Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, November 7, 1995                   TAG: 9511070048
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: LONDON                                LENGTH: Short

INFLO TO BUY KEEBLER FOR $500 MILLION

United Biscuits PLC of Edinburgh, Scotland, said Monday it will sell its U.S. Keebler cookies and crackers business for $500 million to Inflo Holdings Corp., completing the first phase of its flight from the U.S. market, after a three-month search for a buyer.

The business is the core of United Biscuits' Elmhurst, Ill.-based Keebler unit, America's second-largest cookie company. Inflo is jointly owned by Georgia-based specialty foodmaker Flowers Industries Inc. and investment company Artal Luxembourg SA.

Flowers operates a plant in Roanoke, where it bakes its Sunbeam and Nature's Own bread lines, said Jackie Forrest, president of the Lynchburg Flowers plant. A spokeswoman at the company's Georgia headquarters said she could not provide information on any possible impact of the Keebler purchase on the Roanoke plant, which employs 30 to 35 people.

Analyst Nicola Mallard at Charterhouse Tilney Securities estimated that the three Keebler divisions - cookies and crackers, salty snacks and frozen foods - would fetch a combined price of 430 million pounds ($675 million).

Keebler's leading brands, such as Pecan Sandies, Elfin Delights and Zesta saltines, have been battered by low-priced private-label supermarket brands as well as by Nabisco Holdings Corp.'s reduced-fat and non-fat products.

- Staff and wire report