UNFI Acquiring Haddon House Food Products

United Natural Foods (UNFI) has entered an agreement to acquire Haddon House Food Products, a distributor and merchandiser of natural and organic and gourmet ethnic products, for $217.5 million.

Founded in 1960 by the Anderson family, Medford, N.J.-based Haddon has a diverse multichannel customer base encompassing conventional supermarkets, gourmet food stores and independently owned product retailers.

"Haddon House has a unique product and service offering that we expect to play an important role in our ongoing strategy to build out UNFI’s gourmet and ethnic product categories across the country,” said Steven Spinner, president/CEO of Providence-based UNFI. “The Haddon House team has demonstrated exemplary customer service and growth over the last decade while also building a distinctive private label brands business." David Anderson, Sr. and David Anderson, Jr. will remain at the company in leadership roles, the company said. 

“This transaction will provide us with greater operating scale and resources to further develop our product and service offering as we work with the UNFI team to broaden our geographic reach and route to market across complementary and new customer bases,” noted Haddon President David Anderson Sr., adding that the acquisition would create “opportunities … for consumers, employees, suppliers and our stockholders.”

Upon the close of the deal, Haddon, which was advised by Wells Fargo Securities LLC, will be operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of UNFI. The transaction is expected to be accretive to its earnings in fiscal 2017.

UNFI carries and distributes more than 85,000 products to 40,000-plus customer locations throughout the United States and Canada, serving a wide variety of retail formats, among them conventional supermarket chains, natural product superstores, independent retail operators and the foodservice channel.