Bova Fresh, of Boca Raton, Fla., recently sold to CREO Capital Partners, a Miami-based private equity firm that focuses on food, logistics and consumer investments.
Bob Wilhelm and Steve San Filippo founded Bova Fresh, which serves more than 250 retail and foodservice customers nationwide. Both Wilhelm and San Filippo will retain a stake in the business and lead daily operations.
“We just want to let the retailers know that we’ll continue to work hard and grow and procure the freshest fruit and vegetables for the best price possible with timely deliveries,” San Filippo told The Packer. “Really, nothing’s changed there. We’re going to continue to work hard and continue to grow and offer more items to the retailers as well.”
San Filippo says Bova Fresh will continue to focus on its core items, including strawberries, avocados, raspberries, blackberries, mangoes, pineapples and tropicals to both chain stores and foodservice. He says this deal helps the company with capital needed to grow and expand.
“It allows companies like us to raise capital for capital expenditures and to increase our acreage our strawberry farms in Florida,” he says. “We went from like 200 acres to over 350 acres now in Florida for the strawberry season this year coming up.”
He also says there’s some synergies with Bova Fresh’s Peruvian avocado pulp, that’s sold into Europe and CREO’s Insignia International, which sells Yucatan Guacamole into Mexico. San Filippo says he sees an opportunity to work together and to have some of the products available in the U.S.
San Filippo says that being a part of a vertically integrated platform such as CREO Capital Partners helps ensure food safety, transparency and efficiency as well as mitigating risks.
Robert Reavis, director at ButcherJoseph, which advised Bova Fresh in the deal, says Bova Fresh’s unique offering is the ability to connect with a significant number of growers in multiple countries to help fulfill large orders. Reavis also says that CREO’s portfolio contains a large number of end users of produce, so this deal will hopefully create some synergies in both production, customer base and sourcing of inputs.
“What Bova adds to that equation is that with the supply chain logistics disruption we’ve seen over the last year or so, or the last nine months or so, having a broad and diversified group of producers that you can go to in order to fulfill demand on the part of grocery store chains or restaurants is extremely valuable, especially when they’re diversified across different countries,” Reavis says. “What Steve and Bob and Bova Fresh were able to deliver to CREO’s platform was an extremely diversified supply base to go along with their very high-quality customer base. And that’s the sort of flexibility that private equity I think is looking for as they respond to the ongoing trends within the industry.”
