Chr Hansen streamlines through paprika business sale

The business - which includes paprika and spice oleoresin, rosemary extract, paprika powder, turmeric, bixin and chlorophyll products - has been sold for an undisclosed sum. "Within the colour area, our core competence is to develop and supply technically advanced natural colour pigments and compounds for the food and beverage industry,"​ said Lars Frederiksen, chief executive officer of Chr Hansen. "Hence we have been deliberately consolidating and outsourcing a significant part of our basic extraction activities during the last two years in order to shift resources from these activities to more value adding activities for our customers, such as the establishment of state-of-the-art industry technology centres and regional blending sites,"​ he added. The company's paprika and spice oleoresin business in Akay, India has been co-owned by Chr Hansen and A&P Group for more than ten years. A&P will now run the business independently and Chr Hansen said the management team would remain unchanged. The Spanish part of the paprika business has been divested through a management buyout and will be run as a new business known as Ingredientes Naturales Seleccionados. Both the Indian and the Spanish group have appointed Chr Hansen as a distributor of selected colour pigments for a number of markets and products. This week's sale follows hot-on-the-heels of Chr Hansen's announcement that it plans to sell its coatings and excipients business in order to focus on core activities in cultures, enzymes, natural colours and flavours. "We expect this sale to be completed this year, but I would be a little bit surprised if it took that long,"​ Lars Wodschow, director of communications for Chr Hansen, told Foodnavigator.com. He added that the company would be starting to build up a more streamlined business through well targeted purchases in the near future. He said Chr Hansen had been looking at companies to buy but had not found any that were the "right shape and size". "We have not made any decisions where to buy geographically but we have looked at a couple [of firms] in the US and Europe,"​ he admitted.