Question: Discussion: As you research General Mills, you may want to compare and contrast that company with the other food service retailers - such as Kraft Foods, Nestle, Tyson Foods, ConAgra, and Kellogg.
Please visit the General Mills site, and identify the company's mission and vision, as well as their major stakeholders (you may need to interpret and/or make assumptions here, as all mission and vision statements are not crystal clear - nor are they always explicitly stated. You should note that the stakeholders aren't simply the shareholders. "Stakeholders" include everyone and anyone who is affected by the success or failure of the company).
Based on the Discussion above and the below students repsonse, provide comments and fedback based on how the student answered. If you agree or disagree provide comments as well.
General Mills has a pretty easy to use website and I was able to find their mission statement under their purpose section which states, "We serve the world by making food people love" and lists their pursuits as "put people first, build a culture of creating, make food with passion, earn people's trust, and treat the world with care" (Purpose, n.d.). The major stakeholders for General Mills includes everyone from the stock shareholders, the consumers buying the products, the farmers who supply the ingredients, as well as the people involved in the production and distribution.
In order to pick a company to compare it to, I opened up my pantry and found my favorite cereal, Honey Bunches of Oats, and saw it is owned by Post Holdings. After doing some research on Post Holdings, their mission is stated as, "We are driven by one idea: to make better happen. When we make better happen, families get a better chance to choose what they love. Retailers get a fresh chance to grow. We succeed as a company. The communities around us are better off. When we make better happen in every fiber of our business, it adds up to a whole lot of better. And the real beauty is, better is endless" (Company, n.d.). There is no listed vision statement but appears to be combined with their mission statement.
Both of these companies are well known primarily for their grain products, primarily different brands of cereal. General Mills' mission statement is pretty wide focusing on making food people love. Post takes a similar approach with a broad mission statement to make better happen. The Post mission statement goes further into detail specifying how it will affect the major stakeholders with this mission statement including consumers and retailers. The General Mills website was a bit easier to navigate but the Post website was far from difficult compared to other companies. They both have an investor relations section with tons of research can be done on the company, but relies too heavily on colors and pictures rather than facts and details from an investor standpoint. Both investor relation sections do keep an updated stock price with various links to financial data if someone wanted to get more information regarding the company. These are just some of the major similarities that stuck out comparing the two companies doing research as a consumer and potential investor.