CVC & Patria Investments take majority stake in Delly's

CVC Capital Partners agreed on 21 June 2023 to acquire Delly’s alongside Patria’s seventh private equity fund, the two holding the business jointly, while Patria’s fifth fund exited in full. Chief executive Alessandro Chiaramitara continued to lead the company with his management team. Delly’s supplies restaurants, canteens, hotels and other catering operators in Brazil with the food and consumables they use daily: meat, dairy, frozen goods, groceries, packaging and cleaning products. It holds stock in its own warehouses, assembles each customer’s order from several hundred lines and delivers it on its own vehicles, often several times a week. Frequency is what the customer buys. A kitchen holds little inventory and orders against immediate need, so a supplier who delivers reliably and completely is retained while one who omits lines is replaced, and the cost of each delivery falls as the density of customers along a route rises, which rewards whoever serves the most of them in a given area. Brazilian food service distribution remained divided among more than four hundred operators, most of them regional and family-owned, and Delly’s raised its share from 1% at the time of Patria’s first investment in 2015 to 11% in 2022 by acquiring them. Revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 67% over that period and EBITDA at 60%. The new shareholders intended to continue that consolidation, with the stated aim of assembling the largest food service distributor in South America.