Danone’s announcement on Monday that it's selling Stonyfield to family-owned French dairy Lactalis for $875 million was a bizarre twist of fate for the yogurt industry.
With the sale, Stonyfield’s one-time parent becomes its biggest competitor. “It’s a strange set of circumstances,” Stonyfield founder and chairman Gary Hirshberg told Fortune this morning.
The sale was set in motion last July when Danone announced its intention to acquire natural foods company WhiteWave for $10.4 billion. Then in March, Danone said it would sell Stonyfield to speed up the deal's closing; the Department of Justice might otherwise object to a single company owning both WhiteWave and Stonyfield. As Fortune noted when the deal was first announced, WhiteWave owns Horizon, the largest organic milk brand. Organic Valley, the second-biggest organic milk brand, is the largest supplier to Stonyfield. Stonyfield also licenses its brand name to Organic Valley for its milk.
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