Why we Invested in Mammaly: creating a category leader in functional snacks and supplements for pets
At Five Seasons Ventures, we like to invest in European category leaders in Food Tech. Our approach is both opportunistic as conviction driven, the latter we create by building a ‘point of view’ on a certain market. When we investigated the EU Pet Food market (already a few years back in 2018), we immediately got hooked on its many promising trends: humanization of pets that goes hand in hand with premiumization, pet food moving online due to poor offline shopping experience and the ability to offer more than food to the same customer (think customization, services and accessories), and of course a huge TAM with room for local champions to gain scale quickly.
And when we found Mammaly, we knew we wanted to back them because they tick all the boxes.
Creating a new category leveraging the humanization trend: Functional Pet Snacks & Supplements
Our research concluded that the humanisation of pets is following the trend of human preferences being projected on pet nutrition choices (think plant based, organic, functional food) and the trend towards food supplements is also growing stronger rapidly (6.1% CAGR for functional snacks vs. 5.4% for regular pet food). Pet parents want to offer their dog all the nutrients they need, and often have the perception that most of the current food offerings fall short on that front. Mammaly taps into this opportunity with their supplements in the form of functional snacks, that are not only a pleasure to feed to the dogs, but also solve key issues like teeth health and digestion.
First mover advantage
Today’s functional snacks and pet supplement market is still relatively new in Europe, and we believe it will grow fast in the coming years due to humanization and premiumization of the market, and with Mammaly we are ready to take a large part of its share. We do not only have a first mover advantage in the category, but also focus strongly on the home market Germany, which is in value the second largest market for pets in Europe (just after the UK). However, ambitions go beyond the boundaries of the DACH region, and due to its effective sales model (100% direct-to-consumer through its own website), we are set up to scale fast and leverage on the first mover advantage.
The founding team: vision& execution
Mammaly only launched commercially in 2020 and has since then been growing almost 40% MoM with no signs of slowing down. Their online community of pet-lovers is already at nearly 11k followers on Instagram and 10k on Facebook, and the team grew to 25 professionals over the course of 11 months since launch. This is all made possible by co-founders Alex and Stan, who, in our eyes, possess two important founder features: execution strength and vision. They are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get the nitty-gritty work of an early-stage startup done, but also dream big and set up the company for growth.
With regards to our €3m investment in Mammaly, we are convinced we found our category builder in functional snacks and supplements for pets and look forward to supporting Stan and Alex on the journey to build the European champion in the space.
