Rich Products, Buffalo, N.Y., has acquired a pair of California businesses to expand its line of pizza products and add a line of milkshakes and other frozen beverages that are sold in convenience stores.
In one deal, Rich acquired Goglanian Bakeries, a family-owned based in Santa Ana, Calif., that makes a line of pizza crusts, flatbreads and pitas that will complement the frozen pizza dough that Rich Products already makes. The pizza products are primarily sold to foodservice firms.
It also adds four manufacturing plants to Rich Products' stable, including a plant that is expected to open during the first quarter of next year in Chicago, along with sites in Rochester, N.Y., Santa Ana, Calif., and Fountain Inn, S.C. "We now have a complete pizza product offering," said company spokesman Dwight Gram. "It really gives us a national manufacturing footprint."
The other acquisition involving frozens is f'real foods, Orinda, Calif., which makes a line of milkshakes, smoothies and frozen coffee beverages that are sold in more than 9,000 convenience store and food service locations across the United States and Canada. The deal also gives Rich Products f'real's patented blending equipment, which is used to mix the beverages.
"It provides us with the opportunity to enter in a completely new product category and gives us additional in-roads into the high-growth convenience store segment," Gram said. Rich has also formed a joint venture with Stolbun Group in a dessert-making venture called Twin Star Bakery, to make fully finished cakes, along with baked and iced cookies, at a recently opened factory near Houston, Tex.
