Savencia Buys Hope Foods in U.S. Push

Savencia Fromage & Dairy’s U.S. expansion plans have begun to take shape with yesterday’s announcement that the French dairy provider has acquired dip producer Hope Foods.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed and Savencia declined to discuss the deal at this time.

Founded in 2010, the Colorado-based Hope Foods currently makes guacamole, nut-based dips and hummus. In 2019, co-founder and former CEO Robbie Rech told NOSH the brands’ line of hummus was sold in 6,200 stores nationwide. The company works with a co-packer yet owns some of its own equipment.

According to SEC filings and prior interviews, the company has raised roughly $13 million in funding, most recently closing a $4 million round in September 2019. Hope’s lead investor throughout the last half decade has been BIGR Ventures; the firm’s co-founder and managing partner, Duane Primozich, has also served as Hope’s CEO since January 2020. Following the transaction, Rech is expected to be involved with Hope’s mission, branding and innovation pipelines.

Whipstitch Capital served as the financial advisor to Hope Foods. The deal should, Whipstitch co-founder and managing director Nick McCoy said, bring more attention to the power of the U.S. natural foods consumer.

“It’s not every day that you see an international buyer making a bet on a new category,” he said. “It’s great to see.”

Founded in 1956, Savencia is the second largest cheese manufacturer in France and the fifth largest worldwide. The company said in a press release that it has 21,000 employees with subsidiaries in 31 countries accounting for net sales of roughly $6 billion. In the U.S., it markets domestic cheese brands, including Rogue Creamery, Alouette and Dorthy’s, as well as imports such as Epoisses Berthaut and Roquefort Papillon. Savencia, previously known as Bongrain until 2015, also owns chocolate maker Valrhona. Hope represents Savencia’s first push into dips category in the U.S. and is the start of its effort to cater to shoppers looking for more better-for-you options.

“Our core business remains cheese and dairy products, but we want to develop new offers in the plant-based category with taste differentiation and premium brands. Hope is a strategic fit for us to drive growth in premium natural food products,” Jean-Paul Torris, CEO of Savencia Fromage & Dairy, said in a statement. “Hope enlarges our brand’s portfolio in the USA into fast-growing, ‘better-for-you’ products and provides an excellent opportunity to expand consumer options for great-tasting, plant-based products.”

The transaction follow’s Canadian company Fontaine Santé 2019 acquisitions of hummus producer Lantana Foods and Garden Fresh Gourmet, which were previously both owned by investment firm VMG and The Campbell Soup Company, respectively. The hummus category is relatively small, with SPINS data reporting sales of $905 million across natural, conventional and MULO outlets over the last year, and features several large players (such as Sabra and Cedars) alongside many more regional players.

In its early days, Hope used its freshness (as one of the first in the category to embrace HPP pasteurization) and unique flavors, Coconut Curry, Kale Pesto and Buffalo Bleu, to build a consumer audience. However over time, more and more hummus brands began to also use HPP, diminishing it as a point of differentiation. Meanwhile, Hope’s adventurous approach to flavors left it lacking some of the core SKUs (such as black olive or roasted garlic) that other hummus brands have embraced as entry points into the category, and other bigger hummus players began experimenting with their own creative flavors.

Over the last several years Hope has focused on diversifying beyond hummus, launching several new flavors of guacamole (which it later scaled back to a single SKU) as well as cashew and almond based dips that could cater to a carb conscious consumer. In some ways the latter may have also created some consumer confusion: while the company claims it is the number one selling organic hummus brand, its nut-based dips are not certified organic.

“We’ve been around for about seven years and for most of that, we’ve been focused on expanding our flagship line of hummus,” Rech told NOSH in 2019. “[But we] have seen as the possibility to go into a broader portfolio of plant-based dips and spreads to bring forward awesome tasting products and a broader set of healthy products that are for consumers looking for healthy choices in their lives.”