZ. Mars has always been a diversified conglomerate. They actually look a lot like LVMH in that they aren’t a private equity firm, they’re a buy and hold. I think they’ve made 30 acquisitions since the 90s, and they’ve only sold two things since 2015. It’s very Bernard Arnault style.…

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