To put it kindly, Warren Buffett isn’t sweet on this week’s mega junk food merger.

In a remarkably candid interview with Bloomberg, Buffett grumbled that Kraft Food’s $19.3 billion takeover of Cadbury is bad news for shareholders. “I think this deal was a mistake,” Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway investment group holds a 9.4 percent stake in Kraft Foods, groused to Bloomberg. “Kraft was very undervalued before. I feel it’s less undervalued after doing this deal.”

But let’s for a moment consider what Kraft gains from this. If Kraft CEO Irene Rosenfeld is to be believed, the merger will create a global powerhouse with an impressive portfolio of brands ranging from Oreo cookies to Trident gum to Halls cough drops to Cadbury Creme Eggs. She figures the merger will add to earnings as soon as next year, as long as she can cut $675 million in fat off the operations of the combined entity.

Still, Buffett is not convinced. He told CNBC, “I feel poorer.”

Are you a fan?

Maybe this will cheer up the 79-year-old ‘Oracle of Omaha’: by paying billions for Cadbury, Kraft is gaining more than chewing gum and chocolate bars; it is gaining one of the most cherished consumer brands with a vast and loyal following. Consider these numbers:

• roughly 3 million Facebook users have signed up to Cadbury groups and fan pages to show their devotion (including a recent groundswell of supporters who joined merely to lend their name to opposing the merger) making it one of the most beloved consumer brands on Facebook;
• Cadbury videos, including the classic dancing eyebrows ad, posted to YouTube have been viewed well over 20 million times
• and messages of “We love Cadbury” have been a trending conversation on Twitter all week.

And, Kraft? Sorry to break this to all you Kraft Mac & Cheese fans, you’re not a very impressive group by any measure of brand loyalty as expressed in social media metrics, whether it be Facebook fans, YouTube video addicts, Twitter followers and the like. Using the same metrics as above, Kraft’s brands, including Oreo’s, Philadelphia Cream Cheese or Maxwell House Coffee number, cumulatively, in the hundreds of thousands. The Facebook generation is just not drinking the Kool-Aid (another Kraft brand).

It’s doubtful M&A specialists ran these numbers when devising the clinching offer of 840-pence-per-share. That figure was mainly based on a multiple of expected earnings. How quaint. That’s a handy measure if you want to look out a year or two, but what about the potential of this merger over an expanded period, like, say, the next generation? You’d need a reasonable measure of loyalty for that, and one of the only meaningful yardstick available at the moment is to look at a brand’s fan base on social networks. It’s certainly the kind of number-crunching investment bankers should be doing when eye-balling the acquisition of chewing gum, chocolate bars and cough drop brands.

Buffett ought to cheer up. He may not be pleased with a prospective dilution of today’s share value, but Kraft is potentially gaining something it dearly needs: a quantifiably substantial following. In this way, Rosenfeld is right; adding Cadbury makes Kraft a global powerhouse, one with admirers in Brazil, Birmingham and Boston telling the world each day how they feel about these brands.

Now, there is catch here. There is a lot of opposition to this deal, and not just from Buffett. Politicians and union bosses in the UK fear the loss of jobs. And, a lot of Cadbury fans are expressing their fear that Kraft, in some kind of unexplained cheesy synergistic move, will somehow tamper with the formula for Creme Eggs. As one fan from London Tweeted earlier this week: “If Krafts meddle with our Cadburys and make it taste of cheese like US crap choc I am going to be mightily vexed.” Should enough opposition mount it could still sink the merger. It’s a long shot, no doubt, but it’s something directors will also need to consider when plotting the next blockbuster M&A’s in the Facebook Era.