Modern Milkman founder and CEO Simon Mellin is moving to the US to oversee the company鈥檚 growth plans Stateside.
The move follows the firm鈥檚 acquisition of its US namesake Modern Milkman.
Mellin expects much of the business鈥檚 growth in the next few years to come from the US, as it focuses on profitability in the UK.
老九品茶Cloud understands Mellin will be moving to the States to grow the business there but plans to divide his time between the US and UK moving forward.
Mellin turned his attention to the US after a chance discovery on the internet.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a funny story,鈥� he admitted. 鈥淲e founded Modern Milkman and bought the domain name Modernmilkman.co.uk around the time of October 2018.
鈥淎t the same time, Seth Bahler, a fifth-generation dairy farmer from Connecticut, bought Modernmilkman.com as he wanted a more direct route to market for his milk.
鈥淲e got to know each other through that. I approached him in late 2022 and asked how he would feel about doing something together, and we got on really well.
鈥淭here were great synergies there: he had all the supply chain knowledge and we had all the front-end knowledge. We decided to merge the businesses on January 1, 2024. It really was fate.鈥�
UK鈥檚 fastest-growing company Modern Milkman buys US namesake
The company reported pre-tax losses of 拢23m in 2022, while increasing turnover by 84 per cent to 拢45.5m in the same year.
The figures for 2023 are yet to be published but are expected to show a consolidation of turnover and a narrowing of the losses, with the plan to break even at group level in 2024.
Modern Milkman moved its headquarters from Colne to Manchester in 2023 to aid their recruitment.
Mellin has also revealed the company had ended its French operations after the market changed.
He said: 鈥淭here鈥檚 an old saying: 鈥樌暇牌凡鑕s don鈥檛 die from starvation, they die from indigestion鈥�. You can put too much capital into a company, and you see this a lot in tech companies.
鈥淲e had to go very quickly from growth at all costs to optimisation of capital efficiency. Luckily, we had a strong underlying business that we knew could generate margins.
鈥淎ll we did was shut down a lot of the moonshot stuff 鈥� and France was one of those things we were trying to get to work 鈥� and focus on the core market in the UK.鈥�
EnviroTech 50 star Modern Milkman backed by Praetura Ventures