Cadbury staff to taste Kraft style

Workers at Dunedin's Cadbury chocolate factory will get a taste of the management style of the new owners when negotiations over a new collective agreement begin in the next few weeks.

The 186-year-old British chocolate company was sold to United States food giant Kraft, for $27.4 billion, in February.

Otago Service and Food Workers Union spokesman Neville Donaldson said yesterday the current agreement with Cadbury expired in August and the union had initiated the process that would lead to negotiations with the new owner.

Mr Donaldson said the negotiations would enable the union to raise some issues with Kraft, including job security, the relevance of previous agreements with Cadbury and the likelihood of further restructuring.

There was concern among workers about the future of the plant, which has just gone through a major upgrade as a result of a decision made by the previous Cadbury management.

"Now we've got Kraft . . . a whole new group of people who look at things significantly differently."

He believed there were "a lot of arguments" for the Dunedin plant to have a future, "but whether they are arguments Kraft are prepared to consider or listen to is another matter".

Mr Donaldson said he had been in contact with the new Dunedin operations manager, Peter Lennox, who had replaced long-standing operations manager John Booth.

Mr Lennox was unavailable to speak to the Otago Daily Times yesterday and is travelling to Kraft's Cadbury headquarters in Melbourne today.

A Kraft spokesman in Melbourne did not return calls to the ODT yesterday.