• Los Angeles Times, Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:26 AM

The makers of Sunny D, which is known as a children's drink, want to reach older, health-minded consumers, Nathan Olivarez-Giles reports, so they've purchased Bossa Nova Beverage Group, a West Los Angeles marketer best known for its acai juice. Bossa Nova will be run as an autonomous company within Cincinnati-based Beverages Holdings, according to its founder and CEO, Alton Johnson.

"You won't find Sunny D selling in a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's," says Lloyd Greif, CEO of Greif & Co., the investment-banking firm that represented Bossa Nova in the transaction. "But this acquisition gets a Sunny D product into those stores. And this will get Bossa Nova even more into the mainstream supermarkets and the mass channel."

Johnson, who started Bossa Nova in 2000 as an MBA student at USC, says his company did more than $10 million in sales last year. Sunny D's sales topped $575 million in 2008, according to a spokeswoman.

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