CoolBrands Int’l is selling its yogurt business to a company operated by Horizon Organic founder Chuck Marcy.

Healthy Food Holdings, Boulder, Colo.—a portfolio company of private equity firm Catterton Partners—announced last month that it was in the process of acquiring CoolBrands Dairy, Inc., a subsidiary of CoolBrands International Inc. The sales price was reportedly $45 million.

The deal includes the Breyers brand, which CoolBrands itself acquired from Kraft Foods just a few years ago, and the North Lawrence, N.Y. processing facility that goes with it. In Sept. 2005, Marcy’s group acquired another well known yogurt brand, YoCrunch, from the privately held YoFarm Co. of Connecticut. Both brands’ market penetration is concentrated on the east coast, but Marcy says the plan is to move them into the national market.

“We’re really excited about Breyers,” Marcy told Dairy Foods. “It’s a brand that has a really strong heritage, and CoolBrands has done some nice things with it, making the fruit on the bottom all natural and adding probiotics to the light products. That business has grown tremendously along the Atlantic Coast.”

YoCrunch is different from most yogurts in that it is packaged with crunchy topping in a separate compartment on the cap of the yogurt cup. With the two brands combined, Healthy Foods will become the next largest branded player in the U.S. yogurt business after Dannon and Stonyfield Farms and General Foods, Marcy says. In December Healthy Food Holdings acquired Van’s International Foods, Inc., the maker and marketer of Van’s Waffles, the leading brand of all-natural and organic frozen waffles.