Premier Foods, the owner of Snowflake, Blue Ribbon and Rhodes in South Africa, has rejected the Competition Commission‘s application to revoke approval of its merger with RFG Holdings. “Premier strongly disagrees with the Commission’s characterisation of the parties’ conduct and the basis for the application and will defend its position before the Tribunal,” the company said, adding that it “rejects any suggestion that it acted unlawfully, withheld material information or sought to mislead the Commission or the Tribunal during the merger review process.”
The Commission’s application followed Premier’s closure in July of its Fruit Products Western Cape (FPWC) cannery in Tulbagh, after a workers’ union complaint alleging the closure breached conditions attached to the merger approval. The Commission alleges Premier had contemplated the closure during the merger review but failed to disclose it. “The contemplated closure of the Tulbagh cannery was material to the assessment of both the competition and public-interest aspects of the merger,” it said. “Withholding material information, whether by omission or as a deliberate act, undermines the integrity of the merger-control regime and may result in the revocation of an approved merger.”
Why the dispute matters
The FPWC cannery employs more than 400 permanent staff and thousands of seasonal workers. Including FPWC, only two canneries operate in South Africa, the other in Langenberg, so the Commission argues the closure would leave the remaining plant in a dominant position and could create a monopoly in the canned fruit category. For fruit growers who supply canneries and for retailers that stock canned fruit, reduced competition in that category could affect both prices and supply options.
Premier says it did not withhold information, and had “proactively engaged with the Commission on the potential closure of FPWC and provided it with the chronology of events and supporting documents related to its decision-making process regarding FPWC.” It maintains the closure decision came only after the merger was implemented, driven by “commercial realities” in the canned deciduous fruit category, including falling global demand, rising input costs, under-utilised capacity and the need for greater scale. “The proposed controlled closure of FPWC was not a decision, intention or merger implementation step at the time of the merger approval process,” the company said, arguing those commercial pressures “would have confronted the FPWC business irrespective of the merger.”
On the workforce, Premier says it completed the required section 189A consultation process and that “the overwhelming majority of affected employees entered into voluntary severance agreements,” meaning no retrenchments will be implemented.
The matter now goes to the Competition Tribunal, which will weigh the Commission’s claim of material nondisclosure against Premier’s account of the closure’s timing and commercial rationale before deciding whether the merger approval stands or is revoked.
We reported last week on the Commission’s initial filing to revoke the R6.5 billion merger, which noted that the March 2026 conditional approval required Premier and RFG to protect existing jobs and keep every manufacturing facility open. Premier’s rebuttal is the company’s first detailed public response since that filing, and turns the dispute into a factual question for the Tribunal: whether the closure decision genuinely postdated the merger, as Premier says, or was contemplated beforehand, as the Commission alleges.
For more detail see the original report.
