Carey puts Best foot forward with $50m manufacturing buy.

DALLAS: Investment firm W. P. Carey & Co. LLC announced that CPA: 16--Global, its publicly held nontraded REIT affiliate, has purchased four manufacturing facilities from Best Brands Corporation. The purchase price was approximately $50 million.

The facilities, each of which contains a combination of manufacturing, warehousing and refrigerated warehousing, total approximately 665,000 s/f and are located in Colton, California; Dallas Texas; Bonner Springs, Kansas and Eagan, Minnesota. The facilities will be leased back to Best Brands Corporation on a long-term basis.

Best Brands is a manufacturer and distributor of specialty bakery products, specializing in frozen laminated dough, frozen baked cakes, frozen muffins and bakery mixes, as well as other bakery products sold to in-store bakeries and clients such as Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Starbucks and Costco.

"Best Brands has focused on growth in our core product areas--cakes, laminated dough, muffins and mixes," said Scott Humphrey, Best Brands CEO. "The sale-leaseback financing with W. P. Carey was ideal as it allowed us to access the value tied up in a number of our key real estate assets and redeploy that capital in our core business. The Carey team's professional approach and financial skills as well as their understanding of the food and refrigerated food industries enabled them to recognize the value and economics of our business and structure a financing that advances our longer term strategic initiatives."

"We were pleased to work with Best Brands on this transaction," said Gino Sabatini, executive director at W. P. Carey. "We view Best Brands as a strong industry player. In addition because the facilities acquired are critical to their operations, the acquisition is consistent with our core investment philosophy of investing in key assets of well managed operating companies. Given the current credit environment we are particularly pleased to be able to work with companies like Best Brands and their investors at a time when other sources of capital are limited."