Pros
Heinz remains an iconic brand whose flagship product is the gold standard against which other ketchups are judged. Historically, it was a CPG company that fought above its weight-class, largely due to the people who drove quality and innovation. It was an exciting company that was able to attract top industry talent.
Cons
3G has successfully devolved a fun, challenging work environment into a dystopian hell-scape that would fit into an Orwell novel. Corporate double-speak is at an all-time high, employees fear being fired constantly (while vetting out their resumes quietly to colleagues who have found work in greener pastures), and the new Heinz Battle Cry ™ is bleated in every meeting to rouse the workers into accepting the Exciting New Culture ™ and striving towards Meritocracy ™ while they watch helplessly as their paychecks are whittled away by disappearing benefits and their work/life balance is imploded by the new reality of the hours they must spend at work. 3G/Berkshire Hathaway have essentially taken a lean public company, taken it private, and saddled it with an extraordinary amount of debt with no clear path to repayment. The cost cutting measures – the savings in electricity from the lack of office mini-fridges, the reams of paper saved with copier lockdowns, the high tenure/high pay employees replaced by low-cost temps, the factory closures – aren’t enough. The renegotiating of freight contracts backfired when the freight companies simply stopped moving Heinz’s products from the distribution centers to the customers. The change in payment terms to vendors backfired when the vendors simply stopped providing the goods and services and sent Heinz to third-party collections. The deep cuts to R&D and marketing have backfired in the form of lower sales and customers leaving Heinz for competitors. The employee layoffs and voluntary resignation program have backfired: employees with experience and a true love of Heinz have left (many have gone to competitors), and they have been replaced by the young, the inexperienced, and the cheap. And replacing the executives with cronies from Brazil has backfired – they don’t understand why, for example, Heinz would make a lot of gravy before the month of November. The current state of Heinz is this: as another review eloquently stated, employees have gone from being an asset to a cost. 3G will squeeze every cent they can from an employee, and once they are used up, they toss them out and hire a new one. Entire levels have been removed from the organization, but none of the work has been removed. This means that employees are working ten, eleven, or twelve hour days every day. They are working evenings, early mornings, weekends, and holidays. The work they are doing is not value-added – it’s busy-work and double work because the systems that 3G have implemented are terrible and broken. Employees are no longer given goals or performance reviews; instead, meritocracy states that good ideas and hard work will get you promoted. However, if all you are doing every day is updating a daily dashboard and pleading with irate vendors to not cut off service, you have no time to innovate or improve systems. Further, because of the overwhelming workload, you can’t rely on your manager to help and you can’t rely on your cross-functional team to help. Despite the unifying efforts of the Heinz Battle Cry ™, morale is at an all-time low and teamwork is a joke. Many of the positive reviews here (allegedly company-planted) use buzzwords praising the new young culture that embraces change. It is insulting to have it stated that the reason people are disgruntled is because they cannot deal with the changes. Heinz existed for well over a hundred years before 3G and their ilk came in, and the company passed its centennial mark because of employees’ ability to embrace change and be innovative thinkers. I believe that most of the positive reviews are company-planted since they are as tone-deaf as anything coming out of the Heinz Human Resources department lately. The company can continue buying into their buzzwords – the exciting culture, the meritocracy – but they do so at their own peril. Ignoring the real problems they are facing on all fronts – with their employees, with their vendors, and (most importantly) with their customers – will be Heinz’ downfall, and all the battle cry yelling won’t help.