Smart & Final sold to Apollo

The L.A.-based warehouse chain, which was started 136 years ago when no one knew what warehouse chains were, was picked up by private equity giant Apollo Management for $813 million, including debt (the $22 per share offer is 15 percent above Friday's closing price). A French supermarket company called Casino Guichard-Perrachon SA owns about 52 percent of S&F stock and had been talking about unloading the U.S. chain for many months. Actually, Smart & Final has been a takeover candidate for years, both because of the French majority owner never seemed to know what to do with it and because it never got big enough to compete against Wal-Mart and Cosco.

In case you're wondering, Smart & Final was first known as Hellman-Haas Grocery Co. and, like Ralphs, got its start in downtown L.A. The selection was a tad different in those days - flour, brown sugar, salt, patent medicines, rope, sheepherding supplies, chewing tobacco and gunpowder. There were prunes in huge casks and barrels of currants from Greece (Hellman, Haas was one of seven names in the first Los Angeles phone directory). Here's some history, courtesy of the company's Web site:

By the turn of the century, Hellman, Haas had changed hands: The sole owners now were Abraham Haas and Jacob Baruch, who bought out Herman Hellman. The company name was changed to Haas, Baruch & Co. in 1889. Meantime, Haas, Baruch introduced its private Iris label on canned tomatoes (that explains the crazy name Smart & Final Iris) and launched a tradition of artistically designed labels to emphasize the cans' high quality contents. By 1895, the grocer's sales reached $2 million--a huge sum at the time. By 1900, Haas Baruch was the burgeoning city's preeminent wholesale grocer. Over the next two decades, a chain of events--including construction of the L.A. Aqueduct, the discovery of oil in Long Beach and the opening of the Panama Canal--pushed the local population to nearly one million.

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In 1953, Smart & Final merged with Haas, Baruch, with Smart & Final the surviving company. The Company shifted its headquarters to Haas Baruch's new warehouse in Vernon, Calif., which was quickly becoming the preferred distribution location for a number of wholesale and retail companies. Shortly thereafter, the Company was acquired by a leading supermarket chain, Thriftimart, and grew to 83 units by 1984. Later that year, Thriftimart stores were liquidated and the Company's resources focused on an aggressive Smart & Final store modernization and expansion program.