Bounty Fresh wants piece of African poultry market

MANILA, Philippines — Bounty Fresh Food is looking to expand in Africa after successfully acquiring New Zealand’s largest poultry producer, the Tegel Group last year.

“Hopefully going forward we can be in more markets. I am in touch with a sovereign fund and they are very interested in going to Africa (with us),” Bounty Fresh president and chief executive officer Tennyson Chen told reporters on the sidelines of the Family Business Conference 2019 yesterday.

“I want to be in at least 10 foreign markets going forward,” he said.

The company is already present  in Indonesia, Malaysia and now in New Zealand.

It is also looking at new markets like Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.

For the New Zealand venture, the company is targeting to bring the Tegel Group back to a certain level of profitability.

“I think by next year, we will slowly get back on track” he said.

Bounty Fresh acquired the Tegel Group for $309 million.  It was founded in the 1980s by Chen who started the business in a one-layer house in Sta. Maria, Bulacan, with an initial 5,000 heads of chicken. 

The business grew to become  one of the largest broiler integrators in the country.

Today, it is the only fully-integrated poultry firm that has continuously invested in company-owned facilities. These include Grand Parent farm, Parent Stock farm, Hatcheries, Dressing Plants, Feed Mills, and Cool-cell Broiler Complexes in the Philippines, according to its profile.

 Bounty is the first company in the Philippines to put up a single-stage commercial broiler hatchery, a technology that ensures better hatchery sanitation with controlled ventilation that will in turn produce better chick quality.

To cater to the consumers in the various regions and islands of the archipelago, Bounty Agro Ventures Inc. was integrated to operate in several branches across the country.

Bounty is now one of the largest poultry companies in the Philippines with vertically integrated farm-to-plate operations. It is the second biggest poultry producer in the country.