George Weston Foods bolts on dips and snacks business Yumi's

Sarah Thompson & Anthony Macdonald
September 18, 2018
AFR
Consumer goods giant George Weston Foods has snapped up private equity-backed chilled dips and snacks maker Yumi’s Quality Foods.
Street Talk can reveal George Weston Foods has agreed terms to acquire 100 per cent of Yumi’s share capital, including the majority stake owned by Sydney-based private equity firm Anacacia Capital.
Yumi’s was founded by two brothers in the 1990s and makes non-dairy and gluten free dips, snacks, bites and smoked fish.
Anacacia Capital invested in Yumi’s in 2014 and worked with its founders and management to quadruple the size of the business and make it big enough to attract a heavyweight trade owner like George Weston Foods.
“I first met the founders back in 2013 and after several months of exclusive due diligence, we acquired a majority of the business alongside the founders with management investing alongside us,” Anacacia Capital managing director Jeremy Samuel told Street Talk.
“Our investment thesis centred around the importance of brand and innovation for entertaining products like dips.
“We subsequently helped the Friedman family to build out the management team, increase the factory capacity (now 100 tonnes of hummus each week), deal with retailers, materially grow and improve the quality of the earnings including by product innovation, channel diversification, growing food service and exports.
“This all helped Yumi’s grow to be a leading brand in chilled foods, available now in all retailers nationally and a growing presence in Asia.”
Yumi’s is expected to be run as a standalone business in George Weston Foods, which is one of the country’s biggest consumer goods companies with about 6000 staff across more than 50 sites.
It is best known as the maker of Tip Top bread and smallgoods sold under the Don and KR Castlemaine brands, and is owned by London-listed Associated British Foods, which has an £18 billion ($32.9 billion) market value.