What if an FMCG brand would buy LMK Group?

The parent company (LMK Group) of Linas Matkasse (Sweden) and Adams Matkasse (Norway) was one of the original meal kit companies in the Nordic countries. The company grew rapidly and became one of the biggest online grocery players in Sweden.

However, from 2016 to 2019 the revenues declined. Despite the pandemic boom in 2020, the overall mood around the company has not been too positive. With declining revenues and a lack of a growth story around the company, the stock market has not been favourable for LMK Group. Since the spring of 2021, the share of LMK Group has dropped from 80 SEK to lows of below 30 SEK.

Despite the fact that as a standalone business LMK does not have a particularly strong growth story, it can still be a very valuable business as part of another business.

For whom would LMK be valuable?

For grocery retailers the meal kits are a niche operation that is not interesting.

However, for a FMCG brand LMK Group would provide many interesting opportunities, especially now as the value of the company has declined.

For a FMCG brand the almost 115 000 active customers would be a huge trove of data to understand about the customer behaviour online. 464 000 annual deliveries would paint a detailed picture how a certain group of customers in three countries behave.

The customer pool could also be utilised to supercharge the new product development activities with direct feedback from real customers.

This direct interaction with the customers would provide big opportunities for the brand to sell additional products with the meal kits. It would be easy for a meal kit company to expand the product offerings from meal kits to offer other kinds of product bundles for snacks, breakfasts, parties… Many meal kit companies have done that already.

For a multinational brand, it would also be easy to take the meal kit company to many other markets. HelloFresh has shown how well the meal kit concept travels compared to traditional grocery retail models (offline or online).

Last, but certainly not least, LMK Group (or any other meal kit company) would provide the FMCG company with digital capabilities in the people who can build and scale digital grocery operations.

Digital capabilities are something that Nike has spent years and billions of dollars to acquire. Grocery brands will most probably need to do the same some time in the future.