Mondelēz: Kraft’s new name for its snack business

Kraft Foods Inc.’s global snack business will have a new name after it splits from Kraft’s grocery unit later this year: “Mondelēz,” pronounced mohn-dah-LEEZ, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Kraft’s grocery business, which will sell Maxwell House coffee and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, gets to keep the Kraft name.

The new corporate moniker, a mix of two employees’ suggestions, combines the word “monde,” which is Latin for “world,” and “delez,” slang for “delicious,” the Associated Press reported. More than 1,000 employees around the world submitted potential names for the company, which will manufacture Oreos and Cadbury chocolates.

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"For the new global snacks company, we wanted to find a new name that could serve as an umbrella for our iconic brands, reinforce the truly global nature of this business and build on our higher purpose – to 'make today delicious,' “ Kraft Chairman and Chief Executive Irene Rosenfeld said, according to the Guardian.

The name is not a hit with naming experts. “The public gets sick of compressed words if they aren’t intuitive,” Nina Beckhardt, founder and president of The Naming Group in New York, told Bloomberg Businessweek. “When the pronunciation isn’t accessible, it looks bad. It’s not intuitive.”

Another issue is that the name is spelled with a macron, a straight horizontal line above a vowel that makes it a long vowel sound, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. It’s “another way to make the name unique,” Kraft spokesman Michael Mitchell told Bloomberg Businessweek. But, with the macron not on most keyboards, it’s easy to spell the name incorrectly.

Kraft’s shareholders will vote on the name at the company's annual general meeting in May, the Guardian reported. If they find it palatable, the new company will trade under the stock symbol "MDLZ,” the AP reported.

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