Quorn Foods “transformation journey” gathered steam in the first quarter as the meat-free business takes steps to drive full-year profitability.
EBITDA for the category more than doubled, while net income returned to positive mode and gross margins grew by more than 800 basis points in the opening three months of fiscal 2026.
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Quorn, owned by Philippines-based Monde Nissin, is also confident it can maintain the pace to deliver full-year sales growth and profits in 2027 under CEO David Flochel’s three-year transition plan.
Investment has been ploughed into Quorn’s frozen part of the portfolio, “which has been reformulated to be free from any artificial ingredients and as a high source of protein and fiber”, Flochel told analysts in this week’s results discussion.
“We want to move from substitute of meat into preferred everyday protein choices with the ambition to win on taste, health, nutrition, affordability, and convenience,” he said, adding there is “more to come on this topic”.
Flochel said the “fundamentals” of the meat-free business have been “strengthened” by halting the “double-digit” sales declines Quron has seen for “several years” in the frozen portfolio.
Those efforts have brought in new consumers to the frozen Quorn category for the first time in four years, he claimed, but with no mention of plans for reformulation in the chilled segment.
However, he said: “We saw continued positive trajectory, driven by UK retail chilled and frozen as well as a more stable performance across much of our portfolio.”
Former Heineken executive Flochel became Quorn’s CEO late in 2024, when he set out the three-year plan to deliver profitable sales growth.
Quorn CFO Nick Cooper said this week the target remains but with elements of risk from the Middle East crisis along that “transformation journey”.
“When we set that ambition, we hadn’t anticipated a war in the Gulf, but so far we don’t believe that the impact of the Iran war puts that ambition out of reach, but clearly we need to keep that under review,” he told analysts. “And it certainly introduces some more uncertainty in the short term.”
There could be some ups and downs in the gross margin progression, which climbed 881 basis points in the first quarter to 31.8% and improved sequentially by more than 400 points from the final three months of 2025.
“Targeted” price increases and higher production output were the drivers, Cooper said.
“I do expect gross margin to contract a little from this exceptionally high Q1 level but still to deliver year-on-year expansion. And that reflects slightly lower production output and some of those headwinds from the Iran conflict,” he added.
Quorn’s foodservice business, which Flochel said accounts for a bit less than 20% of the meat-free portfolio sales, has “stabilised” as he noted the 7% decline in the same quarter of last year in that channel.
“However, in spite of this improvement in the trajectory, there’s still a lot of work to be done,” he said.
Overall, Quorn delivered an 11.7% increase in first-quarter sales to 3.68bn pesos ($60.8m), while gross profit climbed 54.4% to 1.17bn pesos.
Reported EBITDA surged to 325m pesos from 140m pesos a year earlier, while net profit after tax rebounded to an 87m-peso profit from a 58m-peso loss.
Outside of meat-free, Monde Nissin’s Asia-Pacific Branded Food and Beverage (APAC BFB) business saw sales rise 8.6% to 19.09bn pesos.
Group CEO Henry Soesanto said the gains were driven by volume growth across all segment categories, with the Philippines delivering a 9.5% increase in sales.
However, the international business suffered as exports to the Middle East declined to zero due to the “Gulf crisis”, he said.
Monde Nissin is pricing away some of the impact in categories like biscuits and noodles but was still able to increase volumes.
Biscuits will be bolstered by new capacity coming on stream with a new plant in the Philippines due to open in the first half of fiscal 2027, group CFO Jesse Teo said, adding the initial sales target is 5bn pesos.
“We have space for more lines. So potentially that new greenfield factory can produce even bigger sales once we maximise the footprint that we have,” Teo said.
