Typhoo Tea falls into adminstration | EUROtoday

Typhoo Tea has fallen into administration because the 120-year-old model’s gross sales hunch, losses widen and money owed rise.

Advisory agency Kroll has been appointed to deal with the administration and discover a purchaser for the tea enterprise.

Vape and battery maker Supreme is entrance runner to purchase Typhoo, nevertheless it mentioned there was “no certainty” a deal will go forward.

Typhoo has been attempting to show itself round for a while, nevertheless it suffered a setback after trespassers broken its former manufacturing unit in Moreton, Merseyside final 12 months.

“The company has been exploring a sale of the business and assets which is in the process of concluding,” Kroll mentioned.

“The administration process provides Typhoo Tea with protection, allowing the Joint Administrators to finalise the sale in order to rescue the business.”

Manchester-based Supreme, which shares and distributes Duracell and Energiser batteries in addition to Elf Bar vapes, is on the cusp of shopping for the agency in an try and diversify its enterprise.

It doesn’t presently inventory or distribute any tea manufacturers, nevertheless it does work with manufacturers of soppy drinks, fitness center dietary supplements and multivitamin gummies.

Supreme mentioned talks have been at an “advanced stage” however that “no final terms of the potential acquisition have been agreed”.

Kroll added that Typhoo had been coping with “significant cash flow constraints as a result of supply chain disruptions and subsequent service issues”.

According to the agency’s newest outcomes, which cowl the 12 months 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.

Meanwhile, the corporate’s money owed have ballooned to larger than the worth of its property.

The outcomes additionally revealed £24.1m value of “exceptional costs”, a few of which relate to the break-in on the Moreton plant, which was shut down final 12 months.

Typhoo mentioned: “During August 2023, a group of organised trespassers broke into the Moreton site and occupied it for several days.”

It added that the trespassers brought on “extensive damage” and made the positioning “inaccessible”.

Typhoo mentioned lots of tea was rendered unusable and it was unable to fulfil some orders to clients.

Typhoo Tea is extensively seen as one of many UK’s foremost tea manufacturers, alongside the likes of PG Tips, Tetley and Yorkshire Tea.

The Bristol-headquartered firm was based by Birmingham-born John Sumner in 1903. It is presently majority-owned by personal fairness agency Zetland Capital.

Its administration comes simply two months after the corporate revamped its model with “Fear Free Tea”, a marketing campaign highlighting violence and abuse within the tea provide chain.

Typhoo mentioned it didn’t assure that its personal product was “fear free”, however that it “invites the tea industry to question and assess whether their teas are free of sexual violence”.

The 2023 BBC Panorama documentary Sex for Work: The True Cost of our Tea discovered that three in 4 girls interviewed at tea plantations had suffered sexual abuse.