Triton Partners, PAI Partners and CapVest are part of a group of suitors planning to submit refresh bids for International Flavors & Fragrances' [NYSE:IFF] food ingredients division Frutarom Savory Solutions (FSS), according to sources familiar with the matter.

New York-headquartered IFF has requested confirmatory offers be submitted at the end of October after collecting non-binding proposals earlier this month, the sources said.

Swiss buyout fund Partners Group [SWX:PGHN], Platinum Equity as well as Japanese flavors and fragrances producer Takasago International Corporation [TYO:4914] have also expressed interest in FSS, some of the sources said.

Sale advisers JPMorgan and Lazard distributed information memoranda for FSS in early September, this news service previously reported. The subsidiary, based in Austria, provides starter cultures, spices, oils and ready-to-cook components.

Any leveraged buyout of FSS is likely to require several hundreds of millions of euros in fresh debt issuance at a time when credit markets have been challenged by rising interest rates and pushback from both banks and private lenders reluctant to underwrite risky loans and bonds.

Suitors are expected to line up a debt package worth roughly EUR 340m, or 5x FSS’s marketed EBITDA of EUR 69m, to support a bid, two of the sources said. In the event of a sale, IFF could expect to fetch a double-digit EBITDA multiple for the division.

Frutarom was added to IFF’s portfolio as part of its USD 7.1bn (EUR 5.8bn) acquisition of Israeli peer Frutarom in 2018. The move to sell the business comes just over a year after it agreed to sell its Microbial Control unit to Germany’s Lanxess [ETR:LXS] for USD 1.3bn as part of its strategic portfolio review.

Representatives for IFF, Triton and PAI declined to comment. CapVest, Partners Group, Platinum and Takasago did not respond to requests for comment.