09/12/2026
J. Bruce Llewellyn’s story sounds almost unbelievable. In 1969, he mortgaged his home, sold or borrowed against nearly everything he owned, and raised $3 million to buy Fedco Foods—10 supermarkets in the South Bronx. The deal became an early example of the leveraged buyout, years before the strategy became synonymous with Wall Street. Fedco eventually grew to 29 stores, 900 employees and roughly $100 million in annual sales.
But groceries were only part of his story. Jackie Robinson recruited Llewellyn to the board of Harlem’s Freedom National Bank, where he later became chairman and helped stabilize the struggling Black-owned institution. Then in 1985, Llewellyn joined investors including Julius “Dr. J” Erving to acquire majority ownership of Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling. Under his leadership, it became the sixth-largest Coca-Cola bottler in America.
His business lesson still holds: you don’t always have to invent a company—you can acquire an overlooked business, improve it, scale it and create enormous value. Llewellyn understood financing, partnerships and turnaround strategy long before those ideas became business-school buzzwords.
Had you ever heard his name before?
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