Captain Fresh closes deal for EU salmon processor Koral

India’s Captain Fresh has closed the buyout of European salmon processor Koral from Abris Capital Partners

India’s Captain Fresh has closed the buyout of European salmon processor Koral from private equity (PE) Abris Capital Partners, the latter confirmed.

Captain Fresh’s deal for Koral, based in Poland, closed on Dec. 23, after an agreement was inked on July 26, subject to competition authority approval. In December 2023, Undercurrent News revealed Captain Fresh was working on buying Koral, a smoked salmon specialist with turn over of around $130 million, from Abris.

The PE firm will take a stake in Captain Fresh as part of the deal, it announced on LinkedIn.

Koral was formerly part of the Polish seafood group Graal, which Abris divested to German dairy giant Unternehmensgruppe Theo Muller in November. The deal was first announced in February 2023, with the competition authority reviewing taking so long due to the crossover with Muller’s Lisner canned seafood business.

Antarctica Advisors and Rothschild & Co acted as co-advisors to Abris and Graal founder Boguslaw Kowalski.

“The transaction sees Abris partner with Captain Fresh, India’s leading tech-led seafood supply chain company backed by major global venture capital investors. Koral will become a key platform for the international market development of salmon products within the Captain Fresh group, in which Abris will take a stake,” said Abris.

The transaction with Captain Fresh follows a seven-year investment period, during which Koral has grown revenues and earnings despite challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical challenges, said the PE firm.

Captain Fresh is in the process of raising another $100m in growth capital, on a path to an initial public offering in 2025.

In February, the company acquired US-based shrimp and frozen seafood importer Central Seaway Company. Back in 2023, Captain Fresh acquired the French shrimp cooker Senecrus.

Utham Gowda, CEO and founder of Captain Fresh, told Undercurrent more about the rationale for the Koral deal back in August.

“The plan is to have multi-species and multi-origin exposure. This is our entry into the Atlantic Ocean side of the business,” said Gowda, a former investment banker who founded Captain Fresh in 2020.

“Of course, we start with salmon. But our excitement goes beyond salmon as far as Atlantic species are concerned,” he told Undercurrent earlier in the year.

The next step is to move more into salmon, “then also whitefish and several other categories along the way,” said Gowda.

Koral will also give Captain Fresh a foothold in salmon to cross-sell into CenSea’s US network. However, the next step is to buy a US processor doing salmon and other seafood focused more on value added products than smoked.

“That’s [cross-selling salmon] the immediate opportunity we are evaluating. We are also looking at adding one such [secondary processing] facility on the US side as well because that gives us a complete package from a delivery standpoint in terms of products, said Gowda.

 

SOURCE: Undercurrent News