Flowers Foods Buys Closed Regional Bakery

Flowers Foods has acquired the assets of a closed regional bakery in New England – to the surprise of a Canadian baking company that thought it was going to be the buyer.

Flowers is buying Koffee Kup Bakery, a producer of bread, donuts and other baked goods based in Burlington, Vt. The deal includes three manufacturing facilities, which Flowers has no immediate plans to reopen.

Koffee Kup had closed its doors April 26, shutting down its three plants and throwing some 500 employees out of work. The closing generated a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the laid-off employees, alleging that Koffee Kup had failed to give advance notice of the layoffs as required by law.

Several baking companies emerged as bidders for Koffee Kup’s assets, with the leading one being a Canadian baking company based in New Brunswick. A representative of the company said it was planning to keep the two Koffee Kup plants in Vermont open, selling off the one in Connecticut.

But the court-appointed receiver of Koffee Kup’s assets abruptly approved Flowers Foods as the purchaser in a deal announced June 8.

Flowers CEO Ryals McMullian said in a statement that his company welcomes the “strong consumer following” of the Koffee Kup brands but added, “We have no immediate plans to reopen the bakeries but will be assessing how they may fit our strategic network optimization efforts in the future.”