Beyond vaping - seeing through the haze

Supreme PLC’s M&A spree for consumer brands gathers pace

Hello Rainmakers,

We’ve got another exclusive interview for you today.

Entrepreneur Sandy Chadha has been buying consumer brands to complement many of their existing roster - including Peter Kay’s favourite, Rola Cola. At face value, it feels like a calculated move away from the soon to be regulated vaping market. He insists not. Read on…

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Sandy Chadha is on a roll. In the last year the AIM listed consumer goods distributor and manufacturer has been buying up brands.

Most recently the Manchester-based business bought SlimFast for just over £20m from Irish global nutrition group Glanbia through a mixture of its existing cash resources and utilisation of its asset-based lending facility.

Though it started as a battery reseller, Supreme is best known as a key player in the vape sector and last year moved into the soft drinks and hot beverages market following the acquisition of Clearly Drinks and Typhoo Tea.

Last month the business announced the acquisition of 1001, the carpet care brand, from US-based WD-40 Company, for £1.65m.

Under Supreme’s ownership, SlimFast will sit within the Group’s Drinks & Wellness division, joining an extraordinary lineup of British icons that includes: Typhoo Tea, established in 1906; Glengettie Tea and Lift, part of the Typhoo portfolio; Perfectly Clear flavoured water and Qt energy drinks; Red Mountain Coffee, dating back to the 1900s; and Rola Cola, the classic 1990s soft drink, popularised by comedian Peter Kay in his observational routines about working class life.

There’s definitely a consistency to Chadha’s method which he unpacked for Rainmakers, sharing Supreme’s distinctive acquisition playbook and his frank views on market valuation, while offering a few choice industry insights ranging from fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) to the shifting sands of the vaping market.

On Supreme’s Approach to M&A Integration Chadha’s philosophy on integrating acquisitions centrrs on platform leverage and rapid efficiency gains.

“What Supreme now is more of—we’ve got a very sophisticated platform,” he says. “So when we plug in a brand or plug in a business, we’re able to remove substantial amounts of overheads without losing any sales, and hopefully then go on to growing more sales by adding more customers and more products into the mix.”