Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Tamara Littleton: Today we’re looking at a story in a few parts. On one hand, it’s the downfall of a 138-year-old trusted food company that has slowly lost relevance over recent years, and on the other it’s the story of a company with a really murky history of poor human rights.

Kate Hartley: So today we’re looking at Del Monte, which is a brand of many parts, as we’re going to find out, and many, many different legal entities, hugely confusing. There are all sorts of different companies, and we’ll come on to that. I had no idea it was such a fractured organisation. But specifically, we’re looking at human rights abuses in Kenya.

TL: When we think of Del Monte, we think of tinned – or canned for our US listeners – fruit and vegetables, and fruit juices, and some fresh produce like pineapples.

KH: Or if you’re old enough, the man from Del Monte.

TL: Yikes, that advert is problematic, isn’t it?

KH: I mean, I watched it again to prepare for this. It is so bad, it’s really, really awful. Well, especially the early one, let’s move on from that and talk about what happened in Kenya.

TL: So in 2023…

KH: So recently, Del Monte Kenya was at the centre of a really awful human rights abuse scandal. Del Monte has a huge pineapple farm in central Kenya, and a lot of supermarkets in the UK, all the big brands, stock Del Monte pineapples from that farm, including some of the canned fruit as well.

It’s a big employer with about 6,000 people in Kenya, and in 2023 The Guardian newspaper in the UK and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that there were major human rights violations at that farm. Security guards were being accused of assaulting and killing people that those guards suspected were trying to steal pineapples from the farm.

Now there’s been a really big problem with organised gangs stealing from the farm, apparently, and security guards routinely carry clubs to deter people. But in 2022 and 2023 four people died after they’d been attacked by guards, and there are many awful reports of brutality, including sexual assault by Del Monte guards, that go back a decade to 2013. There are also reports of passers-by being mistaken for thieves by guards because they were travelling on a public road that goes through the farm, and they were attacked by the guards as well. They were just walking through on the road.

And then there was a lawsuit brought against Del Monte that represented 134 villagers living near the farm, saying that there had been security guard brutality going back for that past decade. There were whistleblowers who came forward, including a former guard who said he’d witnessed violence and that some senior guards were involved in the stealing and selling of pineapples. Another security guard said Del Monte had a really bad relationship with the local community, and there was no benefit to the community from the farm being there.

The Guardian reported that senior Del Monte people had been accused of bribing people locally to back their official version of what had happened, although Del Monte completely refuted that.

What they did do was pay their own pathologist to attend a post-mortem of the people who died, and that pathologist played down the injuries compared to another pathologist. When these reports came out, some supermarkets in the UK, including Tesco and Waitrose, said they would not buy from the farm until the claims were investigated and Del Monte had taken clear action to make sure it didn’t happen again.

TL: How did they not know?

KH: Well, this is the thing. They must have done. It was really widely known locally that all this was happening, and it’s worth looking at the investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It was written by a journalist based in Nairobi called Edwin Okoth, and a year after he exposed the story he said he was asked to take on a story that, and I quote, people had known about for years but never fully investigated.

He said he wanted to expose what was going on, and he talked to local communities, but everyone was sceptical about whether anything would change. One person said to him, and this is a direct quote, “Be careful. You will either end up very rich, in exile, or dead. Very few people stand against this company and sustain it.” That person had tried to confront Del Monte in the past, which means they must have known. Everyone seemed to know.

Even Okoth said that while investigating he was arrested by police and questioned, and he was followed when trying to investigate what was going on. So that’s intimidation, basically.

TL: So how did they respond?

KH: It’s interesting, because there are two different responses. When it was made public, Del Monte said they were taking the findings very seriously. They set up an independent investigation, worked with a human rights consultancy, fired about 200 of their own security guards, and handed the security contract to G4S. G4S said they would provide better training, including how to use minimum force.

TL: If you’re being cynical, you’d say that if it hadn’t been investigated, changes might never have been made.

KH: You could say that, Tamara. Yes, I think if you were being cynical, you probably would. And there’s another side of the response that backs that up. There were allegations of bribery, and in relation to those, Del Monte said, and this is a quote: “We do not bribe. We do not instruct our guards to beat. We believe these misleading headlines are part of a disinformation campaign led by interested parties with close connections to the media.”

