🥫 Buffett’s Kraft Heinz shake-up, Nike’s reboot of “Just Do It,” Musk’s big Tesla humanoid bet — all the latest in brand news

Issue #71

Weekly Exhale

Two icons are filing for divorce. Kraft and Heinz.

Kraft will become the North American Grocery Company, keeper of frozen dinners and bright yellow cheeses. Heinz will emerge as the Global Taste Elevation Company, corporate gobbledygook for we sell ketchup. And beans. And soup. None of these has much to do with taste elevation. Don’t overthink it. These aren’t company names. They’re yard-sale signs.

With breakups, you try not to judge, but here, they’ve made it easy. Heinz: good. Kraft: bad. One gets custody of the growth story, the other whatever’s left. It wasn’t meant to end like this. After all, Warren Buffett—America’s investing legend, the oracle himself—orchestrated the marriage.

The old wisdom held: people die, factories fall apart, but brands endure. Two century-old names your grandparents trusted. At its peak in 2019, Kraft-Heinz was worth $133 billion. Today: $33 billion.

Buffett, himself 95, is still the company’s biggest backer. He admits he’s “disappointed”. At this rate, it’s hard to tell who’s outliving who, the man or the ketchup.

Still, it’s not like he can just walk away. The Board are smitten with another century-old food co. that managed a lucrative separation: Kellogg’s. Broken up in 2023. The newly formed snacks arm, Kellanova, was sold to Mars for $36 billion a year later. And in July, Ferrero snapped up the other 'half'—WK Kellogg, the cereals business—for $3.1 billion.

A conglomerate stuck at $20 billion. Curtain down. Curtain up. You now have separate assets worth $39 billion total. Hey Presto. Magic.

So, can Kraft-Heinz do the same trick?

Maybe. But Kellogg’s had something else going for it. The split revealed what the company had really become.

John Harvey Kellogg was a doctor. Corn Flakes once championed wholesome farming and green rooster branding. The cornerstone of a fortified, nutritious breakfast. Fast-forward to today: Pringles, Nutri-Grain bars, Frosted Flakes.

Broken up, the market could finally bet on what Kellogg’s had drifted into being but would never confess: not food, but confectionery.

No wonder Mars and Ferrero were interested. Mars gets permission to sell you “better-for-you” snacks all day. Ferrero, owner of Nutella, gets permission to sell you sweets for breakfast.

Kraft-Heinz’s line-up is different. a grab bag of standalone foods—mac and cheese, Jell-O, Lunchables, Velveeta. They don’t sit in a particular corner of the cupboard, or a particular corner of your mind.

Unilever, owner of Hellmann’s, might have been a home for Heinz. But their new CEO is chasing higher-margin beauty. He only kept Hellmann’s because it throws off cash and, in his words, qualifies as “edible personal care.”

Analysts blame food trends, or the rise of MAHA, for Kraft-Heinz’s problems. But that’s not quite true. Heinz doubled U.S. retail sales as those pressures mounted. And ketchup is hardly kale. At 22% sugar, 3 grams a squirt, it’s not far off Frosted Flakes.

The difference for Heinz? Marketing spend. Barbie tie-ins, branded grillz, and ads with no logos on. They shifted the brand from advertising to the algorithm, ramming home why it's the original and best.

The same can’t be said for the other Kraft brands. They were starved by Buffet’s broader strategy: strip costs, let scale do the work. Spending 3-5% of sales on marketing—about half the industry norm—was barely enough to stand still.

Learning: You’ll struggle to optimise investment in legacy brands. They’re like old houses, they need constant upkeep, careful modernisation.

And that’s the irony. Buffett, who invests for the long term while holding a can of Coke and ordering McDonald’s every morning for over five decades, knows brands compound like any other relationship.

That’s what keeps the businesses—and him—alive.

--

Charlie Munger died on November 28, just 34 days shy of his 100th birthday. He was Warren Buffett’s closest partner in the building of Berkshire Hathaway. The two spoke daily for more than sixty years.

Both Munger and Buffet grew up in Omaha, yet somehow their paths never crossed. As a teenager, Munger even bagged groceries at Buffet & Son, the store run by Buffet’s grandfather. They stacked the same shelves, but never at the same time.

The spark didn’t come until 1959, at a dinner party. Munger was 35, Buffet 29. Mutual friends thought the “odd, brainy Omaha boys” might just get along.

“We hit it off immediately,” Buffett recalled.

Mungar felt something too, in his own blunt way: “I knew right away Warren was going to be very rich. I just didn’t know it would be this rich.”

For Munger, the chance meeting came at a turning point. Living in Los Angeles, he was still carrying the weight of loss. Four years earlier, his nine-year-old son, Teddy, had died of leukaemia. The grief broke him. Previously divorced. And now unbearably bereaved. He would wander the streets of Pasadena, sobbing for hours at a time.

That night in 1959, he and Buffet formed a connection. They stayed in touch, trading letters and calls. A few years later, Munger became vice-chairman of Berkshire. From then on, the two of them did everything together.

