The £300m Pizza: Nestle's Pizza Venture Is Buying a Brand Nobody Can Name

There is a frozen pizza brand in Britain called Crosta Mollica that almost nobody can name — roughly 5% of shoppers, by one industry estimate — yet it has become the country's second top-selling pizza brand by sales value, and in the most recent measured stretch it grew 48% in a year when the entire pizza category grew about 1%. This week Sky News reported that European Pizza Group, an entity part-owned by Nestle, is closing in on a deal to buy it for more than £300 million.

That is weird. Not the brand — the brand sounds genuinely good, a £6 "made in Italy" pizza selling next to £1.50 own-brand pizzas. The weird part is the price. Crosta Mollica (the name is Italian for "crust and crumb") had £67.6 million of revenue and £8.5 million of pre-tax profit in the year to June 2025. More than £300 million is roughly 4.5 times sales, or about 35 times pre-tax profit. For context, the other reported bidder — Premier Foods, the London-listed owner of Mr Kipling and Bisto, worth about £1.6 billion — was reported this spring to be exploring a bid of around £200 million, and it is reported to remain in contention. European Pizza Group appears willing to pay a third more than the listed company was.

The buyer is the interesting part. European Pizza Group is the joint venture Nestle set up with the private equity firm PAI Partners in 2023 to own Nestle's European frozen-pizza business — the Wagner and Buitoni brands, plus plant-based Garden Gourmet pizzas — a business of about CHF 400 million (roughly £350 million) a year in sales, with factories in Germany and Italy. Nestle contributed the business and kept what the parties described as a non-controlling stake with equal voting rights alongside PAI. Which is the way companies phrase it when neither side fully controls the thing, and the practical consequence is that the pizza business leaves Nestle's reported revenue and margins and becomes an equity line on its balance sheet instead.

This is basically the Froneri playbook. In 2016 Nestle and PAI formed Froneri as a joint venture for ice cream, which duly became the world's largest pure-play ice cream maker; in 2025 PAI turned its roughly half stake into a €3.6 billion equity transaction. PAI was explicit that the pizza venture was meant to replicate that success: build an international leader in European frozen pizza. The account of what this deal means is almost already written in the 2016 one. Nestle gets to say it is no longer in the slow-growth, not-very-healthy pizza business; PAI gets a platform it can consolidate and eventually sell; and the expensive part — buying real growth at a retail multiple — happens inside the venture, off Nestle's books.

The official description of this week's development is "a joint venture part-owned by Nestle is buying Crosta Mollica." In practice this is closer to a way for Nestle to keep its fingerprints on pizza without the pizza in its numbers, and for PAI to spend on category leadership with a global food company's brands bolted on. Nestle has used almost exactly the same sentence for ice cream — "strong but small," a distraction from its core pillars of coffee, petcare and nutrition. Same logic, same wrapper. So the headline "Nestle-backed" is doing a lot of work: the price never shows up in Nestle's earnings, and the buyer's economics — not Nestle's — are what have to justify 35 times pre-tax profit.

Why might 35x not be crazy? Because Crosta Mollica is, as these things go, a real one. Founded in 2009 by James Orr, bootstrapped for about 15 years, B-Corp certified, and famously asset-light: no factories, products made by Italian suppliers and sold under the brand. One analysis of the accounts puts it at 43 employees generating roughly £1.6 million of revenue per head. Pizza is most of the business, sold on "authentic Italian" premium positioning. Perwyn, the private equity firm that now owns it, invested in January 2024, in partnership with the founder, and brought in David Milner (ex-Tyrrells, ex-Lily's Kitchen) as chairman. Under that ownership, revenue went from £49.2 million in the year to June 2024 (up 41%) to £67.6 million in the year to June 2025 (up 37%), with pre-tax profit rising from £4.5 million to £8.5 million and a three-year compound growth rate of 36%. Four-and-a-half times sales for a 36% compounder is the going rate for the privilege; the bet is simply that the compounding continues.

The mechanics of who gets paid are clean. In February, Crosta Mollica hired bankers at Harris Williams to respond to unsolicited approaches to Perwyn, with a price tag then floated "in excess of £200 million". By August the talk was "well over £300 million". An auction happened, the price went up by half, and the buyer paying up is the consolidator that needs growth and a UK door — Wagner and Buitoni barely exist in British retail — not the public company with a share price to defend. Perwyn bought a business doing roughly £35 million of sales two and a half years ago; if it holds a majority, this is the private-equity flip working exactly as drawn, with a growth story built on purpose for the exit.

The uncomfortable number is the one you can do on your phone: 35 times pre-tax profit for a discretionary £6 frozen pizza in a category growing 1%. The brand's growth is real, but it is share-taking and premiumization against a flat market, and a 36% compounder only keeps a 35x multiple if it keeps compounding. If UK consumers trade down, or the retailers squeeze a fast-growing supplier, the multiple compresses and the deal economics land on whoever inside the venture paid for it.

The read-through for an investor is not "buy Crosta Mollica" — it is private, you cannot. It is a small, tidy exhibit of how Big Food re-buys a category it has already left: exit the reported business, keep a voting stake, let private equity run the consolidation, and sign the big check inside the wrapper where nobody has to defend it. That is the structure that lets Nestle appear to have left pizza while paying a growth premium, on PAI's template, for a brand most shoppers cannot name. In the Froneri version of this story, today's consolidation deals were bought to be sold later at a bigger number. Worth remembering the next time the word "backed" appears in a headline and you have to ask who actually pays.