Profile Capital takes a bite of Little Dish

US-based investment company Profile Capital Management has taken a stake in the UK’s Little Dish, which manufactures food for toddlers and small children. This will help Little Dish achieve its ambition of conquering the US market.

Little Dish was founded in 2006 and has gone from strength to strength, achieving sales of £12m ($19.7m) in 2014, up from £0.5m in its first year.

This is not Little Dish’s first encounter with investment fund operators. In 2005 the founders of the company raised £0.45m seed funding from a group of angel investors. Three years later, Greenmont Capital Partners invested £1.5m in Little Dish.

The latest move has seen Profile Capital Management take an undisclosed stake in Little Dish for £17m ($21.8m). Founder of the company Hillary Graves and her husband and CEO Dean Brown will retain “significant ownership” of Little Dish, although Graves has previously stated that she would consider a float or sale of the company at some time in the future.

Earlier this year, Little Dish had announced its intention to enter the lucrative US market. In the UK, there are some 1.56 million toddlers aged between one and three years', while there are five times as many children in the target age group in the US at 7.92 million.

Demand is growing for top quality baby food, including HPP products, which require refrigeration. Meanwhile the toddler segment for shelf-stable foods is already clearly delineated in the US, as demonstrated by the strength of Nestlé’s Gerber Graduates brand.

Little Dish is now hoping to exploit both these trends to create a chilled toddler food segment in the US, as it has already done in the UK.