MPM

Headquartered: Manchester, United Kingdom

Investment date: 2016

Exit date: 2020

https://mpmproducts.co.uk/

At a Glance

100%

Natural Pet Food

65%

Of revenue international at exit

4.4x

Return on exit

How we helped

MPM produces high-quality, natural pet foods for discerning cat and dog owners, with leading brands such as Applaws, Encore and Reveal. As consumer interest in premium pet food has grown, so has MPM, and its brands are now sold in 49 markets worldwide with offices in the UK, Australia, China and the USA.

Internationalisation:

We worked closely with CEO, Julian Bambridge and COO, James Bracewell, to deliver an impressive period of organic growth including significant international expansion in North America and Asia Pacific, with international sales forming 65% of total sales by exit.
This included helping the business to launch in China, which was a significant opportunity for MPM due to rising disposable income, strong demand for Western premium brands and growth in the humanisation of pets. However, it was a complex and competitive landscape, and ECI helped MPM to navigate complexities around IP and differing regulations.

Sales & marketing:

MPM augmented the marketing team during our investment, and ECI supported the business to create a new brand for the North American mass grocery channel (Reveal) and refresh the UK grocery brand (Encore). MPM’s success in establishing a meaningful presence in the competitive US pet specialty and mass grocery markets was key to the business’ strong growth.

People & culture:

During our investment we supported MPM to move towards B Corp Certification which it successfully achieved in 2021, with a customer base that places great importance on its sustainability.

Following a period of strong growth, ECI exited MPM to 3i for a return of 4.4x in 2021.

With ECI’s support over the last four years, we’ve been able to strengthen our platform, internationalise our business and develop new product lines. It has been a fantastic partnership.

Julian Bambridge

CEO, MPM

What was it like working with ECI? The MPM story

You will see that the structure around the international business has developed beyond recognition from where we were. And ECI gave us the ability to focus on those things, but also confidence that they’re going to back us to do that.

We’ve got multiple countries making products. We’ve got multiple factories. We brought in a supply chain director, which ECI helped us to do and we’ve built that structure which was really valuable throughout COVID. We’re much more resilient from a supply chain end-to-end perspective.

We’re very fortunate that pet food is incredibly resilient and showing that over 20-30 years it seems to be fairly isolated from macroeconomic trends. It’s an incredible market because it’s growing in so many different ways commercially, obviously the values there, you can see that, but also in the terms of all under-30s, it’s all cats, all high rise, all done by mobile phone, you know, already 50 to 60% online. So it’s a market that’s way ahead of any other in the world on the planet. So to get it right is a must really if you want to be anything in that market at all.

The exit strategy for MPM was really around keeping as many options open as possible. We knew that the pet market was growing and highly resilient and therefore it would be attractive to a number of buyers.

In late 2020, we ran an auction process for the business. We received lots of interest in that and sold the business to another private equity bidder so that the management team have gone on to deliver their plans of North American and Asian growth.

That was a fantastic result for ECI, one we’re very proud of. We generated a 4.4 times return on our investments in the 4 and a half years. But equally, we created a business that is truly global now, has a very strong platform for further growth and I’m very confident it will go on and be successful over the coming years.