Deliciously Ella, founded by “wellness” entrepreneur Ella Mills, has been acquired by health food brand Hero Group, a Swiss food company that already owns British-based baby food brand Organix.
Majority shareholders Mills and her husband Matthew are expected to make millions of pounds from the deal. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Deliciously Ella reported sales of £24m and a pre-tax profit of £1.8m in its last financial year.
The acquisition includes the Deliciously Ella app, which gives subscribers access to more than 2,000 healthy recipes, Deliciously Ella-branded products such as snack bars and chocolate-dipped nuts sold in UK supermarkets and the company’s factory near Milton Keynes.
Not including the more recently launched Plants brand, which sells ranges including pasta, kombucha juice and fresh soups, and the couple Plants from central London restaurant Deliciously Ella. After the sale, seven employees will move to work for the Plant brand, with the remaining 70 joining the Hero Group, including Mills and her husband.
The deal does not include Ella and Matthew Mills’ Plant restaurant in Mayfair, central London, which reopens in 2021.
Sophia Spring/Delicious Falls
Matthew Mills, 40, said the pair would stay with the company “as long as we’re useful”. He said he was looking forward to becoming an employee of Hero and had taken some advice from his mother Tessa Jowell, the Labor politician who died in 2018. “My mother always said that leadership is not about being in charge, it’s about being in charge,” he said, “as long as we can serve the company and continue to grow and lead the company, we will.”
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Ella Mills, now 33, started Deliciously Ella as a blog to chronicle the dietary changes she made to help her recover from a serious illness when she was a student. She said she was “excited” to land her first role as a paid employee. “It’s been quite an unusual career trajectory, never having had a formal job before starting Deliciously Falls.”
After joining forces in 2015, the couple launched a line of products including granola, snacks and oat bars, and have sold more than a million units to date. They also launched three London cafes, two of which closed in 2018. The other reopened as plants in 2021.
Since the pandemic, the focus for Deliciously Ella has been on international markets, with launches in Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland in 2020, followed by Austria and Germany in 2023. Ella Mills said the brand will be launched at health food chain Whole Foods. , this year in the US.
Getting the deal done is “pretty fraught,” but they are positive about the brand’s prospects under new ownership. “With a bigger company it feels like we can really accelerate everything we want to achieve.”
The growth of the Deliciously Ella brand in recent years “led to offers to buy the company from a mix of retailers and financial investors, but we just didn’t feel like the right fit or the right fit,” said Matthew Mills. the time
“We have been approached many times by private equity. We weren’t completely against it, but in a very values driven business you have to make sure it’s right. Of course long-term ownership is better than that.
The couple is confident that Hero Group will maintain its company values around the sourcing and quality of ingredients.
Sophia Spring/Delicious Falls
He said he looks forward to the vacation allowance that comes with a corporate job — “we haven’t taken a vacation yet this year” — and the sense of shared responsibility that comes with being part of a larger organization. “I’m glad to know that people being able to pay their bills doesn’t just depend on where we are. Nice to not have it on our shoulders anymore. “
He acknowledged that the deal also has a “big pressure valve that releases financially” for the couple. “We are totally dependent on business for our income. We have had a personal guarantee on our house for eight years.”
The couple said in a previous interview that despite their “privileged” upbringing – Ella Mills’ mother Camilla Sainsbury, a supermarket heiress – their families did not help their business financially or otherwise. “It’s an obvious assumption and I completely understand where it’s coming from,” Ella Mills said. “We both have privileged lives. But of course it cannot be less. We have built this business brick by brick since its inception.”
M&E Mills, their parent company, paid dividends of £652,752 in 2023 and £777,721 in the 16-month period to the end of 2022.
The pair said they are confident they have found the right partner and that Hero will uphold the values of the business, including the provenance and quality of ingredients.
“We started talking in December of last year,” Matthew Mills said. “Ella and I dated for about two months before we got married and we dated these guys for ten months before we got married. That’s long enough for us.”
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