Kraft Heinz to lay off 2,500 in U.S. and Canada

Kraft Heinz on Wednesday said it will lay off 700 workers at Kraft's corporate headquarters in suburban Chicago, part of a cost-cutting plan that will slash the combined company's head count in the U.S. and Canada by 2,500 jobs.

Employees affected by the cuts, which have been expected for months, will get "generous" severance benefits that last at least six months and include outplacement services, said Michael Mullen, Kraft Heinz's senior vice president of corporate and government affairs. The cuts take effect immediately.

"We have developed a new streamlined structure for our organization to simplify, strengthen and leverage the company's scale. This new structure eliminates duplication to enable faster decision-making, increased accountability and accelerated growth," Mullen wrote in an e-mail.

Kraft employed about 2,000 people in suburban Chicago before the layoffs.

H.J. Heinz completed its purchase of Kraft Foods Group in July, forming Kraft Heinz, now the third-largest food and beverage company in the U.S. and the fifth-largest worldwide.

A few weeks later, Kraft Heinz announced it would move one of its headquarters, which encompasses some 700,000 square feet in suburban Chicago, to less than a quarter of that amount of space in downtown Chicago. Kraft's other headquarters is in Pittsburgh.

On Monday, Kraft Heinz affirmed its commitment to cut costs by $1.5 billion by the end of 2017. As part of its merger, the company said it expected to reduce its existing workforce, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of Kraft's top executives left the company after the merger was finalized.

Last month, Kraft Heinz told workers to limit travel, keep the cost of meals at $50 to $70 when traveling, limit printing to "only when absolutely necessary," and to find ways to reduce the company's use of electricity and other utilities, according to a memo obtained by the Tribune.

Heinz, which is based in Pittsburgh, cut more than 7,000 jobs — about 20 percent of the workforce — in the 18 months after it was acquired in 2013 by Berkshire Hathaway and private-equity firm 3G Capital.