Sentio Insight has provided financial due diligence to Piper, the leading specialist investor in consumer branded businesses, on their £6m investment into Mindful Chef, the UK’s favourite healthy recipe box brand.
Mindful Chef was set up by childhood school friends Rob Grieg-Gran, Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper with a mission to make healthy eating easy. Since its launch in 2015 it has experienced rapid growth – including a 178% rise in sales in the past year – delivering nearly two million meals to UK consumers. Based in Wandsworth, London, the brand has annualised sales of £10m and employs 27 people.
With its focus on making healthy eating easy, all Mindful Chef’s meals are healthy and nutritionally balanced, are gluten and dairy free, containing no refined carbs or sugars. All the ingredients are fresh, high quality and sustainably sourced from local farmers where possible. Each week 16 different recipes are available for customers to select from. For the growing number of UK consumers continuing to seek out a healthier lifestyle, Mindful Chef helps customers discover and cook quick and easy nutritious, tasty recipes in a way that is convenient, saves them time and reduces food wastage by providing only the food you need to eat and reducing trips to the supermarket.
For many customers, Mindful Chef has ignited or rekindled the enjoyment of cooking and a delight in discovering new otherwise difficult to source ingredients and flavours. Customers are also supporting Mindful Chef’s charity One Feeds 2, through their purchases. For every meal purchased, Mindful Chef donates a meal to a child in poverty – to date the company has provided more than 770,000 meals for children in living in poverty.
Piper’s £6m investment will enable the business to continue to grow and expand its customer base in the UK, helping it capitalise on the rapid growth of the recipe box market which is forecast to double over the next 10 years. It is the fifth investment from Piper VI, a £125m fund.
Tim Lee, previously Head of Food and Online Strategy at Marks & Spencer, joined the business earlier this year as CEO.
Rob Grieg-Gran, co-founder of Mindful Chef, said: ‘The investment and expertise that Piper bring to our business will help us to bring healthy eating to many more consumers in the UK and enable us to accelerate our growth ambitions for the brand next year and beyond.’
Tim Lee, CEO of Mindful Chef, said: ‘With 2018 ending on a high, this major investment from Piper signifies the great confidence they have in our business, and will help support our established marketing programme as well as our exciting NPD pipeline. The global recipe box market is ripe for distribution and we believe that Mindful Chef’s proposition ticks all the boxes for people who want to live healthier lives.’
Rory Gibbs, Piper’s Investment Director who lead the deal, said: ‘Mindful Chef is well placed to continue accelerating the growth of the recipe box market with its highly differentiated health focused positioning. We are backing a young, dynamic team who are passionate about making healthy eating easier for their customers. We are excited to be joining them and helping them to realise their ambitions.’
For Piper, financial due diligence was carried out by Ian Robinson at Sentio.
