Healthy eating brand Deliciously Ella, created by wellness entrepreneur Ella Mills, has been acquired by Swiss food company Hero Group, which already owns UK-based organic snack brand Organix.
Mills and her husband Matthew, who are the majority shareholders, stand to make millions of pounds from the deal. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but Deliciously Ella reported sales of £24m and pre-tax profits of £1.8m 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.
This does not include the recently launched Plants brand, which sells pasta products, kombucha juice and fresh soups, nor the couple’s central London restaurant Plants by Deliciously Ella. Following the sale, seven employees will join the Plants brand and the remaining 70 will join the Hero Group, including Mills and her husband.
The deal does not include Ella and Matthew Mills’ Plants restaurant in Mayfair, central London, which reopened in 2021.
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Matthew Mills, 40, said the pair would stay with the company as long as we were useful. She said she was looking forward to working at Hero and had taken advice from her mother, Tessa Jowell, a Labor politician who died in 2018. “My mother always said that leadership isn’t about leading, it’s about leading. about being of service,” he said, “and as long as we can be of service to the company and continue to grow and run the company, we will.
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Ella Mills, now 33, started the Deliciously Ella blog to chronicle the diet changes she made to help her recover from a serious illness when she was a student. He said he was excited to have his first role as a salaried employee. “It’s quite an unusual career trajectory, having never had a formal job before starting Deliciously Ella.”
After joining forces in 2015, the pair launched a range of products, including granolas, snacks and oat bars, and have sold over a million units to date. They also launched three London cafes, two of which closed in 2018. The other reopened under the name Plants in 2021.
Since the pandemic, Deliciously Ella has focused on international markets, launching in Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland in 2020, followed by Austria and Germany in 2023. Ella Mills said the brand will be launched in the health food chain Whole Foods in the United States this year.
Closing the deal had been “pretty fraught” but they were 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.”
Matthew Mills said the growth of the Deliciously Ella brand in recent years had led to offers to buy the business “from a mix of trade buyers and financial investors, but we just haven’t had the right fit or felt it was the right time.
“Private capital has approached us many times. We weren’t completely averse to it, but in a very value-driven company, you have to make sure it fits. And truly long-term ownership is better for that.
The couple is confident that Hero Group will maintain its corporate values of ingredient provenance and quality
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He said he’s looking forward to the vacation allowance that comes with working for the company — “we haven’t taken a day off yet this year” — and the shared responsibility that comes with being part of a larger organization. “I’m glad to know that paying people’s bills isn’t just about where we are. It’s nice that it’s not on us anymore.”
He acknowledged that the deal also released a “huge pressure valve that will be released financially” for the couple. “We are completely dependent on the company for our income. Our house has a personal warranty for eight years.
The couple said in a previous interview that despite their “privileged” upbringing – Ella Mills’ mother is supermarket heiress Camilla Sainsbury – their families had not helped their business, financially or otherwise. “It’s an obvious assumption and I totally understand where it came from,” said Ella Mills. “We’ve both had privileged lives. But it really couldn’t have been any less. We’ve built this company brick by brick from the ground up.
Their holding company M&E Mills paid a dividend of £652,752 in 2023 and £777,721 in the 16 months to the end of 2022.
The pair said they are confident they have found the right partner and that Hero lives up to the company’s values, including the provenance and quality of its ingredients.
“We started talking last December,” Matthew Mills said. “Ella and I dated for about two months before we got married, while we dated these guys for ten months before getting married. This is a long time for us.”
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