The Brazilian Billionaire Who Controls Your Beer, Your Condiments, and Your Whopper

Found via the Corner of Berkshire & Fairfax.

After they sold H.J. Heinz to Warren Buffett and a bunch of Brazilians in June, the ketchup manufacturer’s outgoing board of directors met for dinner at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Twenty-three billion dollars had just changed hands. The takeover price, at $72.50 a share, was almost 20 percent higher than the company’s recent all-time high. “We said we’re all going to miss each other, but we felt we had done right by the shareholders,” says Dean O’Hare, who’d sat on the board since 2000. Heinz is an institution in Pittsburgh—the Steelers play at Heinz Field, locals of means like to get married at Heinz Memorial Chapel—and Buffett’s presence allayed fears that the 144-year-old company would be dismantled. “Seeing the name on the letter was very important to us,” O’Hare says.

The only really un-Buffettlike aspect of the deal, other than the high price, was the Brazilians. Not because of their nationality, but because they were the principals at 3G Capital, an investment firm best known for the leveraged buyout of Burger King in 2010. Had the Oracle of Omaha changed his mind on private equity, which he once compared to a porn shop? At Berkshire Hathaway’s (BRK/A) annual shareholders’ meeting in May, Buffett explained why he seemed to be breaking his own rules: his confidence in 3G’s 74-year-old chief investor and strategist, Jorge Paulo Lemann. He called Lemann “classy.” As a sign of Buffett’s esteem, 3G and Berkshire have equal stakes in Heinz despite Berkshire putting up three times as much cash. Heinz, Buffett said, would be Lemann’s show.

In the U.S., Lemann is virtually unknown, even though he and his two longtime partners, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira, now control three icons of U.S. consumer culture: Heinz ketchup, Burger King, and, after the $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, Budweiser beer. The combined market value of the companies they run is $187 billion—larger than that of Citigroup (C).