Posh crisp maker Kettle could be sold after its US food giant owner Campbell hired advisers to assess the future of the snack brand.

Nestle plans to switch in or out of businesses with combined sales of almost 10bn Swiss francs (€8.7bn) as chief executive Mark Schneider focuses on coffee, bottled water, and pet care to prioritise profitability over scale.

Shares in beauty group L’Oreal surged the most in seven years on speculation that the death of the founding family’s matriarch, Liliane Bettencourt, could clear up the cosmetics maker’s ownership through a takeover or a buyback.

Corvex Management, the activist fund run by Keith Meister, has built a stake in French yogurt maker Danone because it views the company as significantly undervalued, according to sources.

Nestlé warned sales growth this year will be the weakest in at least two decades, giving activist investor Dan Loeb ammunition for his campaign to overhaul the world’s largest food firm, while Danone kept its 2017 goals despite a sales slowdown in the second quarter.

Hertz Global Holdings rose to a record high after the largest publicly-traded US rental-car company said it adopted a so-called poison pill upon seeing “unusual and substantial activity” in its stock.

Yahoo has swept out embattled chief executive Scott Thompson to try to clean up a mess created by an exaggeration about his education that destroyed his credibility as he set out to turn the long-troubled internet company around.