That refers in part to a civil lawsuit brought in December 2023 against Del Monte – or specifically Fresh Del Monte, the company that owns Del Monte in Kenya. This lawsuit was brought by human rights organisations representing 10 people impacted by the abuses, including relatives of those who died. In court, Del Monte lawyers applied to have the case struck out, not because the abuses didn’t happen, but because they argued the company was based in the Cayman Islands and therefore the Kenyan court had no jurisdiction. Sadly, in 2025 a court in Kenya agreed.

TL: So hold on, they grow pineapples in Kenya, but they are based in the Cayman Islands?

KH: Exactly. It is strange that you can grow produce in one country but not actually be based there. It is odd.

TL: So what changed, and could it happen again?

KH: When Okoth revisited the villages a year later, he was told the publicity pushed through changes. One resident said, and this is a quote, “We have not heard of a death in the past six months, which is unique,” and that was because of the reporting. There’s a lot in that statement, and it shocked me that deaths were so commonplace that they noted a six-month gap.

There have still been allegations of violence between thieves and G4S security guards, so the problem hasn’t gone away completely.

TL: But you can still find Del Monte pineapples on supermarket shelves, is that right?

KH: Yes and no. Another issue complicates things: in June 2025 Del Monte Foods, essentially the US company, filed for bankruptcy protection. That means a company can’t pay its debts but can continue to operate while it finds a plan to survive. Usually that’s through selling off parts of the company or restructuring.

Del Monte said that’s what it wants to do, so the brand won’t necessarily disappear but will change in the US. The confusing thing is that’s a different Del Monte. I had no idea about this before researching this episode.

The Del Monte that’s going under is Del Monte Foods, a food production and distribution company owned by NutriAsia and headquartered in California. That Del Monte has a completely different vibe from the one in Kenya. Its mission is to “nourish families with Earth’s goodness,” which sounds wholesome, and it talks about responsible sourcing and its strong record on human rights.

TL: It sounds like a much nicer Del Monte. So why is this totally different Del Monte filing for bankruptcy protection?

KH: There are lots of reasons, mostly about losing market relevance and a slow decline in sales. They increased production during the pandemic when people were stocking up on tinned foods and didn’t downgrade afterwards. They may be hit by tariffs on steel, and consumer behaviour has shifted away from processed or canned foods and towards own-label brands.

TL: And how is the other Del Monte, the one with all the human rights abuses, doing?

KH: It’s really confusing. Fresh Del Monte, not Del Monte Foods, seems to be stable. Fresh Del Monte is the one that operates in Europe and Africa, including the UK. It’s desperately trying to tell people it’s not going under, while the news is full of “Del Monte files for bankruptcy protection,” and they’re saying, “That’s not us.”

But they all use the same brand and the same recognisable yellow and red shield logo they’ve had for 100 or so years.

TL: So how has that brand confusion happened?

KH: It’s years of acquisitions, sell-offs and old licences to use the brand and logo. It’s an incredibly complex set of companies with different holding organisations operating in different areas. Some have the licence to produce canned food, some fresh food, but they all use the same brand name. People don’t know which brand is which, and that’s a problem.

TL: So let’s do a little summary here. I think we should look at the lessons from all this, and it seems to me there are a few. Firstly, don’t do bad stuff. Don’t cover up bad stuff. Don’t claim you’re based in the Cayman Islands to avoid doing the right thing, to compensate people for the bad stuff you did. And sort out your branding, because if something bad happens to one part of the brand, it will affect all the companies that share that brand. Does that about sum it up?

KH: I think it does. And we’re going to dig into all of this with our guest after a short break.

Break

TL: I’m delighted to introduce Marshall Manson. So Marshall is Chief Executive Officer of Fleishman Hillard, UK, where he oversees the agency’s strategic direction, client service, growth, innovation and talent development across its UK operations. He’s also hugely experienced in crisis, so very happy to have Marshall here. Marshall, I’m going to jump straight in. Let’s tackle the brand confusion.

There are so many different parts to Del Monte. What’s your take on what that means for the brand as a whole? Because I know fresh Del Monte produce had to issue a statement saying it wasn’t impacted by Del Monte food filing for bankruptcy, for example. So what’s the impact of that brand confusion?

