Business Capital structured and delivered a $5.5MM working capital facility for Wedderspoon, the largest seller of Manuka honey and its portfolio of branded products in North America. Sourced almost solely from New Zealand, Manuka is a rare and supercharged version of traditional honey with medicinal and nutritional properties. Backed by a leading private equity firm, Wedderspoon was the first US based company to introduce Manuka honey to North America, enabling it to capitalize on local experience and quickly capture the largest US market share. Its customers are major national grocers, online retailers, food distributors, natural food retailers and hundreds of small health food stores making it by far the largest across all channels of distribution. These include Kroger, Whole Foods, CVS and Amazon, where it is the number one seller. This financing facility will supply ample working capital to expand operations and continue gaining market share throughout the US and Canada.
Coastline Capital, Wedderspoon’s private equity sponsor, brought in Business Capital to arrange financing for its rapidly growing portfolio company. Craig Stein, a Partner at Coastline commented, “we knew that arranging financing in the U.S. for a growing company with a foreign credit facility would be labor intensive and require considerable sophistication. The BizCap team got up to speed quickly, was in the market within weeks, marketed the financing far more widely than we could’ve on our own, producing a significant number of term sheets. Their experience and relationships proved invaluable, they managed the company’s expectations throughout the process while balancing the competing interests of multiple lending parties and we would not have been able to close the credit facility in the time required without their involvement,” said Stein.