Airline Catering Food Distributor, 22-Year Miami Wholesaler

Full Editorial Writeup

This is a 22-year-old Miami-based wholesale food distributor that supplies international airline catering operators with frozen meals, sandwiches, bakery goods, pastries, seafood, beverages and specialty items. Founded in 2004, the company runs an asset-light model, outsourcing cold-chain storage and logistics to third-party refrigerated warehousing and transport providers. With only five full-time employees generating $20M in revenue and $3.2M in EBITDA, this is a lean, relationship-driven middleman sitting between global food suppliers and the catering kitchens that feed international flights.

The economic engine here is sourcing and spread. The business wins by maintaining established supplier and customer relationships, hitting airline-grade food safety and quality standards, and reliably moving product through a flexible distribution network it does not own. That asset-light structure keeps capital requirements low and margins visible, but it also means the moat lives almost entirely in the owners' relationships and the trust built over two decades, which is exactly the thing walking out the door at closing.

At $18M against $3.2M EBITDA, the deal is priced at roughly 5.6x, a full multiple for a five-person brokerage-style distributor with meaningful customer concentration risk and a seller-dependent relationship book. The airline catering vertical recovered strongly post-COVID, but it is cyclical and tied directly to international travel volumes, which is the opposite of recession-proof. A buyer is paying for the platform and the relationships, so the entire thesis rests on whether those transfer cleanly.