Innovative Food Holdings (OOTC:IVFH) ($1.56) – IVFH is a leading nationwide provider of specialty foods, healthcare foods, gluten free foods, and direct from source artisanal foods, to the professional foodservice market. The company announced today that it acquired full interest of The Fresh Diet, Inc., which is the nationwide leader in freshly prepared gourmet specialty meals using The Fresh Diet® platform. The trailing 12 months ended June 30, 2014  The Fresh Diet’s revenue for the trailing 12 months ended 06/30/2014 is about $24 million, which is more than the revenue of $23.5 million of IVFH in fiscal 2013 ended 12/31/2013.  And the company stated that this transaction is expected to be accretive to its earnings in fiscal year 2015.

Quotes from management,

“We believe that the expansion of Innovative Food Holdings’ platform to include the capabilities of The Fresh Diet’s platform is an extraordinary opportunity for the Company,” commented Sam Klepfish, CEO of Innovative Food Holdings, “As evidenced by our recent strong second quarter financial results, we are focused on executing and delivering on a specialty food platform based strategy which has the capability to expand sales with low fixed infrastructure costs. We further believe that the Fresh Diet platform, which includes both daily prepared specialty foods and leading last-mile capabilities, is a platform which is uniquely positioned to complement the existing platform of Innovative Food Holdings, enabling us to leverage the rapidly changing specialty food market and provide unique source-to-table capabilities and dramatically enhance our direct-to-consumer infrastructure and capabilities.

Justin Wiernasz, President of Innovative Food Holdings, noted “In addition, we welcome the deep industry knowledge and food operations expertise which the executive team at The Fresh Diet brings to the table.  We look forward to working with the entire The Fresh Diet team of professionals as we build upon their more than 100 combined years of operations, process management, marketing, franchising,  logistics and distribution excellence to drive future growth for Innovative Food Holdings and The Fresh Diet.”