All Good successfully concludes first-ever capital raise

‍

“We’ve bootstrapped the whole way and that is painful at times and often a bit of a luxury because not everybody gets to do that in food and beverage,” says All Good co-founder Matt Morrison. “But we’ve been able to do it, really sucking it up ourselves at times and everybody just throws themselves at the tools in the tough times.”

But the purpose-driven company launched its first equity raise on Snowball Effect late last year, hoping to raise between $500,000 and $1 million on a pre-money valuation of $8 million. It eventually raised just shy of $772,000, representing 7.7 percent of the company.

All Good is majority-owned by its three founders: brothers Chris and Matt Morrison and Simon Coley. They describe themselves as serial social and ethical entrepreneurs who have also created Karma Drinks (spun out of All Good) and Chris Morrison also founded, grew and sold Phoenix Organics.

They launched All Good in 2010, selling the first Fairtrade bananas in New Zealand and it now sells 400,000 bunches a month. It then helped pioneer the oat milk revolution in New Zealand, launching a barista oat milk in 2019, which is being sold in New Zealand supermarkets and cafes and is exported to Asia and the Middle East.

The co-founders wanted to shore up their balance sheet to push the pedal down on the domestic and international expansion of All Good oat milk that started two years ago. They see huge opportunity in countries that have a  growing coffee culture (its oat milk was developed with the world’s leading oat milk manufacturer in Sweden to create a good fit with coffee). 

Their three-year strategy doesn’t involve selling the oat milk internationally through grocery channels, which can be pretty tough in New Zealand and just gets tougher the further away you go, says Morrison. 

The Asia-Pacific oat milk market was estimated to be worth US$353.9 million in 2023 and is expected to double that by 2029.

Under development are smaller packages of oat milk for key Asian markets, flavoured milk variants, and new plant-based dairy products, such as yoghurt and milk, which All Good can sell through its existing distributor channels.

Why crowdfunding?

Startups have a choice of seeking angel or venture capital investment or crowdfunding campaigns. 

Morrison says they choose the latter after successfully raising twice on Snowball Effect’s platform for Karma Drinks.

“I just wasn’t as networked as I probably should have been over the last two to three years – it has been all heads down and driving through Covid and not being out there on the circuit of conferences and stuff where we can run into people who might be interested in funding us,” he says.

Snowball Effect also has a database of people who are genuinely interested in the food and beverage space, and having someone supervise the raise was helpful for a small team of 15 that is “full noise at the coalface driving sales and growing”,  says Morrison.

“If you have a product, you’ve got something that can create some excitement in front of the consumer, and if they’ve seen it in the supermarkets, that gives you a bit of a head start.”

The company attracted a lot of interest from consumers who only invested small amounts but who will act as brand ambassadors and keep the company on track.

“We want investors who actually do put their hands up and go ‘hey, what about this?’ or ‘can you tell me you’re not using this chemical or you’re not getting it from this supplier?’ or ‘what about your packaging?’.  That idea generation or holding us to task thing doesn’t scare us; it’s really useful.”

The financial side

The tough times Morrison refers to were evident after Covid struck. During the 2023 financial year to the end of March All Good turned from making a small profit to a $1.95 million loss, despite experiencing strong growth in the past three years with a compound annual growth rate of 71 percent.

The information memorandum prepared for the crowdfunding campaign said the financial performance was impacted by a sharp rise in international shipping costs, which were more than 300 percent higher than normal due to Covid. 

The costs of shipping from their Swedish manufacturer to New Zealand went from around $7,500 per container in 2019 to $23,000 per container in early 2022, while average shipping times went from 2.5 months to six months.

“It was one of the worst routes in the world to be on but we decided we had to keep the hammer down and had to keep growing and take up the opportunities there were for oat milk. We knew the shipping costs, although they would be absurd, wouldn’t last,” says Morrison.

Those costs are now back at 2019 levels, with the company rebounding to profitability in the first half of the 2024 financial year.

All Good has a contract with Kiwi beverage manufacturer Free Flow to utilise a new plant and start making its oat milk in New Zealand from the middle of 2024, as well as in Sweden, which will improve its margins on that product. 

The company expects to boost revenue by around $2 million to $10 million in the 2024 financial year, lifting to $16 million in FY26 and profit of $2.75 million. The information memorandum also indicated the company would look at starting to pay dividends in mid-2025.

Doing the right thing

All Good has worked with the same 150 Ecuadorian families that supply its Fairtrade and zero-carbon bananas since inception.

Morrison says one of the worst mistakes the company made was around 2016 when it had a lot of containers of bananas on the water when customers complained about quality issues.

“We didn’t react quickly enough.”

At the time it had five 40-foot container loads coming in weekly on a four-week voyage, which meant it had a number of containers already on the water it couldn’t turn back. It soon found itself with a whole bunch of bananas with limited shelf life that didn’t meet supermarkets’ standards.

There were only so many that the local pig farmers could take, and Morrison says it was a tough learning curve at that stage of the business even though their growers responded quickly to get new product in transit.

“You’ve got to become very good at forecasting two to three to four months ahead because those are the sorts of commitments you are making.”

The company has had a number of shipping incidents including piracy, which is rife around South America, and has marine insurance. It also splits shipments into smaller lots so any loss doesn’t lead to it being unable to fulfil sales commitments.

What Morrison thinks the company has done really well is stick to its purpose of delivering FairTrade and organic brands, and behaving in ethical and sustainable ways.

“That hasn’t been too difficult frankly because that is what All Good is about. As soon as you undermine that, then consumers are going to see it a mile off.”

“Doing the right thing and making it an inherent part of the brand from day one means that the outcome for investors and shareholders like ourselves is positive. We don’t feel like it is either/or.”

The company has funded over $3.2 million of development initiatives in banana-grower communities in El Guabo, Ecuador, and its bananas have a net-zero carbon footprint. Emissions from transporting its oat milk from Sweden are offset by native tree replanting in the Solomons and New Zealand.

Exporting to cafe cultures

All Good’s founders have also stuck with scalable products – bananas, soda and oat milk – that have sufficient margins to have a successful business in New Zealand without needing to go offshore until there was good reason, says Morrison.

“It’s about getting a really good domestic business in good shape before you go overseas.”

Exports hit $1.2 million in FY2023, including $800,000 to South Korea and $300,000 to Dubai.

NZTE has been really helpful in finding markets with the biggest opportunities and Morrison says All Good has deliberately skipped going into Australia where the supermarket industry is “brutally competitive and tough to navigate”.

“We can establish the brand really well in Korea with less investment than we would have to put in just to stay alive in Australia, as the Korean market explodes around its coffee culture and the growth of oat milk and plant-based milks.”

The company wants to stick to six to eight Asian cities that have dynamic coffee cultures brewing and high levels of lactose intolerance and “do them well”.  Even feing in 5,000 cafes in Seoul means you’ll still be a very small player in the market because it has such a big growth opportunity, he says.