With financial backing from Five V Capital, three acquisitions in six months and seasoned FMCG specialist Andrew Loader at the helm, Openway Food Co starts operating with more than $100 million in annual turnover, 150 SKUs and a laser focus on further acquisitions and export markets.
Annex Foods (owners of Red Tractor, Raise the Bar and Hammer & Tuffy’s) and Table of Plenty joined Openway in April. Metro Foods (owners of Keep it Cleaner) joined in June. All founders will stay on as shareholders and many will form part of the new Openway leadership team.
After spending most of his career in multinational food and beverage companies, the last 20 with Mars, Loader left the global giant in 2019. He told Food & Drink Business his plan was to take a couple of months off and then consider his options. And then COVID-19 rolled in.
“It was wonderful being able to spend that time with my family at home and it gave me time to think about what I wanted to do next,” Loader said.
The pandemic lockdown gave Loader the chance to pull some threads of ideas and conversations with friends together into a concept that has ultimately delivered Openway.
“The health food sector is growing at around 10 per cent per annum and has plenty of head room to grow. We had started launching products in the health food space at Mars and that had planted some seeds in my mind about opportunities to do things differently.”
Conversations with friend (and ultimately co-founder of Openway) Gavin Evans, one of the co-founders of agricultural investment management company Eat Group, which was also looking for commercial opportunities, saw these threads start to weave together. (Eat Group founded Australia’s first commercial plant protein fraction plant Australian Plant Proteins, which secured a $45.7 million investment from global agrifood company Bunge in April.)
There were a number of factors that saw Openway start to take shape. Loader said: “We could see that many entrepreneurs hit a ceiling without an ability to continue to invest in operations, distribution and innovation, while retailers were managing a fragmented supplier base, looking for trusted partners to drive category growth and deliver more options to customers.”
But driving Loader was a compulsion to do business differently, to forge partnerships with people and businesses doing great things.
“The name Openway is not an accident, we work openly and transparently with the goal of building a great business. It is complex and it hasn’t been a linear process. We needed a model agile enough to move with the rapid growth of the sector. We needed companies that not only had a good business with a clear trajectory but were like-minded in attitude and approach. And we needed investors,” he said.
Loader said there was interest from a number of private equity groups looking to invest, which of itself was a different approach.
“In this instance, the private equity interest isn’t about stripping and flipping the business, instead focusing on investment and growth. It was a totally different conversation,” he said.
Five V Capital has been involved from the outset. CEO Tim Cooper said Five V’s ethos is one of partnership.
“In Openway Food Co, we saw an opportunity to partner with passionate management and founders and meet the growing needs of the market. I’m confident we will focus on long-term value creation, bringing more investment and more brands into the group and identify new growth avenues,” Cooper said.
“We have big ambitions for our future, led by a strong sense of purpose. From the outset, we wanted to do things differently and create a safe space for like-minded founders to grow their brands with access to a range of skills and experience.
“We will keep on looking for the right brands to join the group, ones which fit with our vision and values,” Loader said.
