News Summary

  • Rich Products—one of the largest food service suppliers to convenience stores in the U.S.—announced on Monday that it is acquiring Great Kitchens Food Company, the largest private-label ready-to-bake pizza manufacturer in North America.
  • The deal brings Great Kitchens' fully topped pizzas, including deep-dish and hand-held pizzas, into Rich's pizza portfolio, which previously consisted mainly of crusts and doughs. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
  • Rich's latest acquisition could provide its convenience store partners with more opportunities to upgrade their pizza offerings, as the industry attempts to close the food service gap with QSRs.

Deep Dive

Pizza is a core category in Rich's convenience store portfolio, offering convenience retailers a variety of doughs and crusts, such as stretchable, frozen ready-to-bake, pre-baked, and flatbread types. With the addition of Great Kitchens, Rich's is elevating its pizza line—Great Kitchens also produces stromboli and calzone rolls in addition to pizzas and flatbreads, and sells deep-dish pizzas under the well-known Pizzeria Uno brand.

According to the announcement, Rich's aims to leverage Great Kitchens to "build a vertically integrated topped pizza and flatbread platform," while also expanding its crust innovation capabilities and increasing capacity.

"Combining Great Kitchens' leadership in fully topped pizzas with our strengths in crusts and doughs gives you a one-stop pizza partner with an unmatched breadth of expertise, which will allow us to accelerate growth, drive greater innovation, and deliver unique and superior value to our customers," said Kevin Spratt, president of Rich Products' U.S.-Canada region.

Great Kitchens, headquartered in Romeoville, Illinois, has production facilities in Romeoville, Chicago Heights, Illinois, and Brockton, Massachusetts. The company's 1,000 employees will join Rich's team of more than 13,000 employees across 10 countries, forming what Rich's calls an "expanded combined manufacturing network."

"Rich's is not only a recognized leader in pizza, but they have the scale and size we need to help unlock new opportunities," said Admir Basic, president and CEO of Great Kitchens.