SunRice spends $10 million on animal feed business

SunRice’s animal feed division CopRice has purchased Victorian animal feed business Riverbank Stockfeeds’ dairy and beef arms and extend their reach into Gippsland.

Victoria’s three dairying regions will soon be home to CopRice’s feed mills. Picture: Zoe Phillips

SUNRICE’S stockfeed business will soon have feed mills in each of Victoria’s three dairying regions following its $10 million purchase of Riverbank Stockfeeds’ Victorian assets.

CopRice, SunRice’s animal feed division that produces food for the sheep, beef, dairy and equine industries as well as companion animals, has struck a deal with the Bozzo family of Whyndham Vale in Melbourne’s outer west to acquire their Riverbank Stockfeeds’ dairy and beef feed businesses.

Crucially, the deal includes Riverbank’s feed mill at Leongatha. Riverbank purchased the plant off South Gippsland Stockfeeds in 2008 to support their push into the dairy feed industry.

CopRice general manager Peter McKinney said the company had set its sights on securing a major footprint in each of Victoria’s key dairying regions in Northern and Western Victoria and Gippsland.

“We’ve been looking to make an acquisition in Gippsland for quite a while and have been in discussions with the Bozzo’s. They were looking to divest and we were in a position to buy,” Mr McKinney said.

“We’ve been a long-term player in Victorian dairy, we see it as an industry with lots of growth potential. The (purchase of the) Riverbank dairy business and the Leongatha asset reflects our confidence in Victorian dairy into the future.”

He said the Leongatha feed mill would complement CopRice’s manufacturing facilities in Cobden in south west Victoria, Tongala in northern Victoria and Leeton and Coleambally in southern NSW.

The cost of the purchase, as well as the working capital requirements and capital expenditure to upgrade the Leongatha site is expected to be $10 million.

Riverbank Stockfeeds is owned by the Bozzo family, headed by managing director Peter Bozzo. Traditionally poultry farmers, the family has diversified into property development with their biggest project a 482ha, $3 billion housing estate on land bought 26 years ago in Melbourne’s booming western growth corridor.

More recently the Bozzo’s built a $48 million Sebel hotel in Yarrawonga.

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