Typhoo Tea has fallen into management because the 120-year-old logo’s gross sales hunch, losses widen and money owed upward thrust.
Advisory company Kroll has been appointed to maintain the management and discover a purchaser for the tea trade.
Vape and battery maker Preferrred is entrance runner to shop for Typhoo, nevertheless it stated there used to be “no simple task” a deal will cross forward.
Typhoo has been looking to flip itself round for a while, nevertheless it suffered a setback after trespassers broken its former manufacturing unit in Moreton, Merseyside closing yr.
“The corporate has been exploring a sale of the trade and belongings which is within the means of concluding,” Kroll stated.
“The management procedure supplies Typhoo Tea with coverage, permitting the Joint Directors to finalise the sale with the intention to rescue the trade.”
Manchester-based Preferrred, which shares and distributes Duracell and Energiser batteries in addition to Elf Bar vapes, is at the cusp of shopping for the company in an try to diversify its trade.
It does no longer recently inventory or distribute any tea manufacturers, nevertheless it does paintings with manufacturers of soppy beverages, gymnasium dietary supplements and multivitamin gummies.
Preferrred stated talks had been at an “complex degree” however that “no ultimate phrases of the prospective acquisition had been agreed”.
Kroll added that Typhoo were coping with “vital money go with the flow constraints because of provide chain disruptions and next carrier problems”.
Consistent with the company’s newest effects, which duvet the yr to the tip of September 2023, pre-tax losses widened to £38m from £9.6m and gross sales fell to £25.3m from £33.7m.
In the meantime, the corporate’s money owed have ballooned to bigger than the price of its belongings.
The consequences additionally published £24.1m value of “outstanding prices”, a few of which relate to the break-in on the Moreton plant, which used to be close down closing yr.
Typhoo stated: “All over August 2023, a gaggle of organised trespassers broke into the Moreton web page and occupied it for a number of days.”
It added that the trespassers led to “in depth injury” and made the web page “inaccessible”.
Typhoo stated numerous tea used to be rendered unusable and it used to be not able to fulfil some orders to shoppers.
Typhoo Tea is extensively observed as one of the vital UK’s major tea manufacturers, along the likes of PG Pointers, Tetley and Yorkshire Tea.
The Bristol-headquartered corporate used to be based via Birmingham-born John Sumner in 1903. It’s recently majority-owned via non-public fairness company Zetland Capital.
Its management comes simply two months after the corporate remodeled its logo with “Concern Unfastened Tea”, a marketing campaign highlighting violence and abuse within the tea provide chain.
Typhoo stated it didn’t make sure that its personal product used to be “worry unfastened”, however that it “invitations the tea business to query and assess whether or not their teas are freed from sexual violence”.
The 2023 BBC Landscape documentary Intercourse for Paintings: The True Value of our Tea discovered that 3 in 4 ladies interviewed at tea plantations had suffered sexual abuse.
