Juice drink maker Capri-Sun Group is reportedly eyeing a sale of a minority stake in the business.
Owned by Swiss billionaire Hans-Peter Wild, the company is in talks with financial advisers to assess interest levels from potential investors, according to Bloomberg.
The publication added that Capri-Sun is seeking to raise more than $500m, according to people familiar with the matter, who requested to not be identified as the information is “private”.
Capri-Sun is licensed to different partners globally, including Kraft Heinz in the US.
The juice pouch business will look to use any proceeds to buy back the licence for Capri-Sun North America and accompanying operations that are currently held by Kraft Heinz, the people told Bloomberg.
Bloomberg wrote that deliberations are ongoing and a deal may not necessarily occur.
Capri-Sun and Kraft Heinz could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Zug, Switzerland-based company has $1.4bn in annual external sales, 24 production sites worldwide and around 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website.
It was launched in 1969 by Wild’s father and now sells more than six billion pouches in more than 100 countries every year.
Until 2014, Wild was the majority shareholder in the company in Wild Flavors, a manufacturer of natural flavours for the food industry.
Capri-Sun last year decided to take back the sales and distribution of its pouch drinks in France, Monaco, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Spain and Portugal after ending an arrangement with Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP).
In March, it was revealed that Princes is to manufacture Capri-Sun pouched drinks in the UK from later this year, seeing production move also from CCEP.
Princes has started to take control of Capri-Sun’s warehousing and logistics duties. The company will produce the Capri-Sun 200ml pouches with paper straws and 330ml pouches with a screw cap at its site in Bradford.
The facility is Princes’ largest manufacturing site for beverages, with roughly 400 staff operating eight production lines. The group has two other facilities dedicated to beverage manufacturing: one in Glasgow, where canned CSDs are made and another in Cardiff where it produces chilled ambient juices.
