Boost Juice Bars receives £2.5m BGF investment

02 January 2013 by
Boost Juice Bars receives £2.5m BGF investment

Manchester-based Boost Juice Bars UK has received a £2.5m investment from the Business Growth Fund (BGF).

The BGF will take a minority stake in the business which specialises in the sale of freshly-made smoothies and juices.

Boost currently operates ten stores across the UK including Manchester's Trafford Centre and Piccadilly train station, London's Westfield White City and Westfield Stratford, Meadowhall Sheffield and Bristol's Cribbs Causeway.

Boost was founded in Adelaide by Janine Allis in 2003 and has nearly 200 sites throughout Australia alone. It also operates in over 20 other countries including South Africa, Chile, Estonia, Germany, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, China and Russia.

Boost was established in the UK in 2007 when Richard and Dawn O'Sullivan, the team behind Millies Cookies acquired the rights to exclusively operate Boost Juice Bars in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. In the financial year ended September 2012 the business generated turnover of £4m.

Richard and Dawn O'Sullivan along with chairman Bill Holroyd and finance director Martin Burrill were the team behind Millie's Cookies, which grew to over 100 stores before its sale to Compass Group in June 2003 for £24m.

Richard O'Sullivan has been the non-executive Chairman of Barburrito, a chain of fast-casual Mexican restaurants for the last four years. Barburrito, already sitting within the BGF portfolio, was the first business based in the North of England to receive BGF funding earlier this year.

BGF will take a minority stake in Boost and Andy Gregory will join the board. BGF's £2.5m investment will help accelerate the company's roll-out programme to grow its existing store portfolio of 10 stores to around 40 stores over the next three years.

Richard O'Sullivan, chief executive of Boost said: "Having achieved our target number of test stores along with our move into healthy profitability over the last year, we are now well positioned to expand the business to a further 30 locations over the next few years. Having financed the business almost entirely from our own funds to this point, we decided to seek some outside growth capital to service the next phase of this expansion.

Andy Gregory, BGF's regional director for the North of England, said: "I am delighted to announce BGF's investment in Boost. From the outset we recognised that this is a company with a fantastic product range, supported by a strong and dynamic brand. Richard, Dawn and the rest of the management team are highly experienced in this sector and you only need to look at the success they had previously in executing a very similar rollout with Millie's Cookies, taking it from an initial few sites to over 100 locations to understand our confidence in them. In Boost, we are backing an established, proven concept with significant roll-out potential."

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