Sale of Food Manufacturer – Asian and Middle Eastern Sauces, Pastes and Relishes
Karimix, a successful UK food manufacturing company, came to us through a recommendation from one of our previous clients. With over 15 years of trading history, Karimix built a diverse customer base featuring a range of prominent players and household names across the foodservice and retail sectors, delivering a range of authentic, hand-made and GM-free products with no artificial additives.
The Karimix Foodservice range consists of a bespoke variety of sauces, relishes and pastes designed for customers and distributors within the UK and International food service industry. The range delivers creative ingredients solutions across key foodservice sectors including hospital catering, restaurants, gastro pubs, contract catering, education, travel, leisure and hotels.
The company also demonstrates a strong commitment to Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) principles.
The Situation
The owner was keen to step back from the business following her husband’s recent retirement.
At the outset of the sale process, Hornblower prepared a free indicative valuation and had several meetings to help the owner prepare for a sale, giving insight into how buyers will view the business and what to expect from the sale process.
Food manufacturing is a sector which is in high demand, and we have many buyers registered on our database seeking acquisitions of food manufacturing and the “value-adding” process part of the food supply chain. As a result, we generated a lot of interest in a short period of time.
As always, our job is to sift out the most suited buyers with a serious interest in this opportunity as well as appropriate funding. As a result, we managed to bring a good number of qualified and funded prospective buyers – from both individual investors and trade buyers in the food production sector – which brought real competition to the deal.
The sale process would take many turns along the way, but we stuck with our client to find the best possible deal
Whilst the pandemic and its lockdowns had a material impact on the company’s sales with many of their clients being in the hospitality sector, it also presented an opportunity for the owner to address the company’s outstanding succession issues. The owner productively used this hiatus in the company’s activities to put in place a Production and Sales Manager, which enabled the business owner to step back from the day-to-day operations; to such an extent that by the time sales took off again in 2022, the owner was able to be based the other side of the world and increasingly taking recreation time out – at sea and off grid.
The Outcome
As with many deals, there were many detailed aspects to be agreed and negotiated through due diligence and the drawing up of contracts, which is an area we pride ourselves on in managing transactions to a successful conclusion. The deal completed in March 2023 - some 36 months from starting the process.
The result is a full deal value with the majority paid on completion and a clean break for the vendor. At the same time, the buyer inherits a fully functioning and cash generating business without need for direct day-to-day management, thus allowing them to fully exploit the market for the company’s products and to expand the business. A good deal for both sides.
Post completion, Monica Chia sent words of thanks, saying “Once again, I cannot thank you enough for the hand-holding, words of encouragement, advice and your amazing support.”
The deal was managed by our Business Sales and Acquisitions Consultant, Sian Murray. Sian manages business sales for Hornblower across London and the South East of the UK. The vendors were also advised by Charles Cook at Cook Corporate (Legal).
SOLD – March 2023
