History

Diversification (1960 – 1986)

From 1960 Imperial developed a strategy aimed towards diversification and away from its focus on tobacco.

This saw a move towards the food, drink and leisure industries and began in earnest with the acquisition of Golden Wonder, a fairly small business making potato crisps in Edinburgh.

With Imperial’s financial backing, by the end of the 1960s Golden Wonder had become a leading company in a multi-million pound market.

Two years later Mardon Packaging International was formed, a joint venture between Imperial and British American Tobacco, producing a wide variety of commodities ranging from cigarette packaging to general printing, plastic bottles and paper cups.

Imperial moved into industrial and domestic plastics, teaching machines and electronics with the acquisition of the Creators Group in 1964 and the formation of Education and Scientific Development as part of ESL (Bristol).

In 1967 the company made its biggest acquisition to date - the HP Sauce Group with its many subsidiaries including Lea & Perrins.

This was followed by the National Canning Company (Smedley’s), taking Imperial into frozen foods and further into tinned foods.

A huge addition came in 1969 with the Ross Group, another frozen foods company, and Imperial changed its name to Imperial Tobacco Group Limited.

By 1971 it had acquired Plastic Coatings and its subsidiary, United Moulders.

In 1972 Courage, with all its subsidiaries, joined the group, bringing with it 8 breweries, 6 bottling stores, 6,000 pubs, nearly 700 off-licences and 38 hotels.

The following year the company’s name became Imperial Group Limited (later PLC) and Imperial Tobacco Limited was formed to manage its tobacco interests.

By 1979 the group employed around 100,000 people and its structure was revised into five divisions: Tobacco; Paper and Board; Food; Distributive Trade and General Trade.

Its international character increased, particularly with the purchase of Pillsbury Farms in the United States in 1974. Six years later Imperial bought the Howard Johnson hotel and restaurant chain in the US in a move to lessen the company's dependence on UK earnings, but sold it again in 1985.

A major reorganisation of Imperial Tobacco began in 1981 as a result of the decline in the market for tobacco goods and the need for greater cost effectiveness.

Administration was centralised and four factories were closed – Wills’ cigar factory in Bristol, Wills’ cigarette factories in Glasgow and Newcastle and Player’s cigarette factory in Stirling.

A £35 million new technology programme was planned to re-equip the remaining factories with faster, less labour-intensive machinery.

By 1986, three new regional distribution centres had come into operation – in Bristol, Nottingham and Glasgow – and a major change in the company’s management structure was announced.

It was recognised that only an efficiently structured company could hope to lead the British tobacco industry into the future, as Imperial had done over the previous 85 years.