Mountain Valley Spring Water of Hot Springs.
Mountain Valley Spring Water, which has bottled Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountain spring water for more than a century and marketed it around the world, has been sold for a second time in five years, this time for $78.5 million.
Cott Corp., a Canadian corporation that’s been on a buying binge, paid cash for the venerable Hot Springs company through its DS Services subsidiary, announcing the acquisition on Monday afternoon. The seller was Great Range Capital of Mission Woods, Kansas, near Kansas City.
Great Range had bought Mountain Valley, which was formed in 1871 and billed itself as the country’s oldest continuously operated bottled water company, in March 2014. The sale price in that deal was undisclosed.
Mountain Valley primarily sells spring water in glass bottles ranging from individual servings to 5-gallon water-cooler sizes, as well as sparkling and flavored varieties in plastic. It has been bottling in glass continuously since 1871, with one production facility in Hot Springs and “four protected and owned springs in the Ouachita Mountains with excess capacity to supply long-term demand,” Cott said in a corporate news release. Cott’s 2017 revenue, up 40 percent from the year before, was $2.27 billion; the company put Mountain Valley’s revenue, which was $39 million in 2015, at $50 million in as projection for this year, with “high single-digit growth” expected in 2019.
“We are very excited about strengthening our business and adding a fast-growing premium spring, sparkling and flavored water American brand to our portfolio,” DS Services President Dave Muscato said in a statement. “We have added not only a high growth premium water product but also an American brand that we can offer to consumers in iconic glass bottled packages.”
Cott’s is a water, coffee, tea, extracts and filtration company based in Toronto. Mountain Valley is only the most recent in a string of acquisitions, including deals that brought in water companies Eden Springs, Aquaterra and Crystal Rock, not to mention S&D Coffee.
Tom Harrington, the incoming CEO at Cott, said in a statement that the Mountain Valley acquisition “is another positive step in building out our water solutions portfolio and meeting our stated desire to continue to pursue acquisitions in the growing water and coffee segments, where we believe our platform, operating strength and synergies can be leveraged.”
The purchase price represents about eight times Mountain Valley’s “Year 2 post-synergy adjusted” earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to Cott, which financed the deal with cash on hand and by drawing on its asset-based lending facility.
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