As longtime Goldman Sachs analyst Nomi Ghez emphasized to me, the food business had traditionally been a very profitable, predictable business generally characterized by low growth. Alone among public company CEOs, Stiritz saw this combination of characteristics and arrived at a new approach for optimizing shareholder value. In fact, he fundamentally changed the paradigm by actively deploying leverage to achieve substantially higher returns on equity, pruning less profitable businesses, acquiring related businesses, and actively repurchasing shares.
