Just over one year ago, Canada-based Cooke Inc. reached an agreement to purchase Australia-based aquaculture firm Tassal.
On 21 November, 2022, Cooke officially acquired the company, paying cash by way of a scheme with a total enterprise value of AUD 1.7 billion (USD 1.08 billion, EUR 1.03 billion). The purchase was the largest in Cooke's history and heralded the company’s entrance into the Australian market. It also took Tassal from a publicly-listed business in Australia to a privately-owned subsidiary.
At Seafood Expo Asia, which ran from 11 to 13 September in Singapore, the two companies showed off some of the fruits of the new relationship. Tassal Head of Sales and Marketing Matt Vince told SeafoodSource during the expo the purchase almost immediately had benefits for both companies.
“We had similar values and similar cultures, and all employees at Tassal remained, so it has been really really smooth sailing from the perspective of integration,” Vince said.
Before the acquisition, Tassal was already one of the most recognizable seafood brands in Australia, and being able to take advantage of the wider Cooke portfolio has allowed it to add new products to its lineup, Vince said.
“Now being part of the global seafood business, it gives us that access to bring in new products and new trends to consumers,” Vince said.
The benefits work both ways, as Tassal is helping Cooke gain access to the Australian market, he said.
“We’re actually going to be the first consumer-facing market in the world to launch a Cooke seafood brand,” Vince said. “Come October or November, there will be a Cooke seafood brand in Australia – that’s within 12 months of being part of the Cooke family.”
That brand will include products that Tassal didn’t have access before the acquisition like U.S. sea scallops, Canadian smoked salmon, and sockeye salmon.
“Introducing the Australian consumer to a different type of product, it’s pretty rewarding,” Cooke Director of Global Supply Brett Cooke told SeafoodSource.
In the time since the acquisition, Tassal has also debuted its own new products. Its Tassal Tassie Smoked Salmon Twin Pack 2 x 50g won Best New Product at the first-ever Seafood Excellence Asia Awards.
Cooke has also gained access to some of Tassal’s production of fishmeal and fish oil.
“We’ve got our own rendering facility in Tasmania, so we were always selling meal and oil, but we’re now selling meal and oil to a Cooke-owned subsidiary,” Vince said. “We’re taking our meal from Australia all the way to Europe, which wouldn’t have been able to happen if we weren’t part of the business.”
In addition to Tassal’s production abilities, Cooke has also won access to Tassal’s branding and market presence in Australia – and its proximity to Southeast Asia.
“Our focus in Australia has always been our domestic market, but also Asia, China specifically,” Vince said. “But also places like Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan as well.”
Part of the advantage each company has gained in those and other markets is sharing the knowledge base each has developed independently. Tassal, he said, can set up calls with Cooke employees to educate them and help sell Tassal’s products in their markets, and vice-versa.
Brett Cooke told SeafoodSource his company’s past experience with acquisitions has helped the transition go smoothly.
“A lot of what we’ve come to learn and understand is, when you do acquire a new company, there’s a lot that can be learned from their side. There’s a lot of things that they’re doing that may be better than [how] you [things],” Cooke said.
The Tassal team is “high functioning” and can move quickly on the retail side of products – part of why the company is already launching products into the Australian market despite never having access to it before, Brett Cooke said.
Vince said Cooke's status as a privately owned company with seafood in its DNA, with the ability to communicate across divisions and deep knowledge of global seafood markets, has helped Tassal accelerate its product development.
“Tassal has benefitted, and it’s progressed forward from being part of a business that gets seafood [as] opposed to being publicly listed, where you’ve got great corporate people, but they don’t know seafood,” Vince said. “At Cooke, you can pick up the phone and talk to people who go, ‘Oh you’ve got that problem with your machinery, we do too,’ or ‘We’re servicing the same customer, how do we have a joint meeting together?’”
Looking forward, Brett Cooke said that the two companies will continue to leverage the advantages each offers the other. Cooke Inc. will also continue to make inroads into the Australian market with its existing portfolio of seafood products.
“We’ve been able to leverage all of Cooke’s different entities and locations and partnerships, all of these things, and pack it up and give this Cooke-facing product in the Australian market,” Cooke said.
Photo by Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
