The Wezep, Netherlands-headquartered Plukon Food Group has acquired 100% of the shares in Madrid, Spain-based Grupo de Gestión Empresarial Avícola VMR, S.L. (Grupo VMR). The purchased company is a major marketer of value-added poultry products, as is Plukon.
While Plukon has a strong position in the retail market of its existing production countries in Europe, Grupo VMR specializes in supplying a premium assortment of poultry products to the Spanish retail, wholesale and foodservice sectors under the Gallus Gallus brand.
Fully integrated VMR has its own slaughterhouse, which is supplied exclusively from an in-house poultry chain consisting of a feed factory west of Madrid and a meat processing facility in Madrid. The company is also a joint venture partner of the Portuguese Grupo Valouro for pedigree breeding and hatching of day-old chicks.
“The acquisition of VMR fits our ambition to become a leading player in the production and marketing of poultry in Europe. With the addition of Spain as sixth home country, Plukon has created a production and sales area in Europe with over 260 million consumers, almost 60% EU residents after Brexit,” said CEO Peter Poortinga.
Ranked as one of the biggest players in the European poultry market, Plukon has five other production sites that process more than 8,000,000,000 chickens weekly in the Netherlands, three in Belgium, five in Germany, one in Poland and four in France. The Group, which employs more than 5,500 people, generated EUR 1.8 billion in turnover in 2019 and is aiming for EUR 2 billion in 2020.
Grupo VMR supplies poultry products to customers on a daily basis in central Spain through a proprietary distribution channel. Approximately 550 employees work at its production sites in Madrid and Cáceres, and turnover amounted to about EUR 100 million last year.
