The acquisition reinforces OFI’s growth strategy of being a global leader in providing sustainable, natural, value-added food and beverage ingredients and solutions, the press release states.“This transaction builds on our long 15-year partnership with Olde Thompson and is a logical move to combine our ‘back-end’ strengths in global origination and sustainable supply chains, with Olde Thompson’s ‘front-end’ capabilities in providing retail spice solutions to many major US retailers,” said OFI CEO A. Shekhar in the press release. “Growing our offerings of private label solutions is right at the heart of OFI’s strategy—and within that spices is one of the most attractive and growing categories, especially in the US. This will enable us to offer consumers a comprehensive range of bold, authentic, natural taste and flavors with end-to-end traceability.”
Olde Thompson, established in 1944, is a manufacturer of private label spices, seasonings, baking ingredients, and spice-related housewares. It has benefited, the press release explains, both from increased penetration of private label in the spices and seasonings space, as well as from the growing demand for healthy, natural, organic, clean-label spices.
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“The acquisition of Olde Thompson by OFI is a terrific outcome for all of our key stakeholders,” said Olde Thompson’s CEO David Sugarman. “For our customers, this partnership pushes Olde Thompson to the forefront of sustainable innovation as it provides access to OFI’s extraordinary international sourcing capabilities and spice expertise that will allow us to provide a new level of traceability and transparency to the marketplace. Our employees will benefit from additional resources and opportunities that will accelerate our growth and their careers even further."Greg Estep, CEO of OFI’s spice business, shared that Olde Thompson’s senior executive leadership will continue at the helm.
“Our global origination and sustainable spice supply chain along with Olde Thompson’s expertise in private label is going to be truly complementary and transformative for our spices business,” Estep added. “We can now deliver greater value to our customers by combining Olde Thompson’s reach and capabilities in blending, product formulation and packaging to our seed and field management programs, ingredient processing capabilities and the differentiated transparency and traceability that our AtSource platform delivers. I am hugely excited with the prospects of integrating the two organizations which will open many new avenues of growth for the combined business and all the employees as well.”
