Birds Eye, the British frozen food firm famous for its seafood products, manufactured 2.2bn fish fingers in 2011. Photograph: Foodcollection/Getty ImagesCP Foods tables £2.5m bid for British frozen food firm – just one week after Chinese food giant swallows Weetabix
First they came for Weetabix. Now a second giant Asian corporation is eyeing our fish fingers.
A Thai food manufacturer has tabled a £2.5bn bid for Birds Eye, the British frozen food firm whose avuncular captain has overseen the seafood initiation of millions of tiny mouths. The firm, part of the Iglo group, has its home under the Heathrow flight path in Feltham and employs 2,500 people.
The proposed fish-finger grab has come barely a week after a Chinese firm, the state-owned Bright Foods, bought a controlling stake in the breakfast cereal maker Weetabix.
The potential buyer of Birds Eye, CP Foods, is part of Charoen Pokphand, a Bangkok-listed group with global businesses employing 280,000 staff worldwide. It claims to be the world's largest producer of animal feed and shrimp, and its Thai food sales dwarf even Birds Eye's. CP Foods also has operations in Britain producing Thai food for supermarkets.
Permira, the private-equity firm, put the Birds Eye Iglo group up for sale in March, five years after buying it from Unilever for £1.4bn. It recently reported a 7% cent rise in annual profits to £267m on the back of rising sales of frozen fish, poultry and vegetables.
At least two other private-equity investors, Blackstone and BC partners, are reported to be making rival offers for Birds Eye.
In 2011 Birds Eye Iglo manufactured 2.2bn fish fingers – enough to put a 58% cod or haddock fillet, breadcrumbed girdle round the earth five times. (guardian)
