food4fans is a Hamburg-based company specializing in the sale of sweet and salty snacks for fans. The start-up has been licensed by soccer clubs such as FC Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Hamburger SV, and FC St. Pauli, and it sells its products via established retail chains like Edeka, REWE, and Metro. The German Bundesliga is booming, and so is the business model of food4fans!
Website: www.food4fans.eu
By Matthias Graf Lambsdorff
We have very good news concerning different things for you today. Indeed, we not only achieved very positive results last year, but we also increased our reach through a sales partnership with Lekkerland and attracted German comedian Otto Waalkes as a new customer. Moreover, Handelsblatt published a detailed feature on food4fans.
Enjoy reading our update!
We have recently calculated that we have sold precisely 559,453 individual products over the last twelve months. These products include food merchandising for the fans of several soccer teams from the 1st and 2nd German Bundesliga divisions, fans of rock stars and entertainers, and some creations of our own, for instance for Gebr. Heinemann (read more here). In 2015, we plan to generate €1.2m in revenues, which would correspond to a threefold increase compared to 2014. As mentioned before, we are looking forward to the start of the next Bundesliga season and are expecting that we will attract several additional clubs from the 1st and 2nd division as our customers.
We are very pleased that international wholesaler, system partner, and logistics company Lekkerland has added our products to its range. Lekkerland caters to approximately 60,000 customers all over Germany, namely tobacco stores, gas station shops, beverage stores, department stores, grocery stores, bakeries, cafeterias, and convenience stores.
We have also appeared in the media twice very recently. Shortly after Hamburger Abendblatt had visited us, food4fans was mentioned in an article in Handelsblatt, which concluded that, “the snacks with the logos of soccer clubs, on the other hand, are a surefire recipe for success – as long as the clubs are performing well.” Feedback on this article was very good, and the article made many additional people aware of food4fans.
Handelsblatt also wrote that, “there will be additional business segments in the future. Lambsdorff shows us wine gums shaped like the Rammstein band logo and others that look like the Ottifant character by German comedian Otto Waalkes.” Indeed, food4fans has made a licensing agreement with Otto Waalkes on the wine gum version of the Ottifant character, and we have started selling this character that is immensely popular among fans of Otto Waalkes. As many as 35,999 bags have already been pre-ordered.
Best regards,
The food4fans team
By Matthias Graf Lambsdorff
We are very proud to introduce our new advisory board to you, which consists of some first-rate soccer enthusiasts, media experts, and retail and wholesale experts.
More specifically, our new advisory board consists of:
All three of them possess considerable expertise and extensive networks that they want to contribute to food4fans. We are already looking forward to working with them.
We are very pleased to announce that we are now selling Bayer Leverkusen merchandising products as well. We have already started collaborating with this club and have received the first lollipop order.
Sweet snacks are very popular, which is why wine gum production for clubs is currently in full swing. In fact, we are producing wine gums for St. Pauli, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Berlin at the moment.
As we have already told you, we are cooperating with agencies that are meant to make food4fans products available in retail stores all over Germany. We have also made some progress in this area, and the agencies are now covering almost all of Germany (except for some states in eastern Germany).
Moreover, we are happy about the detailed article in Hamburger Abendblatt, which rightly pointed out that there are all kinds of merchandising products for soccer fans (which generated €187m or 7.5 % of total revenues of the Bundesliga in the season of 2013/14), but that “one thing used to be missing for a long time even though soccer on TV and snacks go hand in hand: groceries such as potato chips, chocolate beans, wine gums, and lollipops carrying the clubs’ logos.”
Now this has changed. Best regards from Hamburg,
The food4fans team