Trian Fund Management

Nelson Peltz

Nelson Peltz runs Trian Fund Management, an activist investment firm he founded in New York in 2005 with two longtime partners, Peter May and Edward Garden. Born in 1942, Peltz left the Wharton School in 1963 without a degree to work for his family's wholesale food business, A. Peltz & Sons, where he started as a delivery truck driver. He grew the small company into Flagstaff Corp. and took it public in 1972. In the 1980s he and May built wealth through leveraged buyouts, buying control of Triangle Industries in 1983 and turning it into the world's largest packaging company before selling it to Pechiney in 1988. The trade that made his name came at the end of the decade. In 1997, after Quaker Oats had badly fumbled the Snapple brand, Peltz and May bought the company for $300 million and sold it to Cadbury Schweppes three years later for $1.45 billion — a turnaround later taught as a case study at Harvard Business School. That knack for finding a good business mismanaged by its owner is the template he brought to Trian. The firm takes a small number of large stakes in underperforming consumer, industrial, and financial companies, works closely with their boards, and pushes for cost cuts, strategic focus, and better governance — an approach Peltz prefers to call "constructivist" rather than activist. Over the years he has pressed for change at companies including Procter & Gamble, DuPont, PepsiCo, Wendy's, and Heinz.