We are delighted to announce our £5m investment into Wild Nutrition, an online natural health supplements brand that has disrupted the UK’s £20bn health and wellness market and transformed the lives of customers through highly effective Food-Grown® formulations and online expert nutritional consultations.
Having done extensive research with consumers in the supplements space, Wild Nutrition stood out for us as a leader in a fragmented category filled with poor quality products. The brand’s core Food-Grown® approach to formulation is a unique way of delivering efficacy while remaining completely natural, sustainable and ethical. This can be seen by the large number of customers who are recommended Wild Nutrition by their nutritionist or doctor.
Founded in 2013 by husband and wife team Henrietta and Charlie Norton, the brand was born out of a desire by Henrietta to find a solution for her ongoing battle with endometriosis. As a best-selling author and highly regarded nutritional practitioner, her work as a formulator for some of Europe’s biggest food supplement brands forced her to confront the reality of poor-quality artificial and synthetic products that make up 95% of the fast-growing supplements market.
Henrietta leads an in-house team that really understand the needs of their customers, sourcing the highest quality, fully traceable ingredients to provide solutions to 12 common health challenges at different lifestages – including fertility, immunity, energy, gut health, sleep, stress and anxiety and hormonal health. Importantly, it’s a brand that resonates emotionally with its customers – when we spoke to them in the 10 virtual focus groups that we ran, they talked about the brand being caring, reliable and honest. Like us, they too are in the midst of becoming a B Corp and share our values round growing brands sustainably.
These formulations are deeply rooted in science. Over 50 independent scientific studies have confirmed Food-Grown® nutrients’ marked superiority in terms of absorption and retention when compared with more mainstream synthetic alternatives. The company owns the trademark for Food-Grown® supplementation in the UK, US, EU and parts of Asia.
While getting to know the team and working closely with them to build a growth plan, we were impressed by their strong customer-centric internal culture and the calibre of the team led by the CEO Chris Dodson, who joined from Google. The current Chairman is Steve Clark, an investor and on the board of the international digital jewellery brand Monica Vinader, another Piper investment. Steven Schapera, co-founder of BECCA Cosmetics, is also a significant shareholder and serves as a NED.
They have helped drive impressive run rate sales of £5m, on the back of an industry-leading client satisfaction Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 82. It’s stocked in premium high street retailers such Selfridges, Harrods, Wholefoods and Planet Organic, while its online sales have grown by 124% over the last year, especially via monthly subscriptions.
We are excited about growing Wild Nutrition’s community and transforming more lives with their supplements. There is still a lot of educating to be done in a large and fast-growing market where 35m people in the UK (66% of all consumers) take supplements, a figure that is growing by 9% annually. This is especially important as Covid has accelerated the adoption of supplements, with more than 30% of the public taking a food supplement for the first time since the pandemic hit.
At Piper, we are big believers in helping people take more control over their health, a consumer need that Covid has accelerated online. It is the tenth investment in our latest fund and the fifth in the digital wellness space, having also invested in leading wellbeing brand Neom Organics, smart indoor cycling brand Wattbike, healthy recipe box brand Mindful Chef and group exercise fitness brand Frame.
Our investment will allow Wild Nutrition to transform more people’s lives through better nutrition by investing in the team, driving online growth in the UK, building on its international business, and bringing out a range of innovative new products that look after the whole family at every life stage.