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Co-founder and investment chief Garden to focus on managing personal investments as Trian promotes next generation of leaders

Feared activist investor Trian Fund Management, known for pushing for shake-ups at some of the biggest U.S. companies, is reshuffling its own top ranks and promoting the next generation of leaders.

Trian co-founder and chief investment officer Ed Garden is stepping down, according to people familiar with the matter. Garden, 62, will focus on managing his personal investments through his family office and remain a senior adviser at Trian, the people said.

His departure paves the way for Trian’s co-heads of research, Josh Frank and Matt Peltz, the son of co-founder Nelson Peltz, to be appointed co-CIOs. Brian Baldwin, a partner who has been a member of Trian’s investment team since 2007, will become head of research.

Trian’s other two founding partners, the elder Peltz and Peter May, both 80, will continue to serve in their roles as chief executive and president, respectively. The firm’s core investment committee will consist of the two Peltzes, May, Frank, Baldwin and Brian Schorr, a partner who is chief legal officer.

The move, in the works for a few months, comes as a surprise to some given Mr. Garden’s central role at the firm. The youngest of the three co-founders, firm watchers expected he would stick around and could one day lead the business.

Founded in 2005, Trian has more than $7 billion in assets under management and focuses on the consumer, industrial and financial sectors. (Historically, Trian also raises additional funds for specific investments.)

Garden, who is Nelson Peltz’s son-in-law, has served on the boards of a number of key Trian holdings over the years, including Wendy’s, Family Dollar Stores and BNY Mellon.

He landed a seat on General Electric’s board in 2017 after Trian took a $2.5 billion stake in the industrial conglomerate, an investment that soured as the stock continued a yearslong slide. In 2021, GE said it would split into three public companies.

Trian most recently launched a short-lived proxy fight for a seat on Walt Disney’s DIS 0.72%increase; green up pointing triangle board, in which Nelson Peltz took aim at Robert Iger after he took the chief executive role at the entertainment company for a second time. (Among other things, Trian was pushing for Disney to plan for Iger’s successor and to slash costs.)

The fight was called off in February after Disney unveiled a reorganization and a cost-cutting plan.

Trian ended last year with a little more than 9 million Disney shares before cutting its stake by about a third by the end of March, according to regulatory filings. Trian has since purchased roughly 500,000 more shares, giving it a total of 6.4 million, according to people familiar with the investment.

A boardroom brawl with Disney would have marked Trian’s fourth proxy fight in the firm’s history.

It has launched battles against chemical producer DuPont, ketchup maker H.J. Heinz and, most recently, in 2017 at Procter & Gamble. Nelson Peltz also recently joined the board of Unilever.

“We believe the market environment is increasingly conducive to our style of investing and continue to develop a robust pipeline of new investment opportunities,” Nelson Peltz and May said in a memo to Trian investors about the reshuffle that was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Collectively, Frank, the younger Peltz and Baldwin have more than 50 years of investment experience and have led more than 90% of Trian’s investments since the firm’s inception, the memo also said. They have served as directors at Sysco, Wendy’s and Janus Henderson, to name a few examples.