If you haven’t heard of Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC, you’re not alone.
Orange County’s largest privately held company has operated below the radar as a marketer of potato chips and other grocery items. The Irvine-based company handles products from Tropicana Products Inc., Unilever NV and Mars Inc.
Advantage is one of four national food brokers, including Crossmark Inc. of Plano, Texas, Marketing Specialists Corp. of Dallas and Acosta Sales Co. of Jacksonville, Fla. The companies act as hired guns, battling on behalf of manufacturers for shelf space in supermarkets, convenience, drug and club stores.
Advantage, which serves as a third-party sales and marketing arm for more than 1,200 consumer product companies, targets major retailers such as Kroger Co., Safeway Inc., Albertson’s Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
McLean, Va.-based Mars, which makes candy bars, pet food and instant rice is among Advantage’s largest customers. So is Unilever, the European consumer products behemoth that owns Lipton, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Bestfoods.
Chief Executive Sonny King, who declined to comment for this story, founded Advantage in 1987. Since then, the company has grown to $25 billion in annual sales and 10,000 employees in all. Like other middlemen, Advantage’s big revenue figure comes from passing along other people’s products, presumably at high volumes and low profits.
Just four years ago, Advantage’s sales were $2 billion and its single office counted just 225 employees.
The company has expanded through acquisitions and by partnering with other regional food brokerages. In the past four years, Advantage has grabbed a 4.5% stake of the $515.1 billion annual U.S. grocery industry, according to data from the Department of Commerce and industry estimates.
One of Advantage’s biggest moves took place a year ago. Advantage became the largest food broker in Canada when it acquired four leading Canadian sales agencies,Cyba Stevens Management Group, William M. Dunne & Associates, Clark Drouin LeFebvre Inc. and AMCA Sales Ltd.
Advantage also has expanded in the U.S. through acquisitions. Last year, the company acquired natural foods brokerage Midwest Marketing Inc. of Plymouth, Minn. And in 1999, Advantage bought Eastern Sales and Marketing and Pezrow Cos. in a move that expanded operations to New England, New York and the Mid-Atlantic markets. n
