Food & Agribusiness

Barley Snyder’s “home” is in Southcentral Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s premiere agricultural and food production regions. It is an area long associated with the Amish way of life and Pennsylvania Dutch quality. Lancaster County ranks as the No. 1 county in productivity among non-irrigated farming counties in the United States. 

From our beginning, Barley Snyder has worked with food and agribusiness clients, from family farms to food production firms of national stature. Our attorneys provide a range of specific services to food and agribusiness clients. Our clients face an environment of growing challenges, including changing consumer preferences dictating changes to ingredients and production methods and greater compliance burdens posed by new legislation and regulations, including the Food Safety Modernization Act.

While our food and agribusiness relationships involve an array of businesses, including national and public companies, a substantial amount of our practice involves closely-held and family-owned businesses and we are sensitive to their particular views and business approach.

Examples of Food and Agribusiness Product/Client Experience

• More than 100 production, processing and distribution business clients
• Protein, including poultry, eggs, pork and dairy
• Animal feed, pet food and crops
• Snack foods
• Pastry, desserts and baked goods
• Frozen foods
• Produce
• Chocolate and confections
• Beverages

Food and Agribusiness Ancillary Business Experience

• Food and agribusiness finance and lending, representing some of the leading agriculture lenders
• Agribusiness facilities development and construction
• Supply chain management
• Agricultural and food processing equipment manufacturers
• Distributors

Examples of Food and Agribusiness Legal Services

• Production, processing and distribution
  • Advice and assistance at all levels – from farm to table, including sales contracts, grower contracts, dealer and distributor issues and supply chain management
• Regulatory and Quality
  • State and federal regulatory compliance, including assistance with requirements under the Food Safety Modernization Act
  • Product safety, government inspections and recalls
  • Product labeling and labeling litigation risks
  • Organic, GRAS (generally accepted as safe), allergen and other content issues
  • Government permitting
• Business Support
  • Real estate, as well as facility construction and permitting
  • Employment and labor, including wage and hour, EEOC, OSHA and other food and agribusiness specific experience, including audits and best practices for immigration law compliance
  • Environmental and land use, including wastewater projects and waste management and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO)
  • Financing and leasing
  • Mergers and acquisitions, both acquisitions and sales
  • Corporate and tax planning
  • Insurance and risk management
• Intellectual Property
  • Product trademarks
  • Licensing
  • Patent prosecution
  • R&D projects
• Litigation
• Personal Planning
  • Particularly for family businesses, extensive familiarity with succession planning and estate planning in the context of family-owned businesses

Our Food and Agribusiness Industry Group utilizes client teams, providing each client with the skills and experience best suited to represent them. We also utilize a project management approach to identify client goals and plan an efficient means to timely accomplish those goals.

Tim Dietrich, one of our partners, leads the Food and Agribusiness Industry Group and he can be reached at: (610) 898-7154, (610) 763-3031 (cell) or tdietrich@barley.com.

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