Crest Foods acquired by Harwood Private Equity

Harwood Private Equity acquired Crest Foods in February 2024 from the Meiners family, which had run the business since 1950 and exited in full. Brown Gibbons Lang arranged a sale and leaseback of the Ashton plant alongside the transaction, with TPG Angelo Gordon’s net lease business acquiring the 575,000 square foot property. Founded in 1946 and based at Ashton in Illinois, Crest Foods operates three activities. It manufactures stabiliser blends for dairy producers, the ingredients that give cottage cheese, cream cheese, yoghurt and protein drinks their texture and prevent separation. It packs dry foods under contract for branded and private label customers. And it develops and manufactures products on behalf of food companies that market them under their own names. Revenue amounted to approximately $100–200M. Stabiliser formulation is the technical part of the business. Each recipe is developed for a specific product and production process, and once a dairy manufacturer has qualified a blend and built its own process around it, changing supplier requires reformulating and revalidating the finished product. That ties the customer to the formulator in a way contract packing does not. The sale and leaseback released the value of the property, which the family had held alongside the operating business, and is a common feature of transactions where an owner occupies a plant built decades earlier. Brown Gibbons Lang advised on the transaction.