A¯ repa squeezes most from brain-food drink, breaks into Woolies

A¯ repa, a maker of blackcurrant and tree bark-based “brain drink” and “brain food” products, has won its second major supermarket deal across the Tasman.

Last year, the Aucklandbased firm inked a deal with Coles. Now it is about to appear on the shelves in Woolworths.

“We’ve been growing a lot in Australia over the past year,” co-founder and chief executive Angus Brown says.

“We’re now in over 400 Coles sites. We’ve just landed Woolworths. So we’ll be launching into around 350 Woolworths supermarkets nationwide in Australia, in August.”

A¯ repa has also broken into Harris Farms, a high-end Australian grocery chain, as well as around 200 independent retailers.

“We think Australia could be a $20 million-plus market for us in the next few years,” Brown says.

Including outlets in Singapore, and various New Zealand supermarkets and service stations, A¯ repa’s drinks, capsules and powders are now in some 1500 outlets.

Along the way, A¯ repa has become one of the largest buyers of New Zealand blackcurrants. It purchased some 400 tonnes last year of a total 2000 tonnes.

A¯ repa’s success has started to attract attention from multinationals. “Companies like Fonterra want to collaborate with us, and Coca Cola, tried to steal our chief science officer two days after we hired him,” Brown says.

“And companies like Nestle are interested in the science that we’re discovering. We’re speaking directly with their head office in Switzerland and their head of neuroscience.

“That’s a compliment and testament to the research that we’ve been doing with our team, but also it’s a very dangerous type of conversation to have because you don’t want to give away your IP too early too soon to what could be a competitor.”

The approaches from the big players, “comes from their interest to acquire us in two, three, five or 10 years’ times. And when we first started this company, that was what we’d fantasise about.”

But the co-founder says he now has the “bigger plan” of becoming a billion-dollar company that retains New Zealand owership. He credits former Zespri chief executive¯ Lain Jager, an investor in Arepa, with widening his ambitions.

The privately held company doesn’t release detailed financials, but Brown says revenue has doubled each year over the last five years, and will reach around $10 million this year.

A $5m capital raise, now under way (following a $2m seed round last year), will be used for a launch into the US.

Brown’s pitch is that his company’s key ingredients of blackcurrants, pine-bark and l-theanine (an amino acid found in black tea) can help with mental alertness, boost your immunity and, combined with lifestyle changes, lower risk of dementia.

A double-blind assessment of Arepa by four Auckland Unversity academics, involving members of the Auckland Warriors and published in March 2020, said results were promising and justified a larger-scale study.

A¯ repa has been chosen as one of the subjects for a $700,000 study for Dementia Australia will be run by the University of Wollongong’s

Professor Karen Charlton, a nutritional expert who will use blood samples, biomarkers and a double-blind with placebos¯ to gauge effectiveness of Arepa and other products. It begins this month. Brown says his company’s product was selected for the Dementia Australia trial and has not contributed funding.

Some high-profile customers are already convinced, including the All Blacks. Brown says his firm has no kind of sponsorship with the ABS; they’ve just chosen to buy his product. “We have to go and fly samples over to the UK every time they buy some, and have it batch-tested by a World Anti-doping Agency certified authority, Informed Sport.”