Allplants, the vegan meal brand launched by the founders of Deliciously Ella, has been scooped up by France’s Fleury Michon, which will leverage the former’s platform to expand its plant-based footprint in the UK.
In their second exit in many years, the founders of Deliciously Ella have sold their Allplants brand to French food behemoth Fleury Michon.
Ella and Matthew Mills established the business as Plants, a subsidiary of Deliciously Ella, in partnership with British retailer Waitrose in 2022. But after selling the latter to Switzerland’s Hero Group, they rebranded it as Allplants, following their takeover of the vegan meal startup’s brand name and assets in early 2025.
Now, Allplants is changing hands again, with Fleury Michon completing the transaction this week, which included all of the brand’s marketing activities, teams and brand rights.
Ella Mills will continue as brand ambassador of the new brand, while Allplants managing director Kerry Atack will stay on in her role under the new ownership.
“What started as a small idea – something we talked about around the kitchen table at home – has grown into a much-loved brand on supermarket shelves across the country,” Mills said in an Instagram post.
“We’ve sold millions of products and helped to show that natural, plant-based is an exciting space again. And today marks a really exciting new chapter in that journey, as we’re incredibly excited to share that we have completed the sale of all plants to the Fleury Michon Group.”
Allplants close to breaking even after multimillion-dollar turnover
The Allplants name was associated with a plant-based ready meal startup founded by Alex and Jonathan Petrides in 2016. After capitalising on the pandemic-era boom of at-home eating, it suffered widespread losses thanks to inflation, post-Brexit supply chain disruptions, rising interest rates, and other factors, forcing the business into administration in 2024.
While Allplants’s recipes were acquired and relaunched in the market by fellow vegan meal brand Grubby, the Millses sought to capitalise on its social media presence (it had nearly 200,000 followers) with their purchase of the brand assets.
They took on the Allplants name to supercharge the growth of their existing Plants brand, which was not part of the Deliciously Ella sale. The brand has since rolled out a range of frozen ready meals, veggie burgers, snacks, pasta, sauces, and protein-packed dishes in supermarkets across the UK.
In May, Matthew Mills bought private-label manufacturer Fairoak Foods out of administration. The deal included its 6,700 sq ft factory in Surrey, saving 60 jobs and giving Allplants a way to expand its portfolio and production footprint by bringing manufacturing in-house.
According to Fleury Michon, Allplants recorded around €5M ($5.6M) in annual turnover and is close to breaking even on its EBITDA (revenue excluding all non-operational and one-time expenses).
The brand will initially make up under 1% of Fleury Michon’s revenue, but will serve as a springboard for the French food major’s plant-based expansion in the UK.
For now, that’s an uphill battle. Analysis by plant-based food startup One Planet Pizza showed that the value of frozen ready meals is growing by 9.2% in the UK, but meat-free options are suffering from a 9.6% decline.
“Yet chilled meat-free meals were growing by 12.7% and reaching far more households: 30.6%, compared with 17.8% for frozen,” One Planet Pizza co-founder Joe Hill told Green Queen this week. “That suggested there was an opportunity to give more people a reason to choose meat-free meals from the freezer.”
Fleury Michon looks to take on more mature UK plant-based market
Fleury Michon has been around since 1905 and is listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange, but its founding families still hold a controlling stake in the business.
The company employs more than 3,200 people across 10 production sites in France, and posted a turnover of over €836M ($941M) in 2025. It sells cooked deli meats, ready meals, and imitation crab, alongside lentil “matchsticks”, veggie meals, and vegetarian deli slices made from legumes.
“In France, our groundbreakingly innovative veggie products range has brought exceptional incremental growth and attracted new shoppers to the category,” Xavier Labelle, managing director of Fleury Michon’s commerce and development division, told the Grocer.
Through the acquisition, the French firm aims to strengthen its international footprint and long-term growth prospects, gaining a solid foundation to accelerate the launch of its plant-based range in the UK and capitalise on a meat-free market more developed than France.
“Together, we will take our ambitions for the plant-led vegetarian and vegan category to the next stage, with the support of a team who have had enormous success in the French market with an extremely innovative, all-natural veg-led range, accelerating huge category growth and incrementality,” said Atack.
“Our shared ambition to make healthy, natural food accessible and enjoyable every day will supercharge Allplants’s growth and enable us to bring some truly innovative ranges to the UK market in the coming months and years.”
The acquisition is the latest in a long list of consolidation deals in the alternative protein category. Green Queen analysis shows that since September 2024, more than 90 firms in this space have been bought out, merged, fallen into insolvency, or shut down.
