Revenues were up 84 per cent to £45.5m for Manchester-based eco-friendly online grocery delivery service The Modern Milkman for the year to December 31, 2022, but pre-tax losses also jumped to just over £23m for the period, up from £15.4m the previous year.
In keeping with the company’s strong environmental remit, the latest filing with companies house also revealed that the company saved almost 35k plastic bottles over the year, a huge jump from 2021’s nearly-22k, through its use of returnable glass bottles.
The company, which raised £50m Series C investment last November as well as over £600k through a crowdfunding round on Crowdcube that completed in January, blamed a challenging grocery sector featuring both online and digital stores in competition for the losses, alongside “labour shortages, supply chain disruptions, and heightened inflation, particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
It also noted that it had made siginificant improvements to operating profit margins over the course of the year.
The directors said in a statement: “The company continued to grow rapidly in 2022, achieving an 84% year-on-year increase in revenues underpinned by growth in the customer base as well as improved basket spend. This was delivered while facing into the worst macroeconomic headwinds for a generation, with significant input price inflation exacerbated by fuel and energy price hikes alongside labour shortages and disrupted supply chains.
“In the second half of 2022, the business launched a profitability improvement program, which by Q4 had delivered a 53 percentage point improvement in operating profit margin compared to the same period last year. On a full-year basis, operating profit margin improved by 12 percentage points compared to 2021, with the major part of the improvement arising in 2023, putting the business on a more sustainable foundation for the future.”
