Ruddick Corporation

Ruddick Corporation was the Charlotte, North Carolina holding company created in 1968 by brothers Alan and Stuart Dickson to hold two unrelated businesses: Harris Teeter, the supermarket chain acquired in 1969, and American & Efird, the industrial thread and yarns maker previously owned by their father. Ruddick traded on the New York Stock Exchange as RDK and belongs in this textile guide because of American & Efird, one of the world's largest makers of industrial sewing thread. Ruddick sold American & Efird to KPS Capital Partners for $180 million in November 2011, renamed itself Harris Teeter Supermarkets, Inc. in 2012, and was acquired by the Kroger Co. for about $2.5 billion in a merger completed in January 2014.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary in the record describes the original two-business structure in full: a holding company for a regional supermarket chain of six southeastern states and a thread maker whose yarns and synthetic fibres served the apparel industry worldwide. The April 2006 summary states the same pairing from Charlotte headquarters — Harris Teeter's supermarkets and American & Efird's textile operations under one NYSE listing.

The unwinding was deliberate and staged: first the thread business was sold, in 2011, on the stated reasoning that American & Efird had become an Asia-centred international manufacturer that no longer fitted a supermarket company; then the name followed the remaining business in 2012; then Kroger bought the renamed company. Harris Teeter still trades as a Kroger subsidiary, and American & Efird still makes thread under KPS ownership — both halves survived the holding company.

The range behind the name is supermarket groceries through Harris Teeter and industrial sewing thread through American & Efird. Its customers are southeastern grocery shoppers and apparel and industrial manufacturers worldwide (in its holding-company years). That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Ruddick Corporation in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Ruddick Corporation with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Acquired — Ruddick sold its textile subsidiary American & Efird in November 2011, renamed itself Harris Teeter Supermarkets, Inc. in 2012, and was acquired by the Kroger Co. in a deal completed in January 2014 — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

The stock record matters because Ruddick Corporation sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following grocery spending in the Southeast and thread orders from the world's apparel factories. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.