A MERGER between US food giants Heinz and Kraft Foods announced yesterday raised fears that thousands of jobs could face the axe.

The new Kraft Heinz company — 51 per cent of which will be owned by current Heinz shareholders and the rest by current Kraft shareholders — will be among the world’s biggest food and drink corporations, with annual revenues exceeding $28 billion (£19bn).

Each party to the deal is already a mammoth firm owning a wide range of household-name brands.

The deal, partly engineered by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company, has been accepted by shareholders on both sides but still needs approval from federal regulators.

The merger is unlikely to fall foul of competition laws because the companies’ products do not tend to overlap, with Heinz specialising in tinned and frozen food and sauces while Kraft sells cheese and meat products.

Mr Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest men, praised the deal as “my kind of transaction. Uniting two world-class organisations and delivering shareholder value.”

The so-called Sage of Omaha has previously admitted that “there’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning,” referring to the decades-long assault on workers’ rights and wages in the United States.

And his own companies have demonstrated the truth of the observation. Since Berkshire Hathaway and Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital acquired Heinz last June, hundreds of jobs have been shed across North America including 350 at its Pittsburgh HQ alone.

Individual offices have been scrapped and employees now work in “pods” and are expected to wear Heinz-branded shirts.

And the new conglomerate has hyped up “significant synergy opportunities” — widely interpreted as indicating mass layoffs — delivered by the merger.

“Savings” of $1.5bn (£1bn) annually will be found by the end of 2017, according to the two firms, which aim to combine “Kraft’s brands with Heinz’s international platform.”

by Our Foreign Desk