Tupperware has been sold off to a group of debtor hedge funds.

As part of the deal, Alden Global Capital, Stonehill Institutional Partners and a trading desk of Bank of America will provide Tupperware cash to “pay other debts”.

The hedge funds themselves will use “debt cancellation for part of the purchase price”. As reported by Reuters on October 23rd, this allows the hedge funds to purchase Tupperware’s debt “at a steep discount”.

Tupperware filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September, citing “more than $700 million in debt”.

The company had proposed an auction to sell off its assets to the highest bidder. The purchasing hedge funds opposed this plan, arguing it

would unfairly prevent them from using a debt exchange as part of their bid for Tupperware’s assets.

This prompted negotiations, resulting in the struck deal for $23.5 million in cash and “over $63 million in debt relief”.

Without harboring any specific prejudice to Tupperware’s buyers, typically when hedge funds buy companies things go downhill.

In recent times this has manifested itself as “enshittification”, i.e. something, typically a product or service,  you previously liked turning to crap.

The current streaming landscape is a commonly cited example. The gig economy is another.

Specific to Tupperware’s buyers we have:

Alden Global Capital, the “second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States”.

Alden has a reputation for sharply cutting costs by reducing the number of journalists working on its newspapers.

In March 2018, Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post, called Alden “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism” and Vanity Fair dubbed Alden the “grim reaper of American newspapers.”

Stonehill Institutional Partners, a private hedge fund reported to be managing $2.04 billion in assets for 171 investors (Oct 2024).

I couldn’t find any specific information on what Stonehill Institutional Partners gets up to. And “a trading desk of Bank of America” is even more opaque.

Beyond having its corpse reaped for short-term financial benefit, Tupperware’s future as a company is unclear.

I suspect however that even attempting to restore Tupperware to its MLM glory days probably isn’t in the cards.