Houlihan Lokey Advises FoodChain ID

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Paine Schwartz Partners, (Paine Schwartz), a global leader in sustainable food chain investing, announced that Paine Schwartz Food Chain Fund IV (Fund IV) has completed the sale to Berkshire Partners of FoodChain ID, a market-leading platform dedicated to providing a holistic suite of technology-enabled food safety, quality, and sustainability solutions.

Marking its flagship investment in the fast-growing, food safety space, Paine Schwartz initially invested in FoodChain ID in September 2016. Over the course of the investment, Paine Schwartz augmented FoodChain ID’s senior management team, partnered with management to reprioritize its strategic focus, facilitated six add-on acquisitions and made incremental investments to support long-term growth. FoodChain ID now boasts a proprietary database that includes more than 100,000 mapped products and ingredients across the value chain, more than 100,000 regulatory references across 218 countries and 2.5 million pages of daily global regulatory notifications, scientific opinions and product recalls across 40 languages. With enhanced technology, increased capabilities, an expanded customer base and access to new markets, FoodChain ID delivered strong financial results during Paine Schwartz’s investment—tripling in size.

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois, FoodChain ID has a global presence and provides technology-enabled food safety, quality, and sustainability solutions that address challenges and opportunities in the rapidly evolving food industry. Serving more than 30,000 customers in over 100 countries with a market-leading portfolio of testing, inspection, certification, and compliance solutions, FoodChain ID helps companies navigate the increasingly regulated global food economy with greater levels of transparency, accountability, safety and sustainability. Founded as a pioneer of the GMO food identification industry, the company’s services now include clean label, food safety, and sustainability claims; food safety certifications; regulatory compliance solutions; and testing.

A global leader in sustainable food chain investing, Paine Schwartz is a private equity firm focused exclusively on investment opportunities in the fast-growing, dynamic global food and agribusiness sectors. Its investment, operations, and finance professionals invest throughout cycles across the food and agribusiness value chain and bring a collaborative and active management approach to portfolio companies.

Berkshire Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, has made more than 130 private equity investments since its founding over 30 years ago. Berkshire Private Equity has developed sector experience in multiple areas including business services and technology, communications, consumer, healthcare, and industrials. The firm has a strong history of partnering with management teams to grow the companies in which it invests.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor and assisted in marketing, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on behalf of FoodChain ID and Paine Schwartz. This deal exemplifies the continued success of Houlihan Lokey’s dedicated coverage of the testing, inspection, certification, and compliance market, with complementary expertise in food safety.