![]() ![]() “People want products that are interesting,” says Lissette, who was attracted to the “gourmet deli image and Cajun crawdaddy voodoo” heritage of the products. In 2011, Utz purchased the Dirty and Zapp’s brands of potato chips because the same “craft” trend that altered the beer market has hit the snack market. “We’ll probably lose money in the market for five years. “We don’t have to go through lengthy approval processes.”įor instance, two years ago, Utz spent aggressively to expand across the south, where Lissette believes future Utz customers are migrating. “We have a very small number of shareholders, and that makes us very agile and much more competitive,” says Lissette. Lissette, 43, and his wife, Stacie, own a minority piece of the business, while Mike and Jane Rice own the majority. “We’ve grown because we have the ability to reinvest,” says Lissette. But Utz, which employs 2,500 people, earns healthy profits that it constantly puts back into the business, without fear of reprisal by activist shareholders. That makes the company a peewee compared to the snack market leader, PepsiCo’s (PEP) Frito-Lay North America (2014 revenue: $14.5 billion). Last year, Utz produced 150 million pounds of snacks in its 11 manufacturing plants and brought in $561 million in revenue. It’s not about short-term results.”įounded in 1921 in William and Salie Utz’s tiny kitchen, Utz started as a simple potato-chip company and is now a producer of a broad range of snack foods: pretzels, popcorn, cheese balls and, yes, chips in 395 different flavors and iterations including Crab and new Yuengling BBQ. First and foremost, by staying private, he says, “You actually get to invest the way you’re supposed to invest. But with Buffett going public about his affection for Utz, Lissette is game to let a few secrets of the snack maker’s success out of the bag. “Believe me, we’re not for sale,” insists Utz CEO Dylan Lissette, who is generally so media-shy that he doesn’t even issue press releases for major news about the company. ![]() The Berkshire Hathaway CEO told Fortune this last week, and when I wrote about it last week in a story about Buffett eating “like a six-year-old,” little-known Utz Quality Foods of Hanover, Pennsylvania, got besieged by acquisition rumors. So it’s hardly surprising that Buffett, who eats Utz Potato Stix as if a famine could imminently wipe out the world’s potato supply, has considered buying the company that sells them. ![]()
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