A Manhattan penthouse that belonged to a carrot mogul who harvested a huge windfall with the sale of his farm to a buyout firm has found a taker.
The late Andre Radandt’s apartment, a 3,700-square-foot condo with a 1,900-square-foot terrace atop a tower in the Meatpacking District, traded for $18 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register Friday.
Featuring three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and a window-lined eat-in kitchen, plus direct elevator access, the West 14th Street unit sold in a lighting-quick deal. It hit the market in early February and was in contract three weeks later, based on StreetEasy data, before it closed April 7, the register shows.
The buyers, executives from the pharmaceutical space, were Peter Stein, the former CEO of global drug-maker Norgine, and Sheila Hopkins, the chief legal officer of the Netherlands-based company.
The Radandt family seems to have enjoyed a healthy return with the transaction. Andre Radandt paid $7.2 million for the home in 2013, when he purchased it from DDG Partners, the developer of the 12-story, 37-unit building, the register shows. Based on the sale, the value of the unit, which is in one of the few residential properties in the Meatpacking’s core area, appears to have more than doubled in a decade.
Still, the Radandts initially wagered that the penthouse’s worth had tripled, in that they asked $22 million when it came to market this winter.
From 2002 to 2008, Radandt was president of California-based Bolthouse Farms, which traces its roots to rural western Michigan in 1915, though the agricultural business relocated to Bakersfield, California, in 1973. Radandt’s wife, Lisa Bolthouse Radandt, was a granddaughter of William Bolthouse, who is credited with focusing a family farm’s output on carrots and growing the size of the operation.
Radandt reportedly expanded Bolthouse’s offerings into prepared foods such as vegetable juices and salad dressings. He also led the sale of the privately-held business to Chicago-based leveraged buyout firm Madison Dearborn Partners in 2005 for $1.2 billion.
Under its new owners, Bolthouse led an industry-wide effort to promote baby carrots as an alternative to junk food. But Madison Dearborn didn’t own it for long, unloading Bolthouse in 2012 to the Campbell Soup Co. for a hefty $1.6 billion.
Another management change came in 2019 when food-focused private equity firm Butterfly Equity snapped up Bolthouse, a 2,200-employee company with 65,000 acres under cultivation nationwide, for $510 million. Butterfly split the company into separate carrot and juice divisions last year.
Radandt, who died in 2022 at the age of 60, owned luxury properties across the country. His holdings once included a six-bedroom stone Tudor-style dwelling in the affluent Hinsdale suburb of Chicago as well as a 15,000-square-foot mansion that he developed on Palm Island in Miami Beach. That home’s current owners listed the property this winter for $65 million.
For its part, Norgine, which Stein headed from 1986 to 2021, was founded in 1906 by Stein’s grand-uncle Dr. Victor Stein, who managed to extract food-thickener sodium alginate from seaweed, according to the company’s website. The pharma firm’s products today include Moviprep, a colonoscopy-prep product. This month, Norgine announced it would buy Theravia, a maker of drugs for sickle cell and other rare diseases.
“This is a truly unique apartment in terms of the finishes, the exposures, the view,” said Serhant agent Christopher Prokop of the penthouse, which he marketed. “And we think the price we got is amazing.”
