Fleury Michon Buys Allplants as UK Plant-Based Sales Fall

French food group Fleury Michon bought 100% of UK plant-based brand Allplants on 20 October 2026. The Pouzauges statement said the deal takes in commercial operations, teams and brand rights, on about €5 million ($5.6 million) of full-year sales and earnings near break-even. The price was not disclosed.

Fleury Michon said the UK plant-based market is more developed than France and that Allplants gives it a platform for its own veg range. The brand has already failed once, been bought out of administration by Ella and Matthew Mills, and now changes hands again after 20 months.

Fleury Michon Closes a Same-Day Purchase of Allplants

Signing and closing happened on the same Tuesday. Félix Fleury and Lucien Michon founded Fleury Michon in 1905 in the Vendée, and the group still presents itself as a family-controlled maker of ham, chilled meals and seafood snacks. Allplants is a rounding error on that base: the buyer said the UK activity is less than 1% of group sales, which were €836.4 million in 2025.

Allplants sells frozen plant-based ready meals, veggie burgers and bites, pasta sauces, tomato sauces, and filled pasta such as tortelloni. The range sits in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Ocado and Whole Foods Market, and still has a direct-to-consumer channel. Managing director Kerry Atack, who has run the business through the Mills years, stays in post.

WHAT THE DEAL TAKES AND LEAVES

• Included: Commercial activities, the UK teams, and rights to the Allplants brand.
• Left out of the price: The purchase price itself, which Fleury Michon did not publish.
• Not in the perimeter: The original Allplants recipes, which already went to another buyer, and the Surrey factory Matthew Mills bought in May.

Fleury Michon called the two businesses complementary and said the purchase strengthens its international footprint, which already accounted for 13% of 2025 sales. The more practical reading is distribution. The group is buying a sales platform in British grocery rather than a high-growth vegan champion.

Twenty Months From Rescue to a Second Exit

Ella Mills and her husband Matthew founded Deliciously Ella in 2012 and sold it to Switzerland’s Hero Group in September 2024. They kept Plants, a Waitrose-born line launched in 2022, and on 12 February 2025 they bought the Allplants name and brand assets from administrators at Interpath. Ella Mills said then that Plants and Allplants would become “a new, natural, plant-based powerhouse.”

The pair rebranded Plants as Allplants that same month. Atack, who had worked with them at Deliciously Ella, stayed as managing director. In April 2026 Matthew Mills left his UK manager role at Hero. In May he bought Fairoak Foods out of administration, a 6,700 sq ft Surrey plant, and put it under Cookplants Holdings as Fairoak Culinary, talking about in-house manufacturing for Allplants.

Five months later they sold the brand. Mills remains a brand ambassador. Atack said the French owner had grown veg-led lines at home and that the deal would let Allplants put new ranges into UK shops. Matthew Mills treated the close as a second founder exit.

On a personal level, having now built and sold both Deliciously Ella and Allplants, it’s a particularly meaningful milestone for Ella and me. We’ve spent 12 years working together to build food businesses that we genuinely believe in, and it’s enormously rewarding to see both brands continuing their journeys under the ownership of established international food groups.

Matthew Mills, co-owner of Allplants until 20 October 2026

Law firm CMS, which also worked on the Deliciously Ella sale, handled the Allplants disposal on a compressed timetable. David Roberts, a partner at CMS UK, said the couple had a knack for building and exiting food brands and that he suspected this would not be the last. Mills said he now wants more time on Fairoak Culinary, the soup and sauces plant, plus a distribution operation and a media business, and he still handles UK rights to Fruit Riot, a sugar-coated frozen grape line that reached Tesco in March.

Jonathan Petrides Raised £67 Million Before Administration

The name Fleury Michon is buying is not the company that burned through venture money. Brothers Jonathan and Alex Petrides started Allplants in 2016 as a frozen vegan meal delivery brand, later adding retail. Backers including Molten Ventures, Felix Capital and The Craftory put in £67 million, some of it from crowd investors.

ALLPLANTS FROM FOUNDING TO THIS SALE

1. 2016: Jonathan Petrides founds Allplants in London as a frozen vegan meal brand.
2. 2022: Sales peak at £9.2 million, with about 175 staff and a 43,000 sq ft east London factory.
3. Seven months to 31 March 2023: Sales fall to £4.1 million and the company posts a £9.9 million loss, after an £11 million loss the year before.
4. 10 months to 31 October 2024: Sales are £2.7 million with a £2.3 million operating loss; cumulative losses since 2016 reach almost £38 million.
5. 22 November 2024: Interpath’s Will Wright and Howard Smith are appointed administrators; 65 staff are made redundant and production stops.
6. 12 February 2025: Ella and Matthew Mills buy the brand name and related assets; Grubby later takes the original recipes.
7. 20 October 2026: Fleury Michon acquires 100% of Allplants, with Atack remaining as managing director.

