MILAN – Três Corações Alimentos SA, Brazil’s leading coffee roaster, is eying expansion in less consolidated South American markets. The company, a joint venture of Brazilian group São Miguel and Israel’s largest publicly traded food maker Strauss Group Ltd., is looking to buy coffee-roasting companies in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, its president, Pedro Lima, said in an interview with Bloomberg in Sao Paulo.
In Brazil, Três Corações is the main competitor with a 27 percent share of the roasted-coffee market, followed by Dutch giant Jacob Douwe Egbert and Germany’s Melitta.
Tres Coracoes has plans to eventually increase its share in Brazil to 40 percent of the market.
But elevated asset values are an impediment for the moment. “Sellers have increased their price expectation a lot in recent years,” according to Lima.
Argentina is high on the list of priorities, despite the country’s economic issues making acquisitions more difficult to accomplish.
Tres Coracoes recently suspended early talks with a mid-sized roaster in Argentina after a plunge in the local currency. “But it’s definitely a target market for us,” Lima said.
