• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 13, 2013

Unilever had one of its desires fulfilled yesterday as it continued divesting some of its processed foods brands with the sale of the Wish-Bone franchise, which includes the Western label, to Parsippany, N.J.-based Pinnacle Foods. Pinnacle is paying $580 million for the two labels whose combined annual sales are about $190 million. Wish-Bone is the No. 1 brand in the Italian segment of the category and No. 3 overall. 

“The deal, funded by cash and new debt, comes as Unilever readjusts its priorities to beauty and health goods…,” observes Tiffany Hsu in the Los Angeles Times. “In January, the company, which is based in the Netherlands and Britain, sold its Skippy peanut butter brand to Spam maker Hormel Foods for $700 million.” 

It also sold its Bertolli and P.F. Chang’s Home Menu frozen foods lines to ConAgra last July.

The sale “fits within Unilever’s mantra lately of repositioning their portfolio to stronger long-term growth prospect brands,” Morningstar analyst Erin Lash tells Bloomberg’s Paul Jarvis & Duane D. Stanford. “With some of these brands, they weren’t able to leverage the strength and others would be more apt to do so.”

The well-known dressing is, in fact, right up Pinnacle’s alley -- “a perfect fit with our successful strategy of ‘Reinvigorating Iconic Brands,’” according to CEO Bob Gamgort in a statement announcing the deal. 

Indeed, the second sentence of Pinnacle’s “Purpose” statement declares: “Everything we do is driven by our purpose: reinvigorating iconic brands, dynamically evolving and improving our already beloved products to bring more convenience, taste, nutrition, and joy to today’s consumers.”

They include the Duncan Hines Grocery Division Brands, with labels such as Armour, Log Cabin, Vlasic and Open Pit; the Birds Eye Frozen Division Brands, with Clarence’s progeny as well as Aunt Jemima Frozen Breakfast, Hungry-Man and Mrs. Paul’s and the Specialty Foods Division Brands with Husman’s and Snyder of Berlin.

“The company was founded in 1998 as Vlasic Foods International, and grew quickly after acquiring the Swanson TV dinners, Open Pit and Vlasic Pickles brands from the Campbell Soup Company,” Leo Sun wrote for The Motley Fool when word got out last month that it was interested in acquiring both Wish-Bone and Del Monte Foods’ canned food business. (Del Monte Fresh is also reportedly interested in the latter “iconic” and “ubiquitous but slow-growing” business, according to Reuters.)

And what could be more iconic than Wish-Bone? It was developed by a returning WW II vet, Phillip Sollomi, who opened a family-style restaurant in Kansas City, Mo., with a name alluding to his favorite food –- chicken -– and a Sicilian family recipe for salad dressing in his back pocket. Before long he was “mixing the dressings right in the restaurant while his mother applied labels that proudly declared her dressing ‘The Kansas City Wish-Bone Famous Italian-Style Dressing,’ according to the history on the Unilever site. In 1957, the burgeoning brand was sold to Lipton, now a Unilever property, and went national.

“In addition to enabling significant cost synergies and tax benefits, the transaction enhances our ability to offer consumers meal solutions and recipe ideas across our broad portfolio of brands,” Pinnacle’s Gamgort said in his statement. “We are excited to apply our innovation capabilities to this great brand.”

But the Wall Street Journal’s Annie Gasparro has a dismaying alternate take on those aspirations: “The salad days appear to be over for salad dressings,” she writes. At least mid-market ironically branded ones, which apparently are being squeezed by private-label offerings from the bottom and “fresh, organic offerings” on the high end.

“The result is what Kraft Foods Group CEO Tony Vernon recently called a ‘competitive Armageddon’ in the salad-dressing business” in offering an explanation for the lackluster performances of its Kraft and Good Seasons labels, Gasparro reports. But she points out that Clorox’ Hidden Valley, the No. 1 non-vinaigrette brand, is buck[ing] the trend and saw its share expand to 28.7% from 25.4% last year. Wish-Bone dropped to 9.1% from 10.6% and Kraft went to 19.6% from 25.1%, according to Euromonitor International.

“During the recession, people switched to [store brands] to save money, and they didn’t notice a difference, so they stuck with them,” Euromonitor analyst Matthew Hudak tells Gasparro.

And then there are those people who –- gasp – are actually mixing their own. What is the consumer world coming to?