Calabro Cheese bought by Italian company
EAST HAVEN — One of Connecticut’s best known food brands is saying arrivederci to local family ownership.
Calabro Cheese is being sold to an Italian company, Granarolo S.p.A., for $25 million, officials with both companies announced Tuesday in a news release. Granarolo, which is based in the Italian city of Bologna, is acquiring full control of Calabro, which is headquartered on Coe Avenue in East Haven and also has a production facility in town.
The company employs about 75 people, and according to Frank Angeloni, Calabro’s chairman and CEO, the business will remain in East Haven. Angeloni said there will be no layoffs as a result of the deal and his family will remain involved in the business even though they no longer will own it.
“It was the right partner at the right time,” he said in an email to Hearst Connecticut Media when asked why he and his family decided to sell the company.
Gianpiero Calzolari, chairman of Granarolo, said foreign sales of the company’s dairy products account for about one-third of its overall business. Calzolari said his company’s goal “is to replicate the positive performance achieved in other markets, such as the French market, where we have grown significantly.”
“The United States will be the target country of 2022,” he said of his company’s strategic plans of growing foreign market share. “We have found a fantastic company, with operations focused on quality, high-standard levels and excellent management skills. We will aim to strengthen our productions, by adding the hard cheeses to a well-established distribution platform and to boost the knowledge of our superior products on the U.S. market.”
None of Granarolo’s dairy production facilities is in the United States, so acquiring Calabro will provide the Italian company with a beachhead for possible future acquisitions in this part of the world. Calabro has a production facility of more than 50,000 square feet, according to Granarolo.
Calabro’s cheeses are distributed in New York, New England and New Jersey, as well as the southern and western parts of the U.S. The company was started in 1953 by Joseph Calabro and his father, Salvatore.
Angeloni, who is Joseph Calabro’s nephew, runs the business as its chairman and chief executive officer. Angeloni said in a statement that Granarolo is “a great and well reputed Italian company with long tradition on dairy, with a well-established international presence both in and outside Europe.”
“We are convinced that working together we can increase the business in the United States by counting on wide portfolio of high quality ... products produced in Italy that could be added to the successful fresh dairy products produced in the U.S.”
Granarolo describes itself as one of the leading exporters of Italian dairy products worldwide. It is part of a larger business called the Granarolo Group.
The Granarolo Group is comprised of two business units: An agricultural consortium of milk producers, Granlatte, which collects the milk, and Granarolo S.p.A. — which processes and sells the finished product and has 11 production facilities across Italy, two in France, three in Brazil, one in New Zealand, one in the United Kingdom and one in Germany.
The Granarolo Group employed 2,454 workers at the end of last year. More than 600 milk producers in Italy are part of the consortium. The Granlatte Consortium is the majority shareholder in the Granarolo Group, with a 77.48 ownership stake in the company.
Holly Raider, dean of the School of Business and professor of management at Quinnipiac University, said for any familyowned company, having a suc
cession plan is critical to keep a business going into the next generation.
“For the first generation of a family business, there is what we call the ‘founder’s mentality,’” Raider said. “As a founder, you know what sweat equity was involved in building the business. The second generation doesn’t always have the same mentality.”
When a family-owned business reaches the third generation, she said “that generation is experiencing the wealth of the business, the disposable income and ability that comes with it to take different kinds of pathways.”