Functional Foods Ingredients Market: A Value Chain Deep Dive

The Challenge

Encore Consumer Capital, a private equity firm with a growing interest in the functional food ingredients sector, sought to identify the most promising investment opportunities across the value chain. While familiar with existing brands and products, they needed a deeper understanding of the entire ecosystem, from growers and processors to distributors and branded products.

The Apex Approach: Mapping the Functional Food Ingredients Landscape

Apex Leaders developed a bespoke market map of the functional food ingredients industry, providing a comprehensive view of the value chain. This included:

• Segmentation: Categorizing nearly 500 unique players into growers, ingredient processors, distributors, and branded product companies.
• Specificity: Focusing exclusively on nutraceutical applications of functional food ingredients (supplements, beverages, snacks, etc.), aligning with the client’s investment interests.
• Detailed Profiles: Including information on core functional food ingredient types (growing, processing, distributing, and products), location, product categorization (supplements, beverages, snacks, etc), diversification outside of core food ingredient sectors, and company size/operations/customers/partners.
• Value Chain Positioning: Indicating company involvement across multiple segments (e.g., companies with both growing and branding operations).
• Executive Identification: Sourcing contact information for CEOs and founders, facilitating outbound deal sourcing.

The Search

Upon intake, our project team developed advisor evaluation criteria with our client and their portfolio management team.