André & Cie

"In 1976, the French magazine L’Expansion called Louis Dreyfus ‘a commercial empire of which one knows nothing’. Pierre Louis-Dreyfus, the company’s president, invited Dan Morgan to lunch in his private dining room. The fish with cream sauce was apparently superb, as was the wine, but the journalist left without learning anything of interest about the company. Georges André, president of André & Cie – and the original ‘A’ of the ABCD group of trading companies – invited Dan Morgan to ‘an excellent lunch of brook trout in a village restaurant’, but all he got out of it was historical data. Although Dan Morgan wrote little about ADM – the new ‘A’ in the ABCD group after André exited the business – the company was no more open. When Dwayne Andreas became CEO in 1974, one of the first things he did was to eliminate a 27-person public relations department. He once famously said, ‘Getting information from me is like frisking a seal’. (2)"