Known as “the baker’s baker,” New Horizons spun off the Genesis Baking subsidiary in 2008 to handle contract manufacturing for all non-McDonald’s production, including the new pancake line. By strategically entering new markets through Genesis, New Horizons has diversified its business while maintaining McDonald’s as a longstanding, valued partner.
The past five years brought a surge of growth when the company transformed its Toledo, OH, distribution center into a bakery with a new English muffin line that launched in 2021. Then later that year, New Horizons acquired Coalescence, a manufacturer of dry ingredient blends, followed by the 2024 acquisition of Graffiti Foods, which produces liquid blends for the foodservice market.
Bolstering the business
While the ingredient side was coming together, Bediako envisioned the next chapter of growth.
“When we thought about that idea of, ‘How big do you want to be,’ we put together a plan for three to five years,” Bediako said. “We recognized there’s a lot of change in the industry. There are fewer family businesses, more private equity groups coming in, and we wanted to be sure our place in the industry was as strong as it could be.”
Oftentimes, opportunity spurs action. But sometimes, the action has to come first, and that can be risky. Intuition must be sharp and in tune. For Bediako, the iron was heating up, and it was time to strike.
In 2024, a building became available in Columbus, originally designed for food manufacturing and equipped with an existing internal freezer, space for a high-speed bun line and capacity for additional lines. The vision was coming into focus.
“We realized we couldn’t wait for all the business to be booked before we built this next phase,” Bediako said. “If we did, we’d end up missing the opportunities when they came. So, we strategized. We assessed. We planned. We looked at where we wanted to be and what our customers’ needs were, and we decided we were ready to take some degree of risk.”
They sat with a team of 10 bankers to share the New Horizons vision and strategy for the future, and the result was the capital needed to bring both Columbus facilities to fruition. A year later, Coalescence and Graffiti merged into one operation to become New Horizons Food Solutions. With full blending capabilities, the opportunities increased exponentially, whether blending for its own bakeries or supporting customers, ingredient suppliers or even other bakers. And with the ingredient operation streamlined, the Columbus bakery is now running one of the fastest bun lines in the McDonald’s network.
“The business we’ve created from these investments has put us in an enviable financial position,” said Kurt Loeffler, New Horizons’ CFO. “The work has just begun, but the possibilities of where we go from here are endless.”