Marshall Manson: It’s really interesting. I think, from an investor point of view, it’s really confusing. From a consumer point of view, it’s really confusing. But this is the business landscape that we’re now operating in, you know, we can think of an awful lot of companies where brands have been divided up, atomized, shared, licensed, you know.

And this is a more and more common thing, particularly given the kind of market attitude at the moment towards spinning off non-core businesses, but retaining brand value in those businesses, right? We’ve seen this in consumer health spinning off from pharma. There’s lots of examples. So from a consumer point of view, it’s often hard to know where to look, it’s often hard to know where to turn. And the reputational damage that comes from one aspect of the kind of brand structure, as it were, you know, one licensee, in this case, you know, their behaviour is affecting the reputation of everyone who touches the brand.

So I think it’s interesting. And I think more and more when boards are thinking about strategies that involve spin-off and licence, which is essentially the strategy in a nutshell, boards need to be thinking about what is the potential reputational harm for the wider portfolio if everybody’s sharing the same brand name, it’s really complex to manage. And if what you’re relying on as a board is, oh yes, well, we’re going to have licencing revenue from that, you know, from that spin-off or licensee company for years to come, well, actually, that licence revenue may be put in jeopardy, and you might affect the value of the whole brand and perhaps what other licensees are paying for that value. So, you know, I think it’s complex, and I think the assumption that brand spin-off and licence back models will kind of always work and always be viable and always make money, I think more and more of those questions need scrutiny.

KH: I totally agree. We saw this, didn’t we, with P&O cruises and P&O ferries, not too long ago, it is hugely confusing. But let’s talk about that impact that you talked about. You know, it is confusing, including for consumers, but where it doesn’t seem to be confusing people, is in the share price. Talk to us a bit about that, because it hasn’t really taken a hit, as you have said before.

MM: If you go back to when the Guardian and Institute for Investigative Journalism originally did their piece, back in sort of 2023, there was a bit of a stock dip, but it didn’t last very long, and if you look at the stock performance since then, so in effect, two and a half years later, the stock is at a higher level than it was when that story originally broke. Analysts, if you look at the there’s only about four analysts who cover this stock, but all four of them have this stock rated strong buy at the moment, and they’re projecting a share price of $46 a share. Our stock’s currently, as of our recording today, trading at about $35 a share, and the company had brilliant, really strong, above expectations earnings in their Q3 results that they put out just a couple of weeks ago.

If you really dig into those results, it’s also clear that they haven’t had a sales dip anywhere in the world, but especially in the UK. And when you dig into that a bit further, if you read really carefully the statements that the supermarket chains put out when this was all kind of kicking off, and then subsequently, what they’ve said is that they’re no longer marketing products that originated at this farm in Kenya, but they are still selling Del Monte products, and quite a lot of them, right? So when you look at the revenue impact of this whole story, actually, the revenue impact on both the supermarkets and the company in question has been not only minimal, it’s been none whatsoever. And the company’s revenues since the moment that the story emerged are actually up and up substantially.

So it’s really interesting. Obviously, this is a small part of their operations. And when you really dig into their sources of revenue, their biggest source of revenue is in the banana trade. So, you know, that’s whatever it is, two thirds or three quarters of their business, this pineapple, the pineapple farm in Kenya, is a relatively small proportion. It’s not made any difference to their bottom line, top line, investor share price or otherwise, and I think that’s interesting, you know?

I think sometimes we, people like us, get caught kind of thinking about the value of reputation and the value of reputational damage. You know, this story was all over the UK. It was out on the AFP. It was all over France. It was covered in the US, and from a bottom line point of view has had no impact at all.

KH: It’s so interesting, isn’t it, because actually, by I guess any of our definitions of a crisis, this hasn’t been a crisis, has it, for Del Monte, maybe, maybe yet. I mean, there is still an outstanding lawsuit, for example, I think from from Lee Day, and there were two more deaths in 2025 under the new security arrangements. But I guess it’s not really a crisis, which leads me to kind of ask the question of what incentive is there for organisations to do better if they’re not going to be penalised when stuff like this happens?

MM: Well, I think that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it? And, you know, the reality of the lawsuit is that the you know, what the Kenyan courts have said is that the parent company isn’t really reachable from the Kenyan court’s point of view, which means that anybody being sued in the Kenyan court is just basically kind of judgement proof. All you could do is wipe out Del Monte Kenya, which is a pretty small business in the great grand scheme of things.

