Tooru: Building the Wellness Brands of Tomorrow

Tooru's strategy is built on a well-established quirk of the food industry: the biggest manufacturers like Mondelez, Nestlé, Danone and Ferrero increasingly outsource brand creation to smaller, more agile operators, and then buy the winners at striking premiums. Recent deals tell the story plainly. Mondelez paid around £200m for Grenade, Danone agreed roughly €1bn for Huel, and Ferrero has made eight acquisitions in six years, half of them in healthy food. The reasoning is simple. Big food groups are structurally bad at the messy, capital-light work of creating new brands, but exceptionally good at scaling proven ones once they exist. Tooru is deliberately positioning its portfolio, particularly OAF, to be exactly the kind of differentiated, growing challenger that fits this playbook.

Juvela's three decades of know-how in de-glutened wheat starch, a process that produces gluten-free bread with a texture far closer to the real thing than rice-flour alternatives, has been redeployed into OAF, a contemporary supermarket brand launched in June 2025. Within nine months OAF was on shelves in both Tesco and Asda, with early sales reportedly tracking ahead of expectations. There is also a structural shift working in OAF's favour. For decades, people diagnosed with coeliac disease could get gluten-free bread and staples on NHS prescription, but the NHS has steadily cut back this funding, and many areas no longer offer it at all. That means hundreds of thousands of coeliac patients who used to collect their gluten-free bread for free are now buying it in supermarkets instead. Alongside the lifestyle-driven shoppers, this has led to the gluten-free market growing at roughly 8 to 12% a year and OAF is designed to catch that wave.

Tooru is being built as a platform rather than a single brand. Its Pontypool facility in South Wales serves as a shared manufacturing base for Juvela and OAF, while Pulsin has moved to a third-party contract manufacturer, reducing overheads and lifting gross margins without the capital burden of an in-house facility. Group-level costs are being stripped out, the non-core marketing agency Market Rocket is being divested, and the model is designed so that each new brand layers operating leverage onto the same infrastructure. With M&A firmly part of the strategy, the group has scope to extend that platform internationally over time, broadening its reach beyond the UK and potentially repositioning it from a domestic micro-cap into a more diversified wellness business.

• OAF retail momentum: Continued week-on-week growth in Tesco, success from the Asda rollout in April 2026, and signed listings with additional major grocers would validate the brand's commercial traction and de-risk the broader investment case.

  
  

• Market Rocket divestment: Management has confirmed its intention to divest the non-core Market Rocket digital agency. Completing the sale would simplify the group, sharpen the focus on consumer brands, and potentially release cash that can be redeployed into the core portfolio.

• Pulsin returning to growth: Following its restructuring and the shift to an outsourced contract manufacturing arrangement, Pulsin should benefit from improved gross margins and a meaningful step-up from expanded Co-op distribution and a new Swiss agreement.
  

• Group-level operating leverage: Sharing manufacturing infrastructure at Pontypool, outsourcing Pulsin's production to a third party, and divesting non-core Market Rocket should produce a noticeably more profitable and more focused group within 12 to 24 months.

• Trade interest in the portfolio: As OAF scales, individual brands, or the group as a whole, could become acquisition targets for larger food and consumer companies looking to enter or expand in the free-from and plant-based segments.
  
  

• International expansion of the brand portfolio: Several of Tooru's brands could travel internationally over time, particularly Juvela's prescription heritage in markets with established gluten-free reimbursement systems, and Pulsin's plant-based proposition in fast-growing European wellness markets.

The slow erosion of NHS gluten-free prescribing is the most certain headwind facing Juvela. National spending has fallen from roughly £25m in 2012 to about £7.7m today, with successive Integrated Care Boards either ending or restricting reimbursement. Juvela is estimated to hold around 55% of what remains, so any further tightening hits it disproportionately. The counter-argument is that most cuts have already happened, the remaining base skews to children and clinically vulnerable patients, and lost prescription demand often transfers into retail, which is exactly where OAF is positioned to catch it.

OAF is still a young brand competing in a crowded, well-stocked free-from aisle where own-label ranges from Tesco, Asda, M&S and others are growing fast and putting pricing pressure on branded players. Listing fees, marketing investment and promotional support all create cost before revenue, and supermarkets are quick to delist brands that fail to hit rate-of-sale targets. Early signals, including a national Tesco stocking at launch, the Asda listing rolling out from April 2026, and sales reportedly tracking ahead of expectations, are encouraging, but the brand still has to prove itself over a full retail cycle.

Tooru is a small AIM-listed business with a market capitalisation of just a few million pounds and around £4m of debt. That limits financial headroom to fund growth initiatives such as marketing, product launches, and absorbing operational bumps as they arise. As a buy-and-build group, Tooru is also likely to need fresh capital periodically to fund future acquisitions, which could be dilutive if raised through new share issuance. Thin trading and a wide bid-offer spread are an inherent feature of micro-cap AIM stocks, meaning the share price can move sharply on small amounts of activity, which is uncomfortable for investors who may need to enter or exit positions efficiently.