From Mars to Intersnack: Are family dynasties becoming food’s new dealmakers?

Family-owned M&A wave: summary

• Public markets have de-rated food stocks over volume softness, private label gains and GLP-1-related demand concerns – yet strategic buyers have kept paying premiums of 40–91% for the same companies
• Family-controlled acquirers such as Mars, Ferrero and Intersnack can deploy patient, low-cost internal capital and price deals on a combined rather than standalone basis, letting them justify premiums public investors won’t match
• Both advisers see the wave as more structural than cyclical, pointing to rising megadeal concentration and a pipeline of further targets whose valuations look out of step with underlying brand strength

Intersnack’s agreement to take Utz Brands private – a $2.9bn deal, struck at a 91% premium, that will leave the Rice and Lissette founding family holding half the business alongside Intersnack – is the latest entry in a growing ledger of deals that all tell a version of the same story: a family-controlled or privately-held buyer paying a hefty premium for a listed food company the stock market had, by most measures, stopped loving.

Mars paid $35.9bn for Kellanova, completing the deal in December 2025. Ferrero handed over $3.1bn, or $23 a share, a 40% premium, for WK Kellogg in September 2025, picking up manufacturing and distribution across the US, Canada and the Caribbean in the process.

Campbell paid $2.7bn for Sovos Brands, home to Rao’s, back in March 2024. Investindustrial completed its $2.9bn purchase of TreeHouse Foods in February 2026, and JM Smucker closed its $5.6bn acquisition of Hostess Brands in 2023.

The names change but the pattern doesn’t.

And increasingly, the buyers at the top of that list aren’t generic private equity vehicles chasing a multiple. They’re family dynasties with century-long time horizons, patient capital and a taste for scale.

So is the market simply getting food wrong or are these dynasties seeing something public investors can’t – or won’t – price in?

Why public markets undervalue food

“The (perhaps unhelpful) answer is that it is both,” says James Watson, partner at Argon&Co, who advises global consumer products companies on growth, value creation and M&A. He points out that consumer staples stocks, which historically traded at a premium to the wider market, have shifted to trading at a discount, punished for volume softness, private label share gains and GLP-1-related demand concerns.

At the same time, he argues, strategic buyers are simply seeing value that a diversified institutional shareholder never could.

Take Utz: Intersnack gets immediate scale entry into the US snacking market, a century-old family brand with established retail relationships, a domestic manufacturing footprint and a founding family that retains a large shareholding and stays motivated.

“Those elements together are worth more to Intersnack specifically than they are to a diversified institutional shareholder,” Watson says. “The premium they paid (c. 91%) reflects what Utz is worth inside Intersnack’s platform, not what Utz is worth as a standalone public company.”

Andrew Searle, who leads AlixPartners’ Consumer Products team in EMEA, traces the undervaluation further back, to a decades-long decline in food’s share of household spending.

“The amount people are buying or paying for food as a share of wallet has decreased over the last, say, 30, 40 years,” he explains, as consumers direct more of their income towards travel, technology and entertainment.

Food companies used to compensate for that by acting as a defensive hedge in public portfolios – people need to eat, after all, even in a downturn. That perception, Searle says, has largely evaporated.

The inflation cycle that followed the pandemic saw branded manufacturers push prices up, in some cases ahead of inflation, which delivered value growth but not volume growth, and in many cases outright volume decline. “Everybody liked the cash that came in and the extra margin, repricing for inflation, but didn’t like the fact that they’re in decline in a number of areas,” he says.

Shoppers traded down to discounters and private label, squeezing the mid-tier brands hardest, and the market’s old assumption that branded food was a safe harbour “kind of evaporated”.

Layer on today’s alternative investment landscape – a booming tech sector and higher bond yields – and, as Searle puts it, “if you’re an investor with cash to deploy in the public markets, you might as well put it into some bonds and potentially get a less risky, higher yield than a public food company.”

How family dynasties value food differently

Where dynasties diverge from the market is in what they’re prepared to underwrite and for how long.

Watson identifies a genuine gap in discount rates: family-controlled acquirers such as Mars, Ferrero and Intersnack aren’t accountable to quarterly earnings calls or activist shareholders, and they can finance deals with patient, low-cost internal capital.

Public investors price a company on a standalone basis; a strategic buyer prices it on a combined one, folding in synergies across procurement, logistics, manufacturing and marketing that a public shareholder never sees reflected in the share price.

