Weetabix sold to US cereals company Post for $1.8bn

Weetabix is being sold in a $1.8bn (£1.4bn) deal with US company Post Holdings, it has been confirmed.

Owners Bright Food put the brand, which has been produced in Burton Latimer, near Kettering, since 1932, up for sale in January.

However, this is not a case of a British company being taken over by foreign investors: that already happened to Weetabix in 2004, when it was sold to a US private equity firm, and again in 2012, Chinese firm Bright Foods bought it.

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"Bright's acquisition was the largest by a Chinese firm at the time, but it is believed to have struggled to build significant market share in China," says the BBC.

"Chinese consumers prefer a hot, rice-based breakfast to cold cereal."

Weetabix was family-owned until 2004, when it was bought by the first of two successive private equity owners before it was eventually sold to Bright, says The Guardian.

Its stable of products includes "Alpen, the No1 muesli brand in the UK, Ready Brek, Barbara's and Weetos".St Louis-based Post already owns the likes of Shredded Wheat and Bran Flakes, as well as Grape-Nuts, Raisin Bran, Honey Bunches of Oats and protein brands such as PowerBar.With Weetabix, it is buying a firm with £400m in annual sales and which yielded adjusted pre-tax profit of £120m, says the Financial Times.

Post said it intends to make £20m of cost savings "from procurement synergies, rather than redundancies".