Canadian group Forbes Medi-Tech, a producer of cholesterol-lowering food ingredients, has been approached by Novartis Consumer Health to help it find a buyer for the Take Heart line of food products enriched with Forbes' Reducol.
The approach from Novartis followed the announcement that the Swiss group is to end its Altus functional food venture with Quaker Oats (now owned by PepsiCo).
The two joint venture partners are looking into the best way to ensure the continued sale of the Take Heart brand, despite the ending of the Altus agreement. Take Heart was successfully test marketed in upstate New York in the latter half of 2001, and is seen by both companies as having significant marketing potential.
"The decision to dissolve the Altus Food Company had more to do with the acquisition of Quaker by PepsiCo and Novartis refocusing its businesses than it had with the Take Heart line of products themselves," said Charles Butt, president of Forbes.
"In fact, sales of Take Heart products during the test launch in upstate New York were reported to be extremely positive and the products were well received by consumers. This decision obviously ties in with Novartis' recent announcement to divest its health and functional food business in order to focus exclusively on the more familiar core pharmaceutical and healthcare business."
Forbes is currently in active discussions with several other major food and dietary supplement manufacturers interested in launching their own line of cholesterol-lowering products using Forbes' proprietary ingredients. Forbes has offered to introduce the possibility of a Take Heart acquisition into these discussions where appropriate.
"As we were not clear about the direction PepsiCo and Quaker were going to take regarding the expansion of the functional food area, sales of Reducol to Altus represented only a small percentage of our 2002 budgeted tonnage. We anticipate that the finalisation of new food contracts, which are presently under negotiation, will make up for any shortfall," stated Butt.
Reducol is one of Forbes' proprietary cholesterol-lowering compositions of non-genetically modified plant sterols/stanols derived from coniferous trees. Forbes licensed the composition to Novartis in 1999 and recently announced its intention to repurchase the worldwide rights to Reducol for consumer products. Novartis Nutrition AG, an affiliate of Novartis, has an exclusive option for the worldwide royalty-bearing licence to use Reducol in medical foods.
Meanwhile, Mac Zondervan, chairman of Dutch natural specialty foods group Koninklijke Wessanen has confirmed that the company is looking for possible takeover candidates, including the possibility of acquiring some of the brands put up for sale by Novartis.
Speaking at a news conference last week, Zondervan said Wessanen was looking at buying brands mainly in the UK and Germany, although companies in Italy, Spain and Scandinavia might also be of interest. He stressed that while it would be logical for Wessanen to be interested in acquiring certain Novartis brands, any purchase would depend on the price.