InsideTrack briefs: Bellisio Foods may be for sale

There is Wall Street speculation that Minneapolis-based Bellisio Foods will be sold after several years of ownership by Centre Partners, the New York-based private equity firm.

Bloomberg reported last month that the maker of Chili's and Boston Market frozen foods has attracted multiple suitors, including Nomad Foods, maker of Birds Eye brands in Europe, and other concerns.

Bloomberg said people familiar with the situation it didn't identify indicated Bellisio might be worth around $800 million, or about 10 times estimated $85 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Neither Centre Partners, which is said to have retained investment bankers for the auction process, nor Bellisio, responded to inquiries last week.

Centre Partners, which acquired Bellisio from the late Jeno Paulucci in 2011, appears ready to make a buck in a still-hot mergers-and-acquisition market. Bellisio CEO Joel Conner and members of his management team also invested in the buyout. There also was industry talk of a sale in 2015. Private equity firms generally buy, invest and hold a company for several years before trying to sell for a premium.

Centre Partners has been busy building a bigger company since it acquired Bellisio.

In 2013, Bellisio bought then-bankrupt Austin Packaging, a southern Minnesota producer of sauces and frozen entrees, for more than $6 million. That same year, Bellisio bought Southern California-based Overhill Farms for $81 million. That transaction gave Bellisio production and marketing of frozen foods under the Boston Market brand.

Twin Cities minority employment is growing about three times as fast as the market for professional-technical fields in recent years, as pointed out in a Monday column about Atomic Data's efforts to diversify the local IT business.

However, the Twin Cities still lags the nation as whole.

The research staff at CompTIA, the computer industry trade group, provided the following figures: 32 percent of IT workers in the United States are minorities, it is estimated, based on census and employer data, including 16 percent Asian, 8 percent black and 7 percent Latino. In the Twin Cities area, only 18 percent of IT workers are minorities.

CompTIA used the larger, 16-county Twin Cities area, which would skew findings toward a lower percentage of minorities, than the seven-county metro area that was cited Monday. The Twin Cities also has a lower percentage of minority residents than some other areas.

Sue Wallace, the local program manager of IT-Ready, the computer industry-funded training program designed to attract more women and minorities, said the recent job gains are encouraging in what was once pretty much a white-male enclave.

"From our work with Ideo — a research firm — and our own research, we know that role models play an important role in career paths. Consequently, with fewer African-Americans and Hispanics in IT jobs, that means there are fewer IT role models for young African-Americans and Hispanics. It's a cycle many organizations are working to end. NextUp is targeting this role-model challenge by seeking partners who can provide meaningful opportunities for the CompTIA members and our certified alumni to engage with middle school kids and share what they do and why they love it," Wallace said.

Minneapolis in January will launch a "target market program" for small businesses that will enable them to bid alongside other small businesses for city contracts up to $100,000 instead of competing against larger companies.

To qualify, businesses must be based in the Twin Cities, be independently owned and meet SBA size standards.

The program follows a city survey of 1,600 small businesses and vendor fairs. The majority of those surveyed had sales of less than $1 million, fewer than 20 employees and had never done business with the city. Three quarters said they were interested.