Utz Quality Foods, a manufacturer of salty snacks, plans to buy Inventure Foods, a specialty food marketer and manufacturer.
The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of both Inventure Foods and Utz and is expected to close by the end of the fourth quarter of 2017.
“We are tremendously excited about the opportunity to acquire Inventure Foods,” said Dylan Lissette, CEO of Utz. “The company’s specialty snack food products and brands, as well as its geographic footprint, customer relationships and distribution strengths, are highly complementary to our business, and we look forward to continuing Inventure’s strong heritage of innovation in both healthy and indulgent snacking. We have also been extremely impressed with the team at Inventure and look forward to working together going forward.”
With manufacturing facilities in Arizona and Indiana, Inventure Foods is a marketer and manufacturer of specialty food brands in better-for-you and indulgent categories under a variety of company-owned and -licensed brand names, including Boulder Canyon Foods, TGI Fridays, Nathan’s Famous, Vidalia Brands, Poore Brothers, Tato Skins and Bob’s Texas Style.
Founded in 1921, Utz produces a full line of products, including potato chips, pretzels, cheese snacks, corn chips, tortillas, veggie stix/straws, popcorn, onion rings, pork skins and more. Its brands, which include Utz, Golden Flake, Zapp’s, “Dirty” Potato Chips, Good Health, Bachman, Bachman Jax, Wachusett and Snikiddy, are distributed nationally and internationally through grocery, mass-merchant, club stores, convenience stores, drug stores and other channels. Based in Hanover, Pennsylvania, Utz operates 10 facilities located in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Alabama.
