Among a litany of complaints an activist investor has leveled against Supervalu and its board of directors recently was the charge that the company has been letting rural and low-income people go hungry as Supervalu's independent grocer customers increasingly go away.
This accusation appears in the latest presentation Blackwells Capital filed in a campaign for board seats, although it doesn't appear until deep into a 175-slide presentation. It's a claim so silly that it seems a little like a late-appearing ad in the governor's race, after all the decent arguments to the voters have grown stale.
The kernel of truth here is that the core wholesaling customer of Supervalu, its independent retailers, really have been in decline. That just isn't Supervalu's fault.
It was, however, Supervalu's problem. And what to do about it was the central challenge for Supervalu going back all the way into the 1980s.
The company never quite met the challenge.
A decade ago Supervalu decided the thing to do was to become one of the biggest, which it accomplished in a deal for most of the Albertsons retail chain. Since the date of that deal Supervalu shares are off roughly 85 percent, the deal has been unwound, and it's not at all surprising that Supervalu has finally been acquired.
Last week, the Eden Prairie-based company announced a deal in which it will be taken over by the top distributor of natural and organic foods. The buyer, Rhode Island-based United Natural Foods, is going to finish a recent shift for Supervalu, and that's to get out of the retail grocery business.
With some of this recent history it might be easy to forget that at one time no one could think of Supervalu as a grocery store chain; it was a top-of-the-industry wholesaler. The term wholesaler may sound a little old-fashioned these days, but wholesalers still do a lot of the hard work that brings food to the consumer's dinner table.