Dive Brief:
- Hain Celestial has purchased Rudi's Organics in a $61.3 million deal, expanding its portfolio into baked goods.
- The purchase is the second this year for Hain, which bought basmati rice giant Tilda Ltd. in January for $357 million.
- Hain, which owns brands such as Arrowhead Mills, Terra Chips, Greek Gods yogurt, and WestSoy, paid for Rudi's in cash and stock. The price was slightly higher than Rudi's $60 million in net sales last year.
Dive Insight:
Hain Celestial is one of the better-run companies in the food business. When the company reports earnings in early May, analysts expect it to announce double-digit growth in both sales and profit. The Rudi's deal likely will, eventually, contribute to those performance levels: the purchase is expected to be accretive to earnings in 2015.
Until then, the big winner in this deal is probably the city of Boulder, Colorado. The mountain community has become a mecca of the organics and natural foods business, and Hain already has operations there, employing 270 people in the Hain Celestial and WestSoy tofu units. Rudi's is also based in Boulder, where it employs about 230 people. The company recently expanded its manufacturing facility and collected an extraordinarily modest incentive from the city of $50,000. We'd call that money well spent by Boulder.