Brea-based Fresh Start Bakeries Inc. has added Santa Ana cookie maker Sweet Life Enterprises Inc. to its goody bag.
Fresh Start, which does more than $500 million a year selling buns and baked goods to McDonald’s Corp. and others, last week bought Sweet Life, another McDonald’s supplier, for an undisclosed amount.
For Fresh Start, the deal boosts its orders with McDonald’s and broadens the company’s business selling dessert items. Fresh Start also sells ice cream cones, fruit pies and cakes.
Sweet Life has estimated yearly sales of nearly $100 million.
For Fresh Start, the acquisition is its second biggest since its $240 million buy a year ago of Illinois-based Chef Solutions Inc.’s Pennant Foods division, which supplies baked goods to Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts and others.
Sweet Life “will add to us significantly,” Fresh Start Chief Executive Craig Olson said. “It has strategic and practical value for us.”
Olson is set to take over as Sweet Life chief executive and continue running Fresh Start.
For Sweet Life founder and departing president Michael Gray, the deal culminates a bid to make his mark outside the shadow of his famous family.
The son of Robert Gray, cofounder of Irvine-based women’s clothier St. John Knits International Inc., Michael Gray left the family business as president in 1990 and set out to build Sweet Life up from a small boutique bakery in Fashion Island.
“I accomplished all I wanted to with it,” Gray said of Sweet Life.
For more on this story, see the Nov. 5 issue of the Business Journal.
