The company saw its sales boom during the pandemic and generated more than $23 million in revenue over five years, according to Nourish Foods’ page on crowdfunding site Birchal. Earlier this year, it added two new snack brands to its portfolio, Just Add and Offbeat, but appears to have run out of cash after failing to secure financial backing.
Meldrum told investors in a letter that the company had spent two months in negotiations and due diligence to secure investment from a major retailer, which it felt “very confident” would proceed. “Both parties appeared to be heading in the same direction,” she wrote. “The investor, however, decided at the last minute not to proceed, much to our shock.“We are devastated we have come to this point,” she added.“With no capacity to relaunch our crowdfund campaign and no other realistic option to fund the business, we faced the difficult position of considering voluntary administration.”
Nourish Foods appointed TPH Advisory’s Tim Heesh and Mark Everingham as voluntary administrators on Tuesday, ASIC records show.“The business has been placed into voluntary administration due to a lack of working capital required to support the business,” Heesh said in a statement on Wednesday. “The owners had been attempting to secure a financial investment partner over the past few months, however time has run out and their working capital requirement became urgent.
Nourish Foods has supply deals with Coles, Woolworths, Chemist Warehouse and some airlines, and also inked deals with major Singapore grocery chain NTUC FairPrice and New Zealand supermarket chain Countdown.