So, you know, you can’t really get legal satisfaction. In this case, the reputational damage that you would have expected from this sort of coverage or storytelling really hasn’t had the intended effect. You know, the only strategy that you can consider for kind of exerting some influence is either for lead a to sue in in British court or somewhere else, but I can’t, I’m not a legal expert, I can’t really work out how that would be possible. Or you’ve got to go in through the shareholder route, and say, look, you know, as a shareholder, I am concerned about this behaviour, and are we on top of it?

But of course, at this point, the company’s just going to say yes and move on. You know, I suspect, if you’re sitting as a senior executive in fresh Del Monte, your view is, yeah, we, you know, this happened, we dealt with it, we brought in the new security contractor, and everything’s everything’s fine, you know, notwithstanding the fact that, as you said, we’ve had two further deaths on the farm just in August. So, you know, if it sounds like I’m pretty, pretty unsatisfied with the whole outcome of this, it’s because I am. It feels like the kind of the levers of influence in this case aren’t really working, certainly not working in a way that we would expect.

TL: Let’s pull back a little bit actually, because I think I know Kate was saying, what what is the incentive to do better? But actually, a lot of companies, it is something that comes up, that that whole concept of don’t do bad stuff off. So generally, what what does best practice look like, and how should organisations look at how they behave in like every location, at every level, to to avoid this kind of crisis?

MM: It’s so difficult, because the reality of being in a global corporation is that you are inevitably trusting, you know, your local managers to live up to the standards that you set. And, you know, you look at a situation like this, and I love Kenya, and I’ve spent a huge amount of time there, you know, the reality is, if your local managers think that they are dealing with a rash of, you know, locally driven, organised theft, and they are trying to work out how to mitigate that, you absolutely can see how they get themselves in deeper and deeper and deeper trouble. And the question is, what oversight is somebody exerting over that to say, hey, wait a second, you know, the cost of mitigating this problem is soon going to exceed the value of actually mitigating it.

In other words, what’s the value of the pineapples that were being stolen versus the damage that results from trying to stop that theft? Nobody’s looking at it on that basis. You know, you’re just sitting there on a, even on a, on a kind of moral level, just going, I object to my product being stolen out of our fields. You know, I’m the local manager, and I want to do something about that. I have some sympathy with that view. And so then you sort of have to ask yourself, okay, is the company, is the parent company exercising enough oversight to say, okay, wait a second, but the way that you’re, you know, putting that into practice is wrong and inconsistent with our values and needs to go in a different direction.

I don’t know for sure. I you know it’s impossible to know exactly what the behind the scenes conversations were, but clearly there was a breakdown in that tier of management, that communication about we don’t want to behave this way wasn’t making it down to the to the local managers who were making those decisions. And so then I think all you can do in a global company is say, oh dear, you know, we’ve had a had a huge tragic consequence resulting from that lack of proper oversight. We need to, we need to resolve that and fix it as quickly as we possibly can. And good companies will react in, hopefully, in the right ways and do that in the right way.

KH: And that’s, I mean, that is the million dollar question, isn’t it? Because they they have and they haven’t, I mean, they’ve, you know, they’ve come forward and said, you know, this is awful, and we’re going to change the system, and they’ve got, you know, new security in and all that stuff and, and, but on the other hand, they’re saying, oh, but we can’t answer to a civil case because, actually, we’re in the Cayman Islands. We’re not in Kenya at all, which is a very different, what they’re saying isn’t sort of matching how they’re responding to those claims.

MM: Yeah, but I know you’ve had this conversation many times before. You know, this is one of those times where you’ve got the grand tension in a crisis management situation between what the lawyers want to do and what communications people want to do, and then the sort of third axis, which is just doing the right thing. And, you know, viewed from the lawyer’s perspective, the lawyers are going, hang on a minute. We cannot set a precedent here where a Kenyan court can pierce the corporate veil and reach upward in the structure. We cannot allow that, because it would cause a whole raft of lawsuits from countries all over the world attacking the kind of corporate centre.

