This series of moves left Ralston at the dawn of the new millennium as a pure play pet food company, the dominant player by far in the US market. It did not escape Stiritz’s attention that pruning unrelated businesses might make the company’s core pet food brands more attractive to a strategic acquirer, and in 2001 the company was approached by Nestlé. After extensive negotiations (which Stiritz characteristically handled himself), the Swiss giant agreed to pay a record price for Ralston: $10.4 billion, equal to an extraordinary multiple of fourteen times cash flow.
