Kraft Foods Inc. set October 1 as the date for its split into two companies. The company also announced the members of the boards of directors for the two independent companies and hired Tracey Belcourt as executive vice president-strategy for the new global snacks business, Mondelez International.
Also, in a detail that has not been apparent, all of Kraft Foods Inc. will first change its name to Mondelez International, and Mondelez briefly will be the “parent” company that spins off Kraft Foods Group.
Belcourt, 45, a partner at Bain & Co. in Toronto since 1999, will lead strategy and mergers and acquisition activities for Mondelez, reporting to Irene Rosenfeld, who earlier announced she will be chairman and CEO of the new company. John Cahill will serve as executive chairman of Kraft Foods Group, the slightly new name for the North American Grocery business, and Tony Vernon will be its CEO.
Together with the recent announcement of Kim Rucker as general counsel of the future Kraft Foods Group, the leadership teams of the two future companies are in place, Kraft said.
At Bain, Belcourt led teams that specialized in the design and implementation of growth strategies to improve business performance across a variety of consumer industries. She was an economic consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development in Africa in 1999, and prior to that, served for five years as an assistant professor of economics at Concordia University in Montreal.
At the time of the spin-off, each Kraft Foods Inc. share will be converted to one share of Mondelez. In addition, each shareholder then will receive one share of Kraft Foods Group for every three shares of Kraft Foods Inc. The common stock for both companies is expected to begin trading on a "when-issued" basis shortly before the record date, which is expected to be in mid-September.
Starting Oct. 2, Kraft Foods Group will begin trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol KRFT. Kraft Foods Inc. will change its name to Mondelez International Inc. and change its ticker symbol to MDLZ (retiring the current KFT ticker symbol).
Kraft Foods Group and Mondelez will hold investor events in early September.
The directors named for each of the newly independent companies’ boards (nine for Mondelez, 11 for Krafts Foods Group) include several executives who are current Kraft Foods Inc. directors.
