Oddbox – Eat Good. Do Good. Stay Odd.
Oddbox is a fruit and vegetable box delivery service based in London. This social impact business, fighting food waste on the UK’s farms, was co-founded by husband-and-wife team Emilie Vanpoperinghe and Deepak Ravindran. This eCommerce business offers consumers the choice of regularity of order and size of the boxes received, direct to their home through a mobile app. Oddbox has a strong management team with significant e-retail and platform experience from global brands such as Tesco, Uber and Coca-Cola.
Mercia’s Northern VCTs initially invested £2.0million into the business in March 2020 to provide support for its growth ambition to extend its geographical footprint outside of London. The business continues to flourish and has announced plans to expand operations to South Wales and Southwest England, increasing its delivery radius to an additional 700,000 households.
Pure Pet Food – Fresh natural food | Long healthy lives.
West Yorkshire-based Pure Pet Food is an online direct to consumer manufacturer of natural health food for dogs and cats. Its mission is to provide pets with customised, healthy, convenient pet food through differentiated air dried or dehydrated recipes. Mercia’s Northern VCTs invested an initial £2.0million to support co-founders Mathew Cockroft and Daniel Valdur Eha develop a more personalised offering. The appointment of an in-house technology team to build a bespoke customer-facing platform allows the acquisition of data to enable intelligent marketing and customised recipes for improved customer retention.
Pure Pet Food’s growth has accelerated during the pandemic with pet owners opting for online convenience, and this is set to double the company’s run rate revenue. A recent follow-on investment from Mercia’s Northern VCTs and its managed funds will ensure sufficient working capital to support this continued growth.