Watson notes that strategic buyers typically pay 15% to 30% more than financial buyers when those synergies are real and quantifiable – exactly the calculation behind Campbell’s pursuit of Sovos Brands, where the real prize was extending Rao’s into soups and frozen meals through Campbell’s existing distribution network.

Searle sees a similar dynamic from the buy side, having spent time inside Mars earlier in his career. What stood out to him, from that vantage point, was how much longer family owners can afford to think.

Family owners, he says, “have the option about looking much longer term” and “actually not having to report to shareholders”, which lets them place bigger, longer-dated bets, first with Wrigley, now with Kellanova.

Family ownership changes the sell-side calculus, too.

Legacies matter as much as economics, Searle argues; sellers often negotiate to keep the family name on the brand, retain board seats and preserve some element of control.

But the more common trigger for a sale is generational: a pioneering founder builds the business, but by the third or fourth generation the shareholder base has diluted and splintered across family branches, and no single line wants – or is able – to keep running and growing it. “It’s that generational succession that precipitates a family business looking to exit.”

What makes food companies takeover targets

Both advisers agree that food’s attraction as an acquisition target rests on characteristics the public market undervalues almost by design: category stability, brand equity that survives even when volumes wobble, and distribution that’s genuinely hard to replicate.

Watson points to Ferrero’s acquisition of WK Kellogg, which handed it a manufacturing, marketing and distribution platform spanning the US, Canada and the Caribbean virtually overnight – the kind of infrastructure that would take years, and considerably more capital, to build organically.

Searle points to much the same list: belief in the category, a brand consumers actively want, and distribution to get product onto shelves, alongside the operational upside of procurement and manufacturing synergies.

He also flags a newer motive – buying smaller, often DTC-native players not just for their products but for capabilities in e-commerce that larger, slower-moving incumbents struggle to build inhouse. “It doesn’t always work,” he cautions, “but that’s one of the rationales for some of the value there.”

Cyclical turn or lasting shift?

Is this simply the M&A market turning or something more structural?

Watson leans towards structural. The repeated re-privatisation of listed food names, he argues, “suggests a structural view that public markets are not the optimal home for mature, brand-led food manufacturers”, reinforced by megadeal concentration.

Such deals now account for 45% of consumer M&A value, up from 23% in 2024, as a small number of dominant strategic buyers use public market weakness to acquire the assets that matter most.

Searle is more circumspect about the broader market, noting that overall deal volumes remain below their post-pandemic peak and that the buyer universe has genuinely shrunk, with several private equity houses scaling back or exiting their consumer teams altogether.

What’s changed, in his view, is the type of process: rather than broad auctions, today’s big transactions – such as McCormick’s pursuit of Unilever’s food business, which has since progressed to a definitive merger agreement and expected to close by mid-2027 – tend to be bilateral, arranged between two parties who’ve been watching each other for a while.

Still, he expects the current wave to keep building, as big food companies reset bloated portfolios, discounters keep gaining ground and GLP-1 adoption reshapes demand for calorie-dense categories over the long term.

Both advisers see a pipeline of further deals ahead, with General Mills, Mondelēz and Kraft Heinz all cited by Watson as trading at valuations that look disconnected from underlying asset quality.

Kraft Heinz’s own attempt to simplify itself is a case in point: it announced plans in September 2025 to split into two separately listed companies, only to pause that process in February 2026 under a new chief executive who argued the underlying business could be fixed without a break-up.

Whether that pause holds may say as much about the appetite for structural change in Big Food as any completed deal.

He warns that further consolidation would hand the largest food companies – and the family dynasties behind many of them – greater leverage over grocery retailers, while reducing the transparency that comes from public reporting and inviting closer regulatory scrutiny of category concentration.

Searle is more sanguine about competitive intensity surviving the wave.

Barriers to entry, he notes, are lower than ever, thanks to contract manufacturers and social media-driven brand launches – “would I see like Kylie Jenner becoming a billionaire on the back of a cosmetics brand? Probably not” – even if scaling those new entrants remains genuinely hard.

He expects continued consolidation in processed foods specifically, as companies build out ambient, chilled and frozen portfolios, and margin pressure from value-hungry retailers forces further tie-ups. But full monopoly, he insists, isn’t on the cards. “Retailers are still going to be the main gateway to customers, and they’re going to want to deliver what customers want but also deliver range in that as well.”

What’s clear from both conversations is that the gap between what public markets will pay for food and what family dynasties are willing to pay hasn’t looked this wide in years.

Whether it closes through re-rating or simply through more companies disappearing from the public markets altogether may be the defining food story of the next decade.