ST. LOUIS — When Post Holdings employees arrive at the company’s headquarters, the food manufacturer’s storied 128-year history is on full display.
How CEO Rob Vitale has quietly transformed Post
The executive has proven to be a shrewd fit for the food maker.
The decades-long evolution in packaging for three of its signature brands — Sugar Crisp, Fruity Pebbles and Honeycomb cereals — is spotlighted inside a black rectangular frame on the first floor. Workers showcase miniature toy trucks, special-edition cereal boxes, champagne bottles and other mementos that commemorate achievements and celebrations.
Rob Vitale, Post’s chief executive officer, has six black and white photographs hanging in his office revealing key moments in the company’s history, such as images of the original factory and the house where the company was established in Battle Creek, Michigan, more than a century ago.
“I’m a history buff. So in one way, I look back a lot,” Vitale said during a 90-minute interview. “We’ve got one of the best corporate histories around [that is] particularly colorful.”
Despite Post’s close connection to the past, the food manufacturer isn’t one to live in it.
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Under the leadership of Vitale and his mentor and predecessor Bill Stiritz, Post has transformed itself from a company selling only cereal into a sprawling CPG conglomerate manufacturing everything from peanut butter and mashed potatoes to liquid eggs and dog food.
Post has found success through an unconventional strategy of building and managing its businesses in a way that is more akin to a private equity firm than a publicly traded company with roughly $6 billion in annual sales. This approach, Post executives say, keeps the company nimble and better positions it to go head-to-head with much larger challengers in the fiercely competitive food space.
“One of the things that Bill taught me early on is to think your own thoughts,” Vitale said. “Don’t just go to what everyone else is doing and say, ‘Okay, because the rest of the pack is doing it that way, we’re going to emulate them. ’ ”
‘The Wild, Wild West’
Post traces its roots to 1895 when C.W. Post started the Postum Cereal Company and two years later launched Grape-Nuts, one of the first ready-to-eat-cold cereals. Since then, Post has been owned by several large businesses following a series of mergers and spinoffs, including tobacco giant Phillip Morris and Kraft Foods.
In 2012, private label food manufacturer Ralcorp Holdings spun off its branded division to create today’s Post as a standalone company.
The debut marked the beginning of a new chapter for the Fruity Pebbles manufacturer, but one that left its executive team, led by CPG industry veteran Stiritz and Vitale, then its CFO, with little time to enjoy the company’s newfound independence. Post was the third-largest cereal maker in a struggling sector where it was pitted against category leaders General Mills and Kellogg.
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“It was not a transaction for the faint of heart,” said Lowell Strug, the global head of consumer and retail investment banking at Barclays who has worked with Post on three acquisitions since 2018. “Spinning off as a pure play in a declining category, that could have gone horribly wrong.”
Post started life on its own with fewer than a dozen corporate employees.
Diedre Gray, now Post’s executive vice president and general counsel, said when the company moved its headquarters into the home of a defunct pharmaceutical firm, workers initially did not have trash cans at their desks and the office lacked printers.
“It was really the Wild, Wild West in here at that time, but it was pretty exciting, too,” she said. “We had this real history with the Post brand and the cereals. At the same time, we were totally a startup.”
Executives working at Post at the time of the spin off, many of whom remain at the company today, said they were aware that despite its recognizable cereal business, Post couldn’t stake its future on that alone. It needed to look for acquisitions to grow the company, and quickly, or it wouldn’t be long before Post would find itself as the target of an opportunistic buyer.
“We needed to do it because if we didn’t, we weren’t going to be a standalone company for very long,” said Jeff Zadoks, Post’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, who started the same day as Vitale in 2011. “We were third in a shrinking category. As a public company, that’s not a recipe for success. We had to be active.”
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It was really the Wild, Wild West in here at that time, but it was pretty exciting, too. We had this real history with the Post brand and the cereals. At the same time, we were totally a startup.
Diedre Gray
Executive vice president and general counsel, Post Holdings
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Since Zadoks joined Post, the company has completed more than 20 acquisitions. It has been one of the most active buyers during that period across the food industry — a notable feat in a sector where access to cheap capital and the urgency to move deeper into trendier categories has accelerated the pace of M&A.
