Unilever seeks to sell Wish-Bone salad-dressing business: report

Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever Plc is seeking a buyer for its Wish-Bone salad-dressing business, the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The London and Rotterdam-based company has hired Goldman Sachs to find a buyer for the business, which is expected to fetch hundreds of millions of dollars, the report said.

In June 2012, Unilever said it would restructure its business by selling some of its brands and businesses that is not core to its portfolio. In August 2012, the company sold its PF Chang's and Bertolli frozen meals businesses to ConAgra Foods for $265 million and its global Skippy peanut butter brand in the US and Canada to Hormel Foods earlier this year for $700 million.

In 1945, Phillip Sollomi opened a family-style restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri and named it `The Wish-Bone.' Since chicken was the specialty of the restaurant, he introduced his family recipe for Italian salad dressing from Sicily, which became a hit and was called `The Kansas City Wish-Bone Famous Italian-Style Dressing.'

The restaurant's customers loved the family recipe and started taking bottles of the dressing home, and Phillip later began selling it to local grocers at a ten cent premium to other salad dressing brands.

The brand was in 1958 acquired by Lipton, now a Unilever subsidiary, which, through clever marketing, made it the No1 brand in Italian dressing in the US.
Today, the Wish-Bone business has around 20 different brands of dressings, Dry Dressing & Seasoning Mix and Marinades.