Mondelez is selling its gum business in the U.S. for $1.35 billion, offloading well-known brands like Trident that struggled to recover from the masked, homebound days of COVID lockdowns.
The buyer is Perfetti Van Melle Group, a European company that makes brands such as Mentos, Chupa Chups and Alpenliebe.
The sale includes gum brands Trident, Dentyne, Chiclets, Bubblicious and others in the U.S., Canada and Europe, plus three European candy brands. Mondelez will continue to operate its gum business elsewhere, such as the Stride brand in China. The sale also includes a manufacturing facility in Rockford, Illinois.
Oreo-maker Mondelez announced the sale in a statement this morning. The company began considering a divestiture of its struggling gum brands in 2021, and said earlier this year that it planned to sell them
Employees working on Mondelez’s gum businesses will transfer to Perfetti Van Melle with the sale, according to the news release.
“We are pleased to transition our developed market gum business to a values-led, family-owned company whose portfolio is a strategic fit and where our brands and people can thrive,” Mondelez CEO Dirk Van de Put said in the release.
Van de Put, who took the helm at Mondelez about five years ago, deployed a strategy in which 90% of the company’s revenue would come from chocolate and biscuits by 2030, up from 80% today.
As such, the company has been targeting strategic acquisitions, such as an August deal to buy Clif Bar for $2.9 billion.
The gum sale further chisels the company’s portfolio toward that goal. When Mondelez first announced in 2021 that it was placing the roughly $550 million business under strategic review, the company’s gum and candy revenue had sunk 16.4% on the quarter. On the other hand, biscuits revenue had grown 7.6%.
Though gum and candy sales have since rebounded a bit, they have not enjoyed the same growth as biscuits. Mondelez reported that gum and candy sales were up 12.3% year-over-year in the third quarter overall, compared with a 15.6% increase on biscuit sales.
