UK-based soft drinks and spirits producer Mallows Bottling & Beverages has raised a new “seven-figure” investment to go towards trebling its production capacity.
The exact size of the investment was not disclosed. Mallows has raised around around £8m ($10.2m) since its establishment in 2021, the business told Just Drinks.
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Managed by father-and-son Andrew and Rhys Mallows, the company provides contract bottling services for leading global spirits and soft drinks producers worldwide at its 30,000 square foot site in Tonyrefail, Wales.
It also produces three spirits brands: Rummer’s rum, Charlie Parry’s Bourbon whiskey and Mallows gin which are sold through specialty retailers in the UK.
The cash injection came from the Development Bank of Wales, sourced from the £500m Wales Flexible Investment Fund, financed in part by the Welsh government and the Development Bank.
Mallows said the new sum will go towards purchasing a new bottle filler for white-label spirits and soft drinks that can make “up to 6,000 bottles per hour, creating five high-speed lines.”
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By GlobalDataSpeaking to Just Drinks, joint managing director of the group Rhys Mallows said the company looked to increase annual production capacity levels from 90 million bottles to 200 million bottles by March 2025.
“We’ve been working on this for eight months,” he said, “so it’s not like we’re starting our plans now… we mainly procure from Italy who have a lovely holiday in August, so in September, we’ll get ourselves ready and then hopefully we’ll be live in March.”
The investment is also expected to create 18 new jobs at the site, bringing the total number of employees at the company to 68.
Commenting on the news in a statement, Rhys Mallows said: “We’re proud to be Welsh born and bred so it was important to us to find a funding partner that understood our business model and provided a solution that allows us to deliver on our growth plans. The Development Bank is definitely the right fit for us and we’ve been really pleased with their support so far.
“The equity investment means that we can now continue to scale to meet demand with investment in additional production lines that will boost productivity as we expand our bottling and distribution offering to the growing UK and international markets.”
Last August, Mallows received a £4m cash injection from HSBC UK, the British subsidiary of the global bank, to fund the development of a new production line.
The global bottling company told Just Drinks an additional 100 million litres of capacity would be created because of the company’s third production line, with the other two used for bottles and cartons. Twenty jobs were expected to be created following the raise.
At the time, Rhys Mallows said that the company’s next investment would be in a new canning line and would require more funding for the implementation, hopefully by 2024.
That plan is still in place, he said today (12 August), with the goal being to raise new funds by the “back end” of the year.
