Cranswick secures £40m acquisition

Cranswick has acquired the whole of the issued share capital of CCL Holdings Limited and its 100 per cent owned subsidiary Crown Chicken from the Thacker family and management.

The cash consideration was £40m, funded from existing bank facilities.

Crown is a poultry producer based in East Anglia. It breeds, rears and processes fresh chicken for supply into a customer base across the grocery retail, food service, wholesale and manufacturing channels.

In a statement, Cranswick said: “Crown also has a well invested and efficient milling operation which satisfies all of the business’ own feed requirements as well as supplying feed to other pig and poultry producers in East Anglia.

“For the year ended December 31 2015, revenue for Crown was £83.8m and adjusted EBITDA was £6.6m. Adjusted gross assets of Crown at December 31 2015 were £28.4m.”

Crown employs a total workforce of around 400 people. The transaction is expected to be modestly earnings enhancing in the current financial year.

The Cranswick statement added: “Nigel Armes (mill director) and Matthew Ward (agricultural director) will remain with the business and we welcome Nigel, Matthew and their team to Cranswick and look forward to working with them to develop the business further David Thacker, the current chairman of Crown, retires from the business and we offer David and his family our very best wishes for the future.”

Adam Couch, the chief executive of Cranswick commented: “Crown is a well-respected operator in the UK poultry sector and represents an excellent opportunity for Cranswick to continue the development of its UK poultry business, building on the highly successful acquisition of Benson Park, the market leading producer of premium cooked poultry, in October 2014. This acquisition represents important progress in our long term growth strategy of developing new product channels in both pork and other proteins.”