Chiquita cut $700M in a 2002 prepack, rebuilt the banana brand, sold for $1.3B in 2015

By late 2001 Chiquita Brands International, the world's best-known banana company, was suffocating under about $950 million of bond debt accumulated through 1990s expansion. On November 28, 2001 it filed a pre-arranged Chapter 11 in which bondholders had already agreed to swap most of their claims for new stock and notes.

The plan cut debt and accrued interest from roughly $950 million to $250 million and lowered annual interest expense by about $60 million, while deliberately leaving the operating subsidiaries — the farms, ships and the banana exporter — outside the filing so the fruit business kept running untouched. Chiquita completed the restructuring on March 19, 2002, under four months after filing.

With a clean balance sheet, the company refocused on its core fresh-fruit brands and salads business, rebuilding for over a decade. In October 2014 Brazil's Cutrale Group and the Safra Group agreed to acquire Chiquita for $14.50 per share in cash — about $1.3 billion including assumed net debt — completing the tender offer in early 2015.

Debt and accrued interest cut from about $950M to $250M in a four-month prepack; Cutrale-Safra acquired Chiquita for $14.50 per share, about $1.3B including net debt.

Bondholders pre-approved the plan, so the case closed in under four months with minimal business disruption.

Only the parent company's securities were restructured; subsidiaries and their $413M debt stayed outside.

Interest savings of about $60M a year freed cash for brand and supply-chain reinvestment.

A decade of rebuilding made the equity valuable enough for Cutrale-Safra to pay a premium cash price.

A pre-negotiated restructuring that touches only the holding company's securities can fix the balance sheet without touching the operating business — customers and farms never see the bankruptcy.

Chiquita became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cutrale-Safra group and remained the leading global banana brand, later moving its headquarters to Switzerland. The 2002 prepack is still cited as a model of a surgical, holding-company-only Chapter 11 that preserved enterprise value.