2023-04-21 16:14:53
The Swiss food giant Nestlé announced Friday the creation of a joint venture with the investment fund PAI Partners in frozen pizzas in Europe, without revealing the amount of the transaction.
These activities generate an annual turnover of around 400 million Swiss francs, however, specifies Nestlé in a press release, believing that the transaction should be finalized during the second half of 2023. The transaction will be subject to prior consultation with employees and must be approved by the regulatory authorities. The company’s headquarters will be located in Germany and will operate two production sites, one in Germany in Nonnweiler, and the second in Italy in Benevento.
The pizzas, marketed under the Wagner, Buitoni and Garden Gourmet brands, are currently sold in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, details the communicated.
Read also: The Buitoni affair leaves Nestlé’s shareholders unmoved
“We carried out a strategic review of our pizza activities in Europe and concluded that a partnership with PAI would be the best platform to develop their full potential,” said Marco Settembri, who leads Nestlé’s activities in Europe, quoted in the communicated.
At 4:29 p.m., the stock rose 0.99% to 115.88 Swiss francs, exceeding the SMI, the benchmark index of the Swiss stock exchange, up 0.41%.
Minority stake
The food giant, owner of Nespresso coffee pods, Maggi broths and KitKat chocolate bars, had already created a joint venture with PAI Partners in 2016 in ice cream under the name Froneri.
Nestlé will retain a minority stake in this frozen pizza joint venture “with voting rights equivalent to those of PAI Partners,” the statement said, without giving specific figures. This decision to create a joint venture with PAI Partners comes as the French branch of the group announced Monday to have undertaken to compensate dozens of victims of the Buitoni pizza scandal contaminated by the E. coli bacterium, as part of an “amicable compensation” agreement, had indicated Nestlé France without revealing the amount.
Two children died and dozens of others fell seriously ill following the ingestion in 2022 of pizzas from Buitoni’s Fraîch’Up range.
Read also: Contaminated pizzas: a thorn in the side of Nestlé
At the end of March, the Swiss group announced the permanent closure of the Caudry factory (in the north of France), implicated in the scandal, while undertaking not to lay off its 140 employees before January 2024, this deadline to seek a buyer.
On Thursday, the Swiss shareholder organization Actares and the Ethos foundation held Nestlé executives to account at the annual general meeting held in Lausanne. The director of this Ethos foundation, which represents pension funds in Switzerland, addressed his “sympathy to the families of the victims” and criticized the “very unsatisfactory” transparency of Nestlé on this affair.
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