Bodega Latina Corp., a subsidiary of Mexican retailer Grupo Comercial Chedraui, is buying 250-store Smart & Final, a California-based warehouse grocery store chain from private equity firm Apollo Global Management.
The sale’s price was not publicized.
Chedraui already owns the California-based El Super chain and the string of 60 Fiesta Mart stores in Texas.
The Mexican firm’s purchase comes after U.S. grocery sales climbed 11 percent in 2020, more than tripling the previous two years’ expansion, according to U.S. census data reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Apollo bought Smart & Final in 2019 for more than $1 billion; last year, Apollo sold the company’s warehouse division to distributor U.S. Food Holdings for $970 million.
Chedraui’s acquisition is the latest in a series of U.S. grocery retail chains purchased by foreign investors.
Japan’s Pan Pacific International Holdings has agreed to buy Gelson’s Markets in California; E-Mart Inc. in Korea bought Good Food Holdings, parent of Bristol Farms and New Seasons Market.
TREND FORECAST: Again, we continue to note how the Bigs keep getting bigger while the middle class keeps shrinking.
As we have noted, in 2020, as much of the world was locked down and hundreds of millions of lives and livelihoods were destroyed, the world’s billionaires got $8 trillion richer.
Indeed, as we report in this Trends Journal, the COVID War cost $10 trillion in economic damages, and more than 100 million people were forced into poverty. (See our new article, “WHO ‘EXPERTS’: THE WORSE IS YET TO COME.”)
As conglomerates gobble up more and more, and more people are pushed into low living standards, new political movements, with radical communist/socialist leanings that demand government support for the working class, will accelerate… as will “Off With Their Heads 2.0” movements.
