Crediton Dairy purchase approved by European Commission

Following the obtaining of European Commission approval, the management buy-out team led by former Milk Link executives Neil Kennedy and Tim Smiddy has completed its acquisition of Crediton Dairy, the leading British milk drinks business, from Arla Foods. The new business, called Crediton Dairy Ltd, is a supplier of high quality British long life milk, long life cream, functional and flavoured dairy drinks and fresh bulk cream.

The dairy has a current production capacity of c.200 million litres and supplies all of the UK’s major retailers and many of its leading food service businesses with both customer label and branded products. The latter includes: Moo, the UK’s leading brand of long life milk; functional branded milks such as Flora pro activ; flavoured milk brands such as Mars Family Refuel chocolate milk made under a licence from Mars; and the Dairy Pride long life milk and cream foodservice brand.

Commenting on the completion, Tim Smiddy, managing director of Crediton Dairy says, “Having obtained European Commission approval and completed the acquisition we can now progress our plans for the development of the business. We believe that Crediton has strong growth potential based upon its self-contained, well invested manufacturing facility; growing customer base; established range of products and brands; and skilled and committed workforce.

“Moving forward we will continue to focus on making great tasting, high quality products with demonstrable British provenance and traceability and complement this with customer service excellence, category insight and targeted new product development.”