The unthinkable pain of losing a child gave Munger, and later Berkshire Hathaway, an edge. Mungar was immune to billionaire fantasies. After all, no sum of money could shield him from the suffering. “You can’t bring back the dead; you have to soldier through it.” Mungar reflected.

That clarity shaped Berkshire. Munger is often credited as ‘the architect’ of its strategy. Until then, Buffet had chased cigar butts—cheap companies with a final puff of value left. Munger pushed for something more enduring: Buy wonderful companies at fair prices.

As we know, it didn’t always work out that way.

There’s no record of what Munger thought, but it’s safe to assume he stood by Buffett when Berkshire teamed up with 3G Capital, corporate raiders with a taste for “synergies”. Together, they loaded Heinz with billions in debt, tied to warrants that gave Berkshire upside in the Kraft-Heinz merger.

So when Buffet says he’s “disappointed”, maybe it isn’t because Kraft and Heinz failed to wring out efficiencies. Maybe it’s because the old cigar-butt instincts crept back in.

As it happens, 3G pulled out of Kraft-Heinz in the same year Munger died, leaving Buffet with the fallout.

Last year, 16,200 crowded into Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. At one point, mid-sentence, Buffet glanced to his left and began, “Charlie—.“

But Charlie Munger wasn’t there.

The room fell silent.

Later came the Q&A. After the analysts and shareholders had their turn, a young boy stepped up.

“I am wondering. If you had one more day with Charlie...what would you do with it?”

Buffet looked at the boy and gasped. “Ah.” He nodded slowly, lips pressed tight, bearing his own loss.

“We always lived in a way where we were happy with what we were doing. We never had any doubts about the other person. Period. So if we had another day, we’d probably have done the same thing we did on the other days.”

Somehow, this boy asking a question made it seem—for a moment—as if Munger and his lost son Teddy had found each other again, and were standing beside him.

“The more interesting question is who you feel you want to spend the last day of your life with. Figure out a way to start meeting them.

Then meet them as often as you can.

Don’t wait until the last day.

And don’t bother with the others.”

Let's rise together with every issue. ♡

---

Market Moves

Reeves to prioritise inflation | Financial Times

Market ructions will shape budget | BBC

Fed expected to make a half-point cut | CNBC

Brand Beat

Warren Buffett to break up Kraft Heinz holdings | Barron's

Craig David, the latest star of Just Eat ads | Campaign

What WPP’s Cindy Rose said at her first global town hall | The Drum

Nestlé ousts CEO after undisclosed romantic relationship | The Guardian

DoorDash’s CMO is ready for you to pay attention | Fast Company

Sweetgreen appoints Zipporah Allen to reignite growth and culture | QSR Magazine

Summer 2025 recap: TV, streaming and digital video | Digiday

NeueHouse shuts L.A. clubs amid financial woes | Los Angeles Times

John Lewis marks 100-year ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ with new campaign | The Industry

Johnnie Walker goes bolder with Sabrina Carpenter partnership | Marketing Dive

Nike revamps ‘Just Do It’ campaign | Nike

McDonald’s brings back McDonaldland to fire up nostalgic sentiment | Marketing Dive

MrBeast buys the NFL for the ultimate internet crossover | Parade

Primark debuts on TV with new brand platform | Marketing Week

Lego taps Tom Holland to reignite imaginative play | Marketing Interactive

Marketing as a transfer of enthusiasm | Jason Fried

Weightwatchers returns: menopause treatments, steamy ads | The Wall Street Journal

Roblox’s growth sparks friction between creators and ad sales | Digiday

Starting Up

Dutch twins secure £4.5m to expand London tonic water brand | The Times

Taking AI healthcare beyond chatbots for doctors | Fortune

Billionaires Thiel and Altman back bold longevity science bets | The Wall Street Journal

Little Spoon shows why DTC is back | Forbes

Tech Tidbits

All the President’s tech CEOs | Wired

Why the court let Google off easy | New York Times

Elon Musk shifts focus to Optimus humanoid | The Week In Startups

Online travel agents prepare for the rise of AI agents | Financial Times

First look: Dyson’s spot-and-scrub AI robot | The Verge

Venture Vibes

Corporate breakups dominate this year’s biggest deals | The Wall Street Journal

Klarna revives IPO to raise $1.27 billion | TechCrunch

UK VC funding faces challenges but remains relevant globally | Crowdfund Insider

All of VC is going into AI | Visual Capitalist

Design Driven

New Banksy mural appears in central London | BBC

Blank Street’s refresh is full-on matcha core | Fast Company

Advertising is going long-form again | It’s Nice That

Ting’s rebrand proves lazy marketers beat busy ones | The Drum

Happiness

Crosley C65 turntable kit includes everything for vinyl listening | Design Milk

Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT | MIT Technology Review

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s funniest moments | YouTube

---

If you like what you've read, why not subscribe and share?

Stay gold 🙏🏻