Dive Summary:
- Pinnacle Foods is paying $580 million to acquire the Wish-Bone and Western salad dressing brands from Unilever PLC. Pinnacle plans to make the purchase with cash-on-hand.
- Unilever will temporarily continue to manufacture the dressing under a third-party agreement.
- Pinnacle, which already oversees such brands as Birds Eye and Duncan Hines, will treat the acquisition as an asset purchase and expects to see a $125 million tax benefit as a result.
Dive Insight:
This isn't Unilever's first sale of the year. It also parted ways with Skippy peanut butter, which went to Hormel Foods for $700 million. And it isn't the only company looking to do something about its salad dressing business, as you may have noticed in Kraft's recent earnings report.