Kettle Cuisine, an artisan producer of refrigerated and frozen all-natural soups, announced that it has acquired Harry's Fresh Foods, a privately held custom food manufacturing company based in Portland, Ore. The transaction strengthens Kettle Cuisine's leadership in the fresh soup category as the only coast-to-coast fresh soup producer.
"Harry's is a great business and a welcome addition to Kettle Cuisine," says Liam McClennon, CEO of Kettle Cuisine. "Its strong reputation in the marketplace reflects its high caliber team members, customer relationships, and premium product portfolio, all of which fit seamlessly into Kettle's growth strategy. Kettle remains committed to its culinary roots of artisan, clean label food while providing our customers and consumers with the highest levels of food safety, customer service and the efficiencies of scale production. Acquiring Harry's will bring an expanded manufacturing footprint to Kettle Cuisine and further enhance our ability to deliver on that promise."
Kettle Cuisine is a portfolio company of Kainos Capital, a private equity firm with extensive experience in the food and consumer products space. Since Kainos acquired Kettle Cuisine in 2015, more than $300 million has been invested to acquire and integrate complementary businesses, expand cooking capacity, add high-speed filling and packaging equipment, and expand its "from-scratch" bone broth capabilities, a hallmark of the Kettle Cuisine brand in the marketplace.
Dan Hopkin, Partner at Kainos Capital, added, "When Kainos acquired Kettle, we embarked on a strategy to expand Kettle from a regional fresh soup provider to a category leader capable of serving an increasingly national customer base. The addition of Harry's – together with prior acquisitions and investments in the areas of production capacity, product extensions, and automation – are all in line with this strategy. Kainos will continue to support additional opportunities to invest behind Kettle Cuisine's growth strategy going forward."
