McCormick’s Mayo Move: Spice Giant Eyes a Bigger Squeeze on the Condiment Aisle

With input from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal.

McCormick & Co. has spent decades being known as the spice king. Now it looks like it wants a much bigger pantry. The Hunt Valley, Maryland company is in talks to buy Unilever’s food business, a move that could put Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Knorr, Marmite and other household names under the same roof as McCormick’s French’s mustard, Frank’s RedHot and Cholula.

It is a smart-looking deal on paper. McCormick is strong in seasonings and sauces; Unilever’s food arm brings scale, brand recognition and a global footprint. The logic is pretty easy to see: if you already own the ketchup-adjacent and hot-sauce shelf, why not go after the mayo too? Reuters says the talks could produce an all-stock deal, while the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal both reported that the transaction could come together within weeks if the two sides can bridge the valuation gap.

That gap is the tricky part. Unilever’s food division is being valued in the tens of billions of dollars, far above McCormick’s market value, so any deal would need a structure that works for both sides. Reuters and other reporting point to a reverse Morris trust or another tax-efficient setup as one likely route, which would let Unilever separate the business without taking the full tax hit of a straight sale.

For Unilever, the logic is just as clear. The company has been moving away from slower-growing food categories and leaning harder into beauty, personal care and home products. Selling or spinning off the food unit would be the latest step in that shift, following earlier moves to streamline the portfolio. In other words, McCormick wants to be the company that owns the mayo. Unilever wants to be the company that no longer has to.

There is still a long way to go, and nobody is pretending otherwise. Both sides have said there is no guarantee a deal gets done, and the final structure could still change. But if this one closes, it would be one of the bigger reshufflings in packaged food in years — and a pretty bold attempt by McCormick to turn a spice empire into a full-on condiment powerhouse.