Hershey’s is getting healthier.
The Pennsylvania-based chocolate manufacturing giant Hershey Co. announced on Monday that it will acquire SkinnyPop‘s parent company Amplify Snack Brands for $1.6 billion.
“Hershey’s snack mix and meat snacks products, combined with Amplify’s SkinnyPop, Tyrrells, Oatmega, Paqui, and other international brands, will allow us to capture more consumer snacking occasions by creating a broader portfolio of brands,” Hershey’s CEO Michele Buck said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time Hershey announced it will be diversifying its portfolio to sell products outside the confectionary world. In 2015, Hershey acquired jerky maker Krave for reportedly $200 million.
“The acquisition of Amplify and its product portfolio is an important step in our journey to becoming an innovative snacking powerhouse as together it will enable us to bring scale and category management capabilities to a key sub-segment of the warehouse snack aisle,” Buck said in a statement.
The deal comes amid recent acquisitions from large food companies staking their claim in snack products. Cereal giant Kellogg’s announced in October that it will acquire RXBar for $600 million. In November, Mars, a global manufacturer of pet care, confectionery, and food products, announced that it will partner with KIND, the world’s third largest snack bar makers by marketshare, to bring healthy snacks to people worldwide.
Hershey’s said the deal, which equals $12 per share for Amplify’s stock, is slated to close in the first quarter of 2018.
