With a marketing campaign in full swing, London’s Manilife aims to exceed £8m ($10.3m) in turnover next year as the peanut butter business opens its first plant.
Manilife is moving away from a contract manufacturer to bring production in-house and is investing £1m in the new factory in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, in the English Midlands. The facility is set to be up and running in the first quarter.
“It will more than double our capacity and gives us a strong runway moving forward,” MD Jonny Bullivant told Just Food.
“At the moment, we’re manufacturing 50,000 to 60,000 jars a week and capacity in the new plant will be 150,000 jars a week, should we require it. The idea is that we grow into that in the coming years.”
Set up in 2015 by Stuart Macdonald, Manilife’s range includes Deep Roast Crunchy, Original Roast Smooth and Original Roast Crunchy. It also has organic varieties, a salted caramel SKU and almond butters, while the company has recently expanded into bagged snacking peanuts.
Manilife will hire ten workers on the back of the factory project, taking the headcount to 24, Bullivant said.
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Turnover this year is expected to rise to around £6.1m from £4.2m in 2023 and is on course for “north of £8m” in the new financial year, he added.
“It’s always been part of our long-term strategy that we would manufacture our product ourselves. And we feel like we’ve reached a tipping point where it’s the right thing for us to press on with,” Bullivant said.
While Manilife serves the retail and foodservice channels, Tesco has recently been added to the roster, joining the likes of Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Ocado.
“We’ve just done our first out-of-home billboard campaign in London and we combine that with a digital marketing campaign,” Bullivant said. “That’s an important moment for us because it hopefully drives brand awareness.”
Manilife is a B-Corp-certified business, sourcing its peanuts from a family-owned farm in Argentina.
Explaining what sets the company apart from the competition, Bullivant said: “We can see a clear shift to products which don’t use stabilising ingredients, so peanut butters without palm oil. That area of the market is seeing growth and the traditional areas of the market that contain those ingredients are seeing a decline.”
Manilife has received around £3m in external financing over a number of rounds, including private investors and seed funding on Seedrs, Bullivant confirmed, as the company has its eyes on expanding beyond the UK into new markets.
“Our business is predominantly in the UK. Internationally, we have ambitions,” he said.
“We have had pockets of strong business in Germany before and other European countries. That’s something we’re really wanting to press on with now in the next couple of years, growing our international business, predominantly through the DACH region.
“We set up a German subsidiary earlier this year to help us service that market.”
Manilife is not too fazed by the implications of the UK budget measures revealed by the new Labour government last week. Bullivant said the increase in the national minimum wage “doesn’t change our plans”.
The MD added: “National insurance rises are going to impact every business but it doesn’t change the direction of travel for us. We’re still on a positive trajectory and bringing manufacturing in-house is absolutely the right thing for us to do.”
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