And actually, the lawyers are probably right about that. That isn’t good for the long-term health of the other corporation. So what you what you hope they would do then is to say, okay, so we need to ensure that our Kenyan entity is funded in a way to make this right. And the thing that you can’t see in the coverage is, and who knows, this is total speculation on my part, but what I would hope is that a company trying to do the right thing would say, okay, the courts aren’t actually going to sort this out in the way that anybody wants. Let’s get on the ground. Let’s go see the affected, whatever, people, communities, families. I’m not sure what the right mechanism is, but let’s go see the right people and try to get to an accommodation that demonstrates in some meaningful way that we’re trying to make this right.

If that’s compensation, great, if that’s apology, great, if it’s something else, fantastic. But you would hope that that engagement was happening, again, no idea if it is or not. But, you know, in the spirit of pullback, like that’s what I would be encouraging a company to do, you know, and recognising that in this case, maybe the Kenyan courts can’t actually be the solution that the people, the kind of victims of this, or the communities affected, they may not be able to find satisfaction there. Okay, can we help them find satisfaction in a different way and make right, you know, what’s happened?

KH: The other thing I think that leads on from that is, should they have known about this? I mean, people died, you know, this this isn’t something that, it isn’t something, in my view, that should have needed investigative journalists to uncover, but it but it did, and it was only at that point that things started to happen. Do you think, how important do you think the role of investigative journalists is in uncovering stuff like this and holding companies to account?

MM: I think it’s hugely important. And I have a different view, actually, than you do on that. I’m going to take the story out of Kenya and talk about a different framing. If you think about these small towns in places like West Virginia, where in the past, particularly when towns were dominated by the mining industry, you might have one company that employed 85% of the workers in the town.

I don’t know if that’s precisely the case in this part of Kenya, but my suspicion is that it’s pretty close. The reality of the situation is, as we saw so many times in West Virginia over the years, that the only way for the workers to find any satisfaction or to win out in a dispute with an employer was either to have strong union representation or to effectively threaten reputational damage through the press. Often that involved needing to go to somebody far outside the region.

You think about West Virginia: you’re going to The Washington Post or the Richmond Times-Dispatch or the Lexington Herald-Leader, which are all hundreds of miles from these mines. It’s absolutely not hard for me to imagine at all a situation where you’ve got a dominant employer in a community and it’s very difficult for anybody to find a voice to confront or deal with a problem that the community might be having with that business. I have no trouble believing that at all.

KH: I mean, sadly, I do totally agree with you on that. I think I’m imagining an ideal world where the person you go to is not the journalist; it’s up through your line management structure, who then has a way of reporting that through the centre, who then has a way of seeing patterns in behaviour, who then goes, “We have a problem.” Wouldn’t that be absolutely lovely?

MM: It’s really interesting, actually, to stick with the mining industry as an example, because now what you’ve got in communities, not in the US but more in places like South Africa, is that you have people whose job it is to go out and do nothing but interface with the community. So if you think about what you were just saying — if I live in this village and I don’t know anybody who works for Del Monte, how would I engage with the company? What’s the connection point?

Genuinely, I have no idea. I don’t know what I would do in that situation. But if you’re the dominant employer in that community and you’ve got somebody whose job is to be out talking to people, to be part of that community, to have their ear to the ground, then as the company you probably do pick up on this, and you’ve got a different way of escalating it up to management. Somebody can say, “Hang on a minute. The community is really concerned about this, and they’ve got good reason to be.”

You also get the virtue of the other course of action, which is for management to say, “Listen, community, we’ve got a real problem here with a level of theft that’s happening on the farm. Can you help us work out how best to address this?” And then to have some engagement in the right way, to say, “We have a genuine concern with the level of theft we’ve got. We need to address that, and we want to do that in the right way. What does that look like?”

You probably get a better outcome. Things are always perfect in retrospect, right? But as I look at the situation, as I understand it, it would be great if there were people out on the ground trying to do that on behalf of the company. And I want to say: I don’t know that there aren’t. There may well be; perhaps they weren’t effective, whatever. But if you look at it in a different context, that feels like an opportunity.

KH: That’s just the perfect way to leave it, I think, isn’t it? The best response to a crisis, very often, is in asking the right questions and then listening to the answers. Marshall, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us.

MM: Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me

Outro

You’ve been listening to “What Just Happened?” with Kate Hartley and Tamara Littleton. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review.