Strauss: the founder's granddaughter turned an Israeli dairy into a global food group

Strauss began in 1936 as a family dairy in Nahariya. Michael Strauss, the founders' son, ran it from 1975 and grew it through acquisitions, including the 1996 purchase of the chocolate and coffee maker Elite. His daughter Ofra was groomed inside the business through the ice-cream and food divisions, and when Michael retired in 2001 she took over as chairwoman of the group.

Her first decade paired two moves. She completed the integration of Elite, the merger that made Strauss Israel's second-largest foodmaker, led by executive Giora Bardea in 2004. And she chose partnerships over going it alone abroad: a 50/50 joint venture with PepsiCo for the Sabra dip brand in the United States, plus coffee alliances in Europe and Brazil.

The partnership model compounded. Sabra grew more than 50% in a single year and by 2016 generated an estimated $800 million in annual US retail sales, with PepsiCo calling it its next billion-dollar brand. In 2017 Strauss reported sales of NIS 8.5 billion and a market value that had more than doubled under its professional CEO to NIS 9.3 billion (about $2.6 billion), with the founder's granddaughter still in the chair.

Sabra reached about $800M in US retail sales; group sales hit NIS 8.5 billion in 2017 with a market value near $2.6B — Israel's second-largest foodmaker.

A food group the size of Strauss could not fund a global rollout alone, so joint ventures gave it scale in each market without new family money.

PepsiCo brought the one thing an Israeli dairy could not build quickly in America: shelf-space distribution in every supermarket chain.

The Elite merger doubled the domestic base, giving the third generation cash flow to invest abroad instead of defending a niche.

Keeping the chair in the family while hiring professional CEOs let ownership and management specialize, a model the group kept through repeated leadership changes.

A family heir's first big decisions decide the firm's scale. Strauss globalized by letting partners own half of each new market, keeping the family's control at home intact.

Sabra became the model case of the strategy, but the dip business also brought food-safety shocks: a listeria finding forced a recall in 2015 and a broader salmonella-related recall followed in 2016. Strauss itself kept professionalizing — when CEO Gadi Lesin stepped down for medical reasons in 2017, the board handed the group to his deputy Giora Bardea, the same executive who had built the Elite merger and the PepsiCo partnership. The family kept the chair and its controlling stake while the group's international sales grew past its Israeli base.