UK savoury snacks company The Curators has teamed up with an export advisory business to look at opportunities to sell its products overseas.
The business, however, has put M&A plans on the back burner after completing a deal to buy local peer Cheesies just over a year ago.
The London-based jerky, crisps and puffs manufacturer, which sells its products through major UK supermarket chains, said it has been “laser-focused” on the UK until now but co-founder Ed Hauck told Just Food: “We are starting to work with an export expert. It hasn’t been that easy to export meat products into Europe over the last few years because of Brexit but things have started to open up.”
In another distribution initiative, The Curators, founded six years ago, has just signed a deal with airline British Airways to supply snacks for its in-flight catering.
The Curators, which last year said it was targeting sales of £10m ($12.8m) by 2025, saw its revenues increase by 80% in the last year, according to co-founder Max Rees.
“Our mantra has been to super-charge savoury snacking. Lots of stuff has been going on in sweet snacks but no one has taken the lead in savoury snacks,” he said.
Innovation in the short term at least is likely to be around flavours rather than new products.
Hauck added: “We’re really happy. We’ve got amazing momentum around our current range. But like all challenger brands we don’t sit still for too long.”
The Curators, which said it still thinks of itself as a high protein rather than a nutrition business, does however consider itself a beneficiary of the growth of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, which many commentators think will lead to users taking a healthier approach to food in the future.
Rees said: “We are in the right place for the movement that is rejecting sugar and even sugar replacements.”
The Curators’ investors include the venture arm of local dairy business Yeo Valley, which introduced it to last year’s takeover target Cheesies and contributed towards the acquisition fee.
In terms of future M&A deals, Hauck said: “The big message from us is that we are 100% focused on building on what we’ve got but if a knockout opportunity came along we would absolutely look at it.”
Rees added: “It’s not our number one objective” and said they while Cheesies had presented a “really clear synergy” with its own offering, it “probably underestimated the amount work involved” in doing a deal.
As for being an M&A target themselves, Hauck said they are “having too much fun at the moment to distract ourselves with that sort of thing" but said that “further down the line they might be open to conversations”.
