Maljers led the Unilever food group from 1984 to 1994 and also held various supervisory directorships in the business community, such as KLM, Philips and V&D parent company Vendex. He was born in Middelburg in 1933 into a grocer’s family. After studying economics, he ended up as an intern at a subsidiary of Unilever, where he quickly made his career. Via a Colombian fat factory, a Turkish jasmine plantation and a margarine factory in Rotterdam, he ended up in the highest position at Unilever in 1984.
Although Unilever was already a company with hundreds of thousands of employees in dozens of countries, the group and its CEO remained unknown to the general public. Consumers knew Calvé, Zeeland Girl, Dubro, Vaseline and Lipton, not the grizzled parent company on Weena in Rotterdam with the unknown logo and even less the untalkative CEO.
Maljers was described in the press as an “80 billion grocer”, “cool, matter-of-fact, mildly cynical, with the attitude and appearance of the head of the primary school in ‘s-Heer Arendskerke”. Under his leadership, the “boring but successful” Unilever empire was reduced to core businesses such as nutrition and personal care. He also took the first steps towards the Asian market.
After leaving Unilever, with a British honorary title from Queen Elizabeth in his pocket, he was succeeded at the company by Morris Tabaksblat. Because he remained active in business posts, he was therefore the ideal person to give Prince Willem-Alexander some practical experience in business life.
One of the lessons Maljers taught the prince was that he sometimes had to keep his mouth shut when he asked too critical questions about, for example, a company’s weak liquidity position. “I’ve had him ask questions and you saw the company think: good heavens, that’s a good question, but we don’t need a king at all to put the finger on this sore spot,” said Maljers in a retrospective of the period of time.
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