Antoine Riboud, creator of food giant Danone and one of the most successful businessmen in post-war France, has died.
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Born in Lyons in 1918, Riboud created Danone after over 20 years in the glass-making industry, and left it in 1996 at the age of 77. At this point Danone was that largest biscuit and milk products producer in the world, and the biggest sauces and condiments maker in Europe, with an annual turnover of £8bn (US$7.6bn). All this was an amazing achievement for a man whose father had prevented him from taking his baccalaureate over concerns that he would fail.
From 1981, when he bought back the rights to the Danone product from the US firm that had purchased them during the Second World War, his leadership of the company was based on ability, and his share ownership never exceeded two out of every thousand.
In October 1972, he shocked his peers with a speech that insisted many workers were not being paid enough: “You cannot say that a country is rich if the workers’ wages rise more slowly than those of the bosses.
“I am anti-conservative, a false-bourgeois,” he added.
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