Cavenham Foods (also known as Cavenham) was a retail and food processing conglomerate started by Sir James Goldsmith in 1964. The company started out as a group of struggling UK food brands, including Carr's and Hollands Toffee purchased and brought together by Goldsmith. By 1973, the company had grown extensively with a series of take overs, and operated grocery stores under the Home and Colonial Stores, Lipton and Maypole brands in the UK, Grand Union in the US, UK brands Bovril and Ambrosia and continental brands Melchers, Amora, Synthol and Unimel amongst others. The company would become Europe's third largest food processor after Unilever and Nestlé. From 1978 onwards, Goldsmith started to break up Cavenham and by 1986 the company was put into voluntary liquidation.

By 1964, Sir James Goldsmith had already built and sold several businesses with differing success, including Laboratories Cassene and Lewis & Burrows (which would become Mothercare). At the time he owned a French pharmaceutical business called Gustin-Milical, which produced a slimming drug called Milical, as well as self-tanning product Right Tan which were selling well across Europe. He also owned 20% of Procea Products, a British firm that made slimline bread that he purchased in 1963 from the Doughnut Corporation of America. However Goldsmith was short of funds to expand his business further, and was introduced to Great Universal Stores Sir Isaac Wolfson by Charles Clore, who loaned Goldsmith £1 million at an interest rate of 100 percent.

With this injection of cash, Goldsmith created a private company, Cavenham Foods to start making further investments. The company was named after his grandfather Adolphe's estate in Suffolk to which his father Frank would talk fondly of. Cavenham's first investment was to purchase a controlling shareholding in chocolate manufacturer Carsons. Carsons, which had started life as H J Packer in 1881, was financially not in good place having failed to pay dividends for two years and recording a loss of £50,000 in 1963. Goldsmith transferred his shares in Procea Products, which had been valued at £310,000, into Carsons which gave him a 55% shareholding. By June, Carsons had offered to not only purchase the 80% of shares they did not own in Procea Products, they had also offered to purchase a smaller confectionery business called Yeatman for a combined total of £1.5 million. It was during the Yeatman deal, that Goldsmith met Roland Franklin of merchant banking firm Keyser Ullman, who Yeatman banked with. Goldsmith liked Franklin, and with it Keyser Ullman became Cavenham Foods merchant bank. After these deals were completed, Cavenham then expanded again by purchasing controlling shares in Carr & Co, the biscuit manufacturer, after a takeover battle with J. Lyons and Co., and J A & P Holland, a confectionery group that had overstretched itself trying to become a group big enough to take on Cadburys or Rowntree's. Described by the Daily Mail in 1961 as the world's biggest toffee manufacturer, Holland's had diversified into boiled sweets, liquorice, chocolates, paper, printing, packaging and plastic manufacturing.

In January 1965, the Sunday Times first reported on Cavenham Foods (which now had shareholdings in three public listed companies: Carsons, Carr & Co and J & A.P. Holland) and Goldsmith, commenting that they believed,

the most probale solution would be to select one of the companies as a vehicle to make share exchange offers for the others. Holland would seem to be the most likely choice.

In June 1965, Goldsmith with help from Roland Franklin and Keyser Ullman, started to implement a plan by first selling the Carlisle factory of Carr & Co for £600,000 and leasing it back for £63,000 a year. The money gained by the sale was used by Carr's to purchase Cavenham's shares in Carsons, with Carr's then purchasing J. A & P. Holland from Cavenham. Carr & Co then changed their name to Cavenham Foods, and so Cavenham became listed on the London Stock Exchange. The deals were not illegal at the time, as Charles Raw of the Sunday Times stated later, but while Carr & Co paid cash for Goldsmith's shares via Cavenham, Carsons and Holland's other shareholders only received paper shares in the new company. It was largely because of deals like this that the London Stock Exchange would change its rules. Cavenham Foods at this point employed 6000 people, with a turnover of £30 million and assets of £7 million but was making no profits. However Goldsmith was bullish to Cavenham shareholders declaring that the company would make a profit of £215,000 in its first year. The new company impressed the Sunday Times,

Cavenham Foods, the new bakery and confectionery group which will result from the merger of the James Goldsmith controlled food companies, looks like becoming one of the most interesting shares on the stock exchange

Goldsmith warned shareholders after the merger that