Cavendish Corporate Finance, the UK’s leading sell-side mid-market M&A firm, has advised fast-growing healthy recipe box brand Mindful Chef on securing £6m of further investment from Piper, the specialist consumer brand investor.

Founded by childhood school friends Rob Grieg-Gran, Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper, Mindful Chef looks to make healthy eating easy. Since its launch in 2015 it has experienced rapid growth – including a 178% rise in sales in the past year – delivering nearly two million meals to UK consumers. Based in Wandsworth, London, the brand has annualised sales of £10m and employs 27 people.

With its focus on making healthy eating easy, all Mindful Chef’s meals are healthy and nutritionally balanced, are gluten and dairy free, containing no refined carbs or sugars. All the ingredients are fresh, high quality and sustainably sourced from local farmers where possible. Each week 16 different recipes are available for customers to select from.

For many customers, Mindful Chef has ignited or rekindled the enjoyment of cooking and a delight in discovering new otherwise difficult to source ingredients and flavours. Customers are also supporting Mindful Chef’s charity One Feeds 2, through their purchases. For every meal purchased, Mindful Chef donates a meal to a child in poverty – to date the company has provided more than 770,000 meals for children in living in poverty.

Tim Lee, previously Head of Food and Online Strategy at Marks & Spencer, joined the business earlier this year as CEO.

Piper’s £6m investment will enable the business to continue to grow and expand its customer base in the UK, helping it capitalise on the rapid growth of the recipe box market, which is forecast to double over the next 10 years.

Cavendish Corporate Finance, which advised Mindful Chef, has an extensive record in direct to consumer and healthy food businesses. Recent high-profile deals include advising on the sales of luxury apparel brand Orlebar Brown to Chanel; smoked salmon producer John Ross Jr. to PR Foods; and subscription wine retailer Naked Wines to Majestic.

The Cavendish team was led by Jonathan Buxton, Partner and Head of Consumer.  Jonathan commented:

“I am delighted to have advised the Mindful Chef team on this significant step towards achieving their ambitions. Mindful Chef is at the forefront of three important trends in the UK food sector: bypassing the old-economy grocers to engage directly with consumers; cutting down waste; and offering healthier, free-from and vegan options. As such, Mindful Chef is ideally placed to prosper with Piper’s support.”