Food Thoughts has acquired vegan confectionery challenger Doisy & Dam from Nurture Brands to expand the ethical home baking brand into a new category.
It follows the sale of Indie Bay Snacks to Kestrel Foods earlier this month as Nurture Brands slims down its portfolio to focus on core, high-growth brands.
Food Thoughts and Doisy & Dam will come together to form an ethical, plant-based chocolate proposition across home baking and snacking, The Grocer can reveal.
“Doisy & Dam is synonymous with great-tasting, ethical, plant-based chocolate and is a brand with a loyal consumer following across the UK and EU,” Food Thoughts MD Mark Gould said.
“Adding Doisy & Dam to our ethical cocoa powder brand, Food Thoughts, provides us with an exciting plant-based chocolate proposition across snacking and home baking. As a certified B Corp brand that avoids using palm oil and commits 1% of its revenue to Borneo Orangutan Society, Doisy & Dam also sits perfectly with our ethical values, and we will continue to make this our priority.”
Nurture Brands rescued Doisy & Dam from administration in 2022. Founded by Richard Wilkinson and Ed Smith in 2012, the brand today supplies a range of vegan, palm oil-free chocolate products, made with ethically sourced cocoa, to the likes of Boots, Ocado, Holland & Barrett, Amazon and Planet Organic, as well as premium wholesalers and independents. Its chocolate is positioned as a healthier alternative to big-name brands such as M&M’s, Maltesers and Buttons.
The deal, for an undisclosed price, is part of Nurture Brands’ strategy to concentrate on fewer high-growth brands.
Nurture MD Adam Draper added: “As Nurture Brands consolidates its resources around Rebel Kitchen, Emily and Jax Coco, I am delighted to see Doisy & Dam go forward and become an important part of Fairtrade Ltd and I wish Mark all the best.”
Food Thoughts sells a range of premium and ethical home baking products, including cocoa and cacao powder, chocolate chips and cacao nibs.
The business traces its origins back more than 25 years ago when Oxfam created a fairly traded cocoa powder, which was a UK first back in the 1980s. The anti-poverty charity worked with brand-building agency Product Chain to commercialise the product and created the Food Thoughts brand.
Ownership of the brand later transferred to Product Chain, which continued to run the brand under CEO Fiona Esom. Earlier this year, Food Thoughts was sold to Gould, a food industry veteran and a founder of cereal bar maker Wholebake, where he spent almost 20 years.
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