Depressing news from the business world: Del Monte Foods filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week, with all divisions potentially up for sale. The Del Monte brand has been around for over 135 years.
In addition to the obvious Del Monte branded canned goods line, they also own College Inn broths, Contadina tomato products, Joyba bubble tea, Take Root Organics, and more.
It’s not Del Monte’s first bankruptcy filing, but this is a major one; they’re hoping to get acquired. Still a huge business with well-respected product lines, Del Monte reported a $1.7 billion revenue figure for last year. Unfortunately, they have over $1 billion in liabilities spread over more than 10,000 creditors (this big a number of creditors means that there are likely thousands of family farms still awaiting payment for their produce).
The preliminary reports don’t assign the responsibility to any specific causes, outside of continued fallout from their last bankruptcy, and generally saying that Del Monte “hasn’t adapted successfully to changing consumer preferences,” a non-statement that merits a bit more contemplation.
Since this is a public policy page, not a financial services page, we won’t analyze this from an auditor’s perspective, but it would be useful to logically consider the various cultural and policy-related issues that play a role in their struggles. We know the following issues contributed; the only thing we can’t be certain of is the relative weighting between them.
- Transportation costs went up a lot over the past four years, partially because of increased fuel costs but also partially due to other issues such as the trucking industry’s suffering in the aftermath of the pandemic. All companies that are dependent on a lot of transportation have suffered. Del Monte sells heavy, low-value cargo, particularly canned foods and products requiring refrigerated transport. Their transportation costs have likely been killers these past four years, even more so than for most of retail.
- Food processing is a complex process, very dependent on inexpensive and dependable power. Ingredients have to be both cooked and refrigerated – fruits and vegetables have to be peeled, seeded, shelled, shucked, all these steps requiring different machinery, all requiring a lot of electricity. As the suicidal American Left continues to push energy sources that don’t work (wind and solar) and close down energy sources that work (coal, oil, natural gas), these energy costs have gone up considerably over the past few years, along with the huge costs of blackouts (when a refrigeration or freezer unit loses power, the contents can be a total loss – imagine such exposure in a huge produce warehouse).
- As Bidenflation (the unprecedented annual price inflation that skyrocketed during the Biden-Harris years) hit America’s farms, agricultural producers have had to raise their prices, to the extent they could. As purchased materials’ costs went up, along with the huge wage increases necessitated by the pandemic and by numerous local and statewide minimum wage increases, Del Monte was still limited in how much it could raise its own prices to consumers, putting them in the same boat as most American consumer goods producers – being squeezed between unavoidable cost increases and an inability to pass them all on to customers.
- The tariffs on steel and aluminum introduced in 2018 and increased in 2025 add to the cost of the steel sheeting they use for much of their canning (typically, food and beverage producers don’t purchase cans; they find it more cost-effective to buy sheet steel and make their cans themselves, onsite. Del Monte is so large, they likely do both, varying from site to site).
- More Americans than ever have abandoned cooking for themselves, relying on prepared foods or dining out. This choice was discouraged by past generations who always paid attention to their own spending, but with government assistance skyrocketing, more people don’t realize the financial advantage of cooking for themselves, so they don’t. And Del Monte produces a larger share of products we’d classify as “ingredients” vs. “prepared foods” than most companies in their space. (By contrast, food producers with a large base of frozen foods and other packaged meals could better weather this unfortunate cultural slide).
- America’s agricultural output has suffered in recent years, as more and more productive land is repurposed for green energy production. As corn is used to produce ethanol, and as good farmland is covered over with windmills and solar panels, grocery suppliers like Del Monte have fewer suppliers of their own to turn to, which likely increases the cost of the commodities as well as necessitating new vendor searches by purchasing departments unused to such challenges. Think of every long trip you’ve taken in the past few years, and all the former farms you’ve seen now covered by thousands of black plastic panels; each such farm used to produce countless bushels of beans, peas, corn, broccoli, tomatoes – so many fruits and vegetables – but no more. Such scarcity causes price increases.
- The American tax structure has grown more and more punitive in recent generations, particularly as the inheritance tax has attacked the value of the family farm. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 will likely help many of the suffering farms, but for others, it’s just too late.
- Like many modern corporations, Del Monte has been infected with “the woke virus.” According to Del Monte’s corporate “Sustainability” web page, they donate $5 million per year toward programs to “nourish the wellness of youth and communities.” Del Monte boasts of foolishly meddling with their energy consumption to reduce their output of so-called “greenhouse gases” by 42% by 2030. And on top of all this, they donate five million pounds of food each year. There’s no dollar value named for the second and third items there, but we know that the cost of changing the energy profile of manufacturing plants, distribution centers, offices, or transportation – switching from energy that works to energy that doesn’t – is absolutely immense. Such an unforced error has doomed other companies; it certainly contributed to dooming this one too.
In any capitalist economy, there will be companies that rise and companies that fall, companies that prosper and companies that struggle. This single example isn’t particularly “special” on its own; it will likely find a buyer and emerge, with new ownership, a restructuring, and perhaps some retirement or spinoffs of some of the brands.
But it serves us as an excellent example, doesn’t it, of the myriad challenges in the modern economy, and of the broad variety of errors, both forced and unforced.
What if American governments hadn’t made the foolish and destructive taxing and energy choices that it has made, forcing a different, unnecessarily costlier environment on our nation’s thousands of businesses? What if American governments hadn’t chosen to push landowners into non-agricultural uses of their land; what if America’s cities and states hadn’t meddled with employment law and increased mandatory benefits and mandatory minimum wages? What if the woke crowd on Wall Street wasn’t pushing public corporations like this one to throw away scant resources on the climate hoax and on donations they can’t afford?
The choices a company makes for itself, it owns outright.
But the choices that government make for it are another matter. May Divine Providence guide our nation’s leaders in the years to come, to encourage public policy choices that support our nation’s critical industries rather than punish them.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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