Dive Brief:
- Amplify Snack Brands Inc. has filed paperwork with federal regulators for an IPO, valued at about up to $276 million, and requested to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BETR. Amplify Snack Brands is an Austin-based company focused on better-for-you snacks like tortilla chips and its flagship brand SkinnyPop.
- "The company is looking to sell a minimum of 15 million shares at an initial public offering price at between $14 and $16 per share. Underwriters have an option of selling as many as 2.25 million additional shares to cover over-allotments," Austin Business Journal reported.
- According to Amplify Snack Brands' regulatory filing, the company delivered more than twice the sales in 2014, up to $132.4 million from $55.7 million in 2013. At the same time, net income fell from $24.3 million in 2013 to $13.6 million in 2014.
Dive Insight:
In April, Amplify Snack Brands acquired Paqui, a better-for-you (BFY) tortilla chips brand also based in Austin. Along with SkinnyPop, which the company launched in 2010, Amplify Snack Brands is positioning itself in both the snack foods and BFY foods segments.
"Paqui allows the company to leverage its infrastructure to help it grow into an adjacent snacking sub-segment with a second innovative BFY brand. Amplify believes that its focus on building a portfolio of exclusively BFY snack brands differentiates it and will allow it to leverage its platform to realize material synergies across its family of BFY brands, as well as allow our retail customers to consolidate their vendor relationships in this large and growing category," 24/7 Wall St. reported.
Better for you brands appear to not only be better for consumers' health but for the company's health as well. According to 2011 findings from the Hudson Institute and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, "Companies with a higher percentage of sales from the BFY products had a 50% growth in operating profit (compared to 20% at companies with a below-average percentage of sales of those items), outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 60 points (vs. 40 points) and generated higher shareholder returns than the other companies."