Glanbia has acquired weight management brand SlimFast from Kainos Capital for $350 million as it expands its performance nutrition portfolio. The deal also includes SlimFast’s sister company HNS.
Headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, SlimFast offers products such as sweet and savoury snacks, iced coffee, and meal replacement shakes and smoothies. In 2017, the brand delivered $212 million of net sales.
Glanbia plans to operate SlimFast within its performance nutrition segment, which consists of brands such as Optimum Nutrition, BSN and Isopure.
Siobhán Talbot, group managing director of Glanbia, said: “I am pleased to announce that we have agreed to acquire SlimFast, a leading consumer brand in the $8 billion weight management nutrition market, an adjacency to the Glanbia performance nutrition brand portfolio.
“SlimFast is an established and enduring brand and, along with nutritional supplements brands Healthy Delights and Nu-Therapy, complements our existing portfolio targeting lifestyle consumers. It plays to global consumer trends focused on convenient formats and snacking.
The announcement comes just four years after Kainos bought SlimFast from Unilever.
Kainos managing partner Andrew Rosen said: “Our acquisition of SlimFast came with no employees or systems. Behind the leadership of CEO Chris Tisi, who we partnered with when we invested in his company HNS in 2014, we quickly built a 60-plus person team in the US and the UK.
“This team, combined with our own internal resources, did a great job revitalising what was an orphan brand within a large multinational company. SlimFast is positioned to continue its great success as a part of Glanbia.”
SlimFast CEO Chris Tisi added: “It was very important for us to work with our retail partners to reclaim the SlimFast heritage, which is providing effective solutions for real people who desire to lose weight or live a healthy lifestyle.
“By partnering with Kainos, my team and I had the resources and support to dramatically increase our consumer base and offer a variety of innovative, great-tasting and effective products, including high-protein SlimFast Advanced, SlimFast Advanced Energy with caffeine, and our most recent Keto product offering.”
It is anticipated that the transaction will close before the end of 2018.
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