PILLSBURY ACQUIRES RUDI FOODS, PLANS TO ADD IT TO BAKERIES UNIT

ROSEANNE HARPER

MINNEAPOLIS -- Pillsbury Co. has purchased Boston-based Rudi Foods, a leading manufacturer of parbaked frozen breads. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Rudi's operations will be integrated into Pillsbury Bakeries & Foodservice, a unit of Pillsbury that has annual sales of $500 million, Pillsbury officials said. "Rudi's leading position in parbaked frozen breads builds on our strengths in baking mixes and frozen sweet goods," S. Paul Oliver, president of the Pillsbury unit, told SN last week.

"This gives us both a new product line and a new product technology," he said, noting that this is the unit's first parbaked line.

The products are suited to a large variety of points of use, including bakeries with slow turns and those with little space, Oliver added. "Parbaked products create less waste because you can bake off closer to the point of sale. If it's nine o'clock at night and you need five more onion rolls, you can bake them off in nine minutes," Oliver said.

And bakeries that otherwise couldn't afford to can add niche products to fill out their lines, he said.

Pillsbury Bakeries & Foodservice does "a substantial portion of its business with supermarket in-store bakeries."

Oliver said sales are balanced pretty evenly among the channels it serves -- retail (including in-store) bakeries, wholesale bakeries and food service.

The unit's name was changed earlier this year from Grand Metropolitan Foodservice to Pillsbury Bakeries & Foodservice "to more accurately reflect the rapid evolution of our business."

After a reorganization in 1990, the unit which had handled frozen and canned vegetables as well as baked goods, took a decided bakery direction. Most of its products now are bakery items, Oliver said.

It is a leading U.S. producer of bakery mixes, flour and frozen prebaked and unbaked Pillsbury branded dough products. Pillsbury, its parent company, is a subsidiary of Grand Metropolitan, London.

Rudi was part of the Neuhauser Group, a France-based bakery consortium. Rudi has four manufacturing facilities. Two are in Boston; the others are in Miami and San Francisco.