Hull’s Cranswick plc acquires poultry business in £40m deal

Cranswick, the Hull-headquartered food producer, has acquired CCL Holdings Limited and its 100% owned subsidiary Crown Chicken Limited from the Thacker family and management for £40m.

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

Crown also has an 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 ending 31 December 2015, revenue for Crown was £83.8m and adjusted EBITDA was £6.6m. Adjusted gross assets of Crown at 31 December 2015 were £28.4m.

Crown employs a total work force of approximately 400 across its operations.

Nigel Armes (mill director) and Matthew Ward (agricultural director) will remain with the business, whereas David Thacker, the current chairman of Crown, has retired.

Adam Couch, Chief Executive Officer 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.”

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