Olde Thompson buy grows Olam Food Ingredients’ portfolio

Olam Food Ingredients is growing its foothold in the United States with an acquisition. The Singapore-based company is purchasing private label spices and seasonings manufacturer Olde Thompson for roughly $950 million through its Olam Holdings subsidiary. 

Olde Thompson was established in 1944 and currently is a leader in the private label spices, seasings, baking ingredients and spice related housewares segments in the United States. With private label currently accounting for roughly 26% of the U.S. spices and seasonings industry, per IRI, Olde Thompson has seen increased private label penetration recently, alongside growing demand for health, natural, organic and clean-label spices. 

“The acquisition of Olde Thompson by OFI is a terrific outcome for all of our key stakeholders,” said Olde Thompson CEO David Sugarman. “For our customers, this partnership pushes Olde Thompson to the forefront of sustainable innovation as it provides access to OFI’s extraordinary international sourcing capabilities and spice expertise that will allow us to provide a new level of traceability and transparency to the marketplace. Our employees will benefit from additional resources and opportunities that will accelerate our growth and their careers even further.”

The acquisition brings Olde Thompson’s facilities in Bayonne, N.J., and Oxnard, Calif. to OFI, as well as its partnerships with leading retailers in the club, mass, grocery, discount and dollar store channels. OFI said the acquisition would have a transformative effect on its spices business, offering a growth platform to provide similar sustainable and innovative retail solutions across its other products. 

“Growing our offerings of private label solutions is right at the heart of OFI’s strategy – and within that spices is one of the most attractive and growing categories, especially in the U.S.,” said OFI CEO A. Shekhar. “This will enable us to offer consumers a comprehensive range of bold, authentic, natural taste and flavors with end-to-end traceability.”

Shekhar said the acquisition builds on OFI’s 15-year partnership with Olde Thompson and would combine OFI’s global origination and sustainable supply chain capabilities with Olde Thompson’s abilities to provide spices to many major U.S. retailers. 

“Our global origination and sustainable spice supply chain along with Olde Thompson’s expertise in private label is going to be truly complementary and transformative for our spices business,” said Greg Estep, CEO of OFI’s spices business. “We can now deliver greater value to our customers by combining Olde Thompson’s reach and capabilities in blending, product formulation and packaging to our seed and field management programs, ingredient processing capabilities and the differentiated transparency and traceability that our AtSource platform delivers.”

With the acquisition, Olde Thompson’s senior executive leadership will continue to helm the company. “I am hugely excited with the prospects of integrating the two organizations which will open many new avenues of growth for the combined business and all the employees as well,” Estep said. 

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.