VAFO Acquires Pets Deli as Its Founder Returns to the CEO Seat

A pet food manufacturer with more than €700 million in annual turnover just bought a nine-year-old direct-to-consumer brand roughly a seventeenth its size, and put the person who left its CEO chair a year ago back in it. VAFO Group announced Tuesday it has acquired Pets Deli, the Berlin-based D2C dog and cat food brand, on undisclosed terms.

VAFO adds a €40 million D2C brand to its portfolio

VAFO Group, based in the Czech Republic and built over three decades into one of Europe's largest pet food producers, employs more than 1,500 people across nine countries and distributes flagship brands Brit and Carnilove in over 90 countries. Its disclosed annual turnover tops €700 million.

Pets Deli launched in Berlin in January 2014 selling fresh, human-grade dog and cat food by subscription, and closed an eight-figure Series A in 2016 backed by investors including Index Ventures. The company now generates more than €40 million a year and sells wet food, dry food, raw feeding, snacks and supplements direct to pet owners across the DACH region.

Financial terms of the sale were not disclosed. Pets Deli will keep operating under its own name. Founder Tania Moser, who stepped back to a chairwoman role more than a year ago, is returning as chief executive. Pascal Haenle, who has run the company alongside her since 2016, continues as managing director and chief operating officer.

Why manufacturers want to own the customer relationship

VAFO has bought its way into Germany before, but never quite like this. In 2024 it took full ownership of Allco Tiernahrung, a manufacturer it had partly owned since 2017, and last year it acquired Swedish wholesaler Lupus Foder. Both were supply-side plays: production capacity and distribution reach. Pets Deli is different. It's a digital brand with its own customer data, its own subscription relationships, and a marketing engine a wholesale manufacturer doesn't build by expanding a factory.

That distinction is the thesis behind a small but growing pattern. Two weeks earlier, Central Garden & Pet took majority control of TRIXIE Heimtierbedarf, a German pet supplies manufacturer, to get a European foothold it couldn't build organically. In February, the Spanish conglomerate Agrolimen paid more than $600 million for Ollie, a US fresh-food subscription brand, running the same play in reverse: a manufacturer-adjacent buyer paying up for direct customer access rather than plant capacity. VAFO buying Pets Deli fits the same logic on a smaller scale, and it is the second deal involving a German pet food company The Underbite has tracked in barely two weeks.

The numbers underline how modest a bet this is by size. Using each company's own rounded disclosure, Pets Deli's turnover equals roughly one-eighteenth of VAFO's, a bolt-on rather than a transformative purchase. What VAFO is buying isn't scale, it's a functioning D2C operation and the data that comes with running one, layered on top of manufacturing and procurement infrastructure Pets Deli couldn't fund on its own margins.

One detail the release leaves open: Jan Billenkamp, who has held the chief executive and managing director title at Pets Deli since joining in 2020, isn't named or quoted anywhere in VAFO's announcement. Moser's own account of the deal thanks him for what he "carried" and "gave" in language that reads more like a send-off than a continuation. Neither VAFO nor Pets Deli has addressed his status directly.

What Pets Deli's leadership shakeup signals for the deal

Watch for VAFO to say more about what it actually bought once Pets Deli shows up in group reporting. Subscriber counts, retention rates and channel mix were absent from Tuesday's announcement, and disclosure (or continued silence) on those numbers will say more about how well the D2C business performs inside a manufacturer than the deal announcement did.

Watch for clarity on Billenkamp's role. A quiet departure alongside Moser's return would mark a full changing of the guard at the operating level, even as the release frames the deal as continuity.

And watch whether this becomes a third data point rather than a coincidence. VAFO, Central Garden & Pet and Agrolimen have each spent the past several months buying direct customer relationships instead of building them, in three different countries. If a fourth manufacturer makes the same trade before the year is out, it stops being three companies' individual strategies and starts being how the category consolidates.

Source: VAFO Group via company press release