Exclusive: Nurture Brands to launch £2.5m Seedrs raise
House of clean label brands seeking public funding to scale its US and Asia operations
Nurture Brands will launch a £2.5 million Series A round via crowdfunding platform Seedrs, this week.
The Rebel Kitchen-parent company is seeking to raise its first round of public investment to progress its expansion in Asia and the US, and scale the wider business.
Operating six brands, including the newly acquired Asian coconut water start-up Jax Coco, Nurture Brands expects to hit £10 million in revenue this year, breakeven in 2023 and record £40 million in turnover over the next five years.
“I believe there’s an opportunity for a house of brands business like us to actually go up alongside the big guys like Coke, Pepsi and Unilever,” Nurture and Rebel Kitchen founder Ben Arbib told NutritionInvestor.
“By consolidating our brands onto one platform we can do exactly what Big Food does. That’s why Big Food ends up being so powerful and having such an advantage over single brands. Almost everyone in our company works across all our brands,” Arbib added.
The start-up launched its Rebel Kitchen offering in the US back in July 2021, under the sister brand Miracle Kitchen.
Arbib said that while the brand has garnered significant traction in foodservice, scale and growth in the US would require significant capital.
Miracle Kitchen will launch its first retail offering in Q2 of this year.
The company also closed its third acquisition this week, adding the Jax Coco brand to its portfolio.
On Nurture’s healthy appetite for M&A, Arbib said the company had found itself in a unique position a few years back, when rapid growth had afforded it the chance to seek out potential acquisitions and build out the house of brands.
“Our first year sales were around £500,000, then it went up to £1 million and £2 million and we were having really solid growth early on in the business’ existence,” Arbib said.
“We got to a stage in year four where we had a really solid plan to go from £2 million to £6 million in sales but we had a year where we basically flatlined.
“We had scaled the business to be twice the size and realised something needed to change [and we had to find an alternative solution to] letting a load of employees go,” he said.
At this point Arbib acquired Ape Snacks and realised the company could take on and help scale small start-ups that were experiencing slowed growth and low margins, by reducing their overhead costs and consolidating their operations into Nurture’s.
Nurture’s first public capital raise will close in March. Arbib expects to launch a further investment round in two years to secure capital from US investors.
You can read more about the history of Nurture Brands and Rebel Kitchen here.