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Dole Food Company, Inc. is an American agricultural multinational corporation headquartered in Westlake Village, California. The company is the largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world, operating with 74,300 full-time and seasonal employees who are responsible for over 300 products in 90 countries. Dole markets such food items as bananas, pineapples (fresh and packaged), grapes, strawberries, salads, and other fresh and frozen fruits and juices. Dole's Chairman founded the Dole Nutrition Institute, a nutritional research and education foundation. ==History== The company traces its origin to the 1851 establishment of Castle & Cooke by missionaries Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke. Castle & Cooke rapidly became one of the largest companies in Hawaii, investing in shipping, railroad construction, sugar production, and seafood packing. The other half of Dole's corporate heritage, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, was founded in 1901 by James Dole, who opened his first pineapple plantation in the central plateau of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Sanford Dole, the cousin of James, had been president of the Republic of Hawaii from 1894 after the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii (her last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani), and first governor of the Territory of Hawaii until 1903. The annexation of Hawaii to the United States made selling agricultural products to the mainland much more profitable, since they would never be subject to import tariffs. In 1932, Castle & Cooke purchased a 21% interest in the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. In the 1960s, Castle & Cooke acquired the remainder of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company and the Standard Fruit Company and renamed the company "The Dole Food Company, Inc" in 1991. Castle & Cooke Inc, a real estate company, was spun off in 1995; it is currently operating as a subsidiary of Flexi-Van Leasing, Inc. It was then the third largest producer and U.S. importer of bananas. Dole and Chiquita remain the top two U.S. banana companies as of 2011. In 2011, the company reported $7.2 billion in annual revenue.〔 Dole operates plantations throughout Central and South America, and in the Asia-Pacific region, with plantations in the Philippines and two packing plants in Thailand, Hua Hin and Chumphon. As part of a major restructuring in 2012, Dole agreed to sell its worldwide packaged foods and Asia fresh produce businesses to Japanese trading house Itochu for $1.7 billion in cash. The transaction paid down a large amount of Dole's debt and refocused the company's business on fresh fruit and vegetables.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/18/us-dolefood-itochu-idUSBRE88H01L20120918 )〕 The businesses acquired by Itochu continue to use the Dole brand and are owned by Dole International Holdings, a Tokyo-based subsidiary of Itochu.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.itochu.co.jp/en/business/food/project/10/ )〕 In August 2013, Dole announced that CEO David Murdock would acquire the outstanding stock of the company for $1.2 billion. The sale closed in October 2013, but was challenged by shareholders who argued that the company was undervalued, based in part on underestimated cost savings from the 2012 sale of the Asia business. In 2015, the Delaware Chancery Court awarded $148 million in damages to the former shareholders, on the grounds that Murdock and David Carter had misled shareholders regarding the finances of the company. Dole, which had moved its corporate registration from Hawaii to Delaware in 2001, became an outspoken critic of Delaware corporate law as a result of this litigation. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dole Food Company」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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