Dean Foods Co., the maker of Silk brand soy milk, has agreed to buy the Alpro soy-beverage unit from Belgium’s Vandemoortele NV for about $448 million to expand into Europe.
Alpro has five manufacturing sites in Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands and employed 750 people in 2008, Dallas-based Dean Foods said in a statement.
The company expects the acquisition to be “modestly accretive” to 2009 earnings, excluding transaction costs.
Dean Foods, the biggest U.S. dairy producer, gained soy beverage and products with its 2002 buyout of WhiteWave Inc., which owns the Silk brand. WhiteWave Foods is based in Broomfield and is a $1.5 billion division of Dean Foods.
The Alpro transaction will create a soy-products business with more than $1 billion in combined annual sales, Dean chief executive Gregg Engles said in the statement.
“We have quietly pursued Alpro since we acquired Silk in 2002,” Engles said during a conference call with analysts. “Since 2000, sales have increased at a compound annual rate of 14 percent, tripling the size of the business in just the last eight years, strong growth that we think only scratches the surface of the potential opportunity here.”
Alpro will be run as a separate European business, and the transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter, Dean Foods said.
Denver Post staff writer Elizabeth Aguilera contributed to this report.
