PepsiCo to buy veggie snack maker
Continuing to bet that consumers want to crunch on healthier snack items, the food and beverage giant PepsiCo announced Friday that it was acquiring Bare Foods, a maker of baked fruit and vegetable snacks.
For PepsiCo, which did not make public the financial terms of the deal, the purchase of a company that makes products such as salt-and-vinegar beet chips and Granny Smith apple chips is its latest effort to diversify its food and beverage portfolio and move toward the more natural, less-processed foods that are now in favor by an increasingly healthconscious public.
“We have been on a journey of broadening the snack portfolio for many years now,” said Vivek Sankaran, president and chief operating officer for PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay North America unit, noting the brand’s earlier development of Simply Tostitos organic tortilla chips, Simply Organic Doritos and Off the Eaten Path, which makes crispy snacks using vegetables such as black beans and green peas. Since 2006, the percentage of revenues coming from healthier food and beverages at PepsiCo has climbed to 50 percent from 38 percent.
The acquisition was one in a string of purchases of healthy snack-food companies by large conglomerates.
Earlier this year, Campbell Soup, which had already acquired the organic products maker Pacific Foods, closed on its $4.9 billion acquisition of Synder’sLance, the maker of Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels and Cape Cod potato chips. Late last year, Hershey announced plans to buy Amplify Snack Brands, the maker of SkinnyPop Popcorn and Paqui tortilla chips, for $1.6 billion, while ConAgra picked up Angie’s Boomchickapop for $250 million and Kellogg’s bought Chicago Bar Co., maker of the RXBAR protein bar, for $600 million.
In the past four years, U.S. snack sales have jumped more than 12 percent to $145 billion, according to Nielsen Retail Measurement Services. But millennials and other consumers aren’t looking to munch on just any snacks. Consumers are increasingly seeking out healthy snacks or those that are organic or have so-called clean labels — no artificial flavors, colors, preservatives or sweeteners. U.S. sales of nuts, trail mix, and organic savory snacks jumped to nearly $9 billion last year from $7.8 billion in 2012, according to Euromonitor International.