WattAgNet: Southern California Egg Cooperative buys Moark assets

 

Acquisition of Moark’s Western Division assets hoped to enable egg cooperative to run more efficiently

Release Date: 2014-05-27

The Southern California Egg Cooperative (SCEC) has acquired the Western Division of Moark LLC’s egg production operations from Land O’Lakes. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Moark’s Western Division is headquartered in California, and services customers along the West Coast, as well as Idaho and Nevada.

The two organizations had a longtime working relationship, as Moark hard been the distributor of the cooperative’s fresh shell eggs. However, SCEC believes as the new owner of the Moark assets, the cooperative will become a stronger business.

“This acquisition puts us in direct connection between the farms and the purchasers of our eggs,’’ Jim Van Gorkom, vice president of sales and marketing for SCEC, told the Press Enterprise. “There are a lot of positives: One, it should be more efficient. Two, the eggs may be a little fresher when they hit the store shelves. They’ll go straight from the farm to the retailer, with no middle man.”

SCEC was formed in 2010 when four egg enterprises -- Demler Enterprises, Pine Hill Egg Ranch, Demler Egg Ranch and Harmony Egg Ranch -- joined to form one organization. Those four operations were owned by five brothers from the Demler family.

Earlier in May, Moark’s Midwestern Division egg production assets in Missouri and Colorado were sold to Opal Foods, a new company formed by AGR Partners, with Rose Acre Farms and Weaver brothers as minority shareholders.

Land O' Lakes, in its 2013 annual report, announced its intent to sell its Moark egg operations, citing financial losses over the past three years.