Administrators put creditors at about £13 million, most of it £11 million of venture debt owed to TriplePoint Capital against the London factory. Employees were owed £770,000, HMRC £262,000 and trade suppliers £826,000. A £3.5 million equity raise failed in summer 2024 after a further £2 million from existing backers in June. The original business is gone. What remains is a brand, a team, and grocery slots.

The UK Market Called More Developed Is Shrinking

Fleury Michon’s case for the deal is that Britain’s plant-based aisle is further along than France’s. In cash terms the UK is still larger. In direction, it is the market going backwards.

The Good Food Institute Europe, using Circana supermarket data that excludes major discounters, put UK plant-based retail across six segments at £847.8 million in 2025, down 1.2% in value and 2.5% in volume. Plant-based meat, the closest cousin to a ready-meal brand, fell to £294.6 million, down 7.3% in value and 9.4% in volume. France’s plant-based sales rose 11.4% to €571.7 million, with volumes up 13.3%. Germany, the largest European market in the same set, rose 3.1% to €1.71 billion.

PLANT-BASED RETAIL IN 2025

The format Allplants actually occupies is weaker still. Research cited this month by frozen-pizza maker One Planet Pizza put the whole UK frozen ready-meal market at £466 million, up 9.2% in value, while vegetable and plant-based frozen meals were down 9.6%. Chilled meat-free meals were up 12.7% and reached 30.6% of households, against 17.8% for frozen. NIQ had already recorded a £37.1 million drop in meat-free sales in the year to June 2024, the slide that sat behind the first Allplants collapse.

So the “more developed” market is the bigger one, and it is the one that shrank. France is smaller and is the one that grew. Fleury Michon is not buying a boom. It is buying shelf space in a category that has already shaken out independents.

What Fleury Michon Already Sells as Plant-Based

The buyer’s core is still cooked meat and catering products for French supermarkets, plus airline catering through MarfoFMA. Plant-based is a side bet that has worked in one chilled deli format at home, not in frozen vegan meals.

Tranches Végé, whole-legume vegetarian slices launched in April 2024, is the proof point the group keeps citing. In the 2025 results it said Tranches Végé volumes more than doubled and held above 70% of volume in a still-small segment. The veggie-slice market itself was €27 million, up 91%, with Fleury Michon at 64.7% share. That is a French chilled success. It is not a UK frozen-meal engine.

FLEURY MICHON SALES BY POLE

France retail still did the heavy lifting, with volumes up 4.4%. Individual cooked meals rose 8.8% in volume against a market up 1.1%. Operating profit barely moved, to €12.2 million from €12.3 million, a 1.5% margin, after poultry costs jumped on avian flu and strong global demand. Net profit from continuing operations fell to €8.4 million from €13.3 million. Consolidated net profit was €13.6 million, down from €47.8 million, because 2024 still carried a large gain on sold activities, including the group’s stake in Spanish meals firm Platos Tradicionales.

International sales, mostly airline catering, rose 10.2% to €110.9 million. To feed that, Fleury Michon has a factory project in Covington, Kentucky, with spending spread across 2026 and 2027. Allplants does not sit in that story. It sits in grocery, as a cheap way to put a plant-based label in Tesco and Waitrose without building a UK sales force from nothing.

Recipes, a Factory and the Brand Split Three Ways

The asset has already been carved up. When the Mills bought the name in February 2025, the original recipes and manufacturing methods were not in the deal. Recipe-kit firm Grubby took that intellectual property the following month and put part of the old frozen range back on sale in August 2025. Fleury Michon is buying the Mills-era Allplants, which grew out of Plants, not the Petrides meals that raised the venture money.

The factory the Mills bought in May stays with them. Matthew Mills said he will keep running Fairoak Culinary. Whether that Surrey site still cooks for Allplants under French ownership has not been said. Cookplants Holdings also holds the Fruit Riot distribution rights. Deliciously Ella remains with Hero Group.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The close: Fleury Michon owns 100% of Allplants as of 20 October 2026, with Atack still managing director and the Mills as brand ambassadors.
• The run-rate: The activity is about €5 million of sales in a full year, with EBITDA near break-even, and less than 1% of group turnover.
• The other owners: Grubby holds the original recipes; Mills holds Fairoak Culinary; Hero Group holds Deliciously Ella.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The price: Fleury Michon has not disclosed what it paid.
• The factory link: It is not public whether Fairoak remains a supplier to Allplants after the sale.
• UK history: The group has not said whether Allplants is its first branded grocery business in Britain.

The first annual results that can include Allplants are due after the market close on 6 April 2027. Until then the brand is a small British sales office inside a French ham and meals group, in a UK plant-based market that is larger than France’s and no longer growing. Matthew Mills said he is heading back to the soup and sauces plant he pulled out of administration in May.