How This Private Equity Firm Helped MadeGood Become a Unicorn

Under Prelude Growth Partners’ ownership, the health-conscious snack brand MadeGood grew net sales by 2.5x in four years.

Private equity is in a weird spot these days, with a host of unsold portfolio companies—over 33,500 of them as of this summer—slowing down the profitability flywheel that keeps the whole system liquid. One estimate suggests that it could take nearly a decade to clear the backlog.

The consumer brands-focused PE firm Prelude Growth Partners, however, is bucking that trend. Prelude has already secured three exits this year, co-founder and managing partner Neda Daneshzadeh tells Inc., and it just added a fourth to the list.

This morning, Prelude announced that it had successfully sold its minority stake in Riverside Natural Foods—the parent company of the health-conscious snack brand MadeGood—back to the Fotovat family, who initially founded the firm.

Over the four-plus years during which Prelude held a stake in Riverside Natural Foods, MadeGood increased its net sales by 2.5x. The exit leaves MadeGood’s parent company with a unicorn valuation, Bloomberg reports.

“All we’ve ever done is partner with founder-owned and family-owned businesses in categories where there are multi-decade secular tailwinds,” Daneshzadeh tells Inc. “We had reached out to [Riverside] to build a relationship with, and we did, over the course of a year. … It was 100 percent family-owned before, and we partnered together back in 2022.”

She declined to share the percentage ownership stake Prelude held in Riverside before it exited, but cited her PE firm’s support around executive hiring and retail expansion as having helped the company grow substantially over the length of their partnership.

“The company is vertically integrated, and every single product is made in its own facilities, which are allergen-free, high quality,” Daneshzadeh says. “We’ve really scaled the manufacturing footprint … and then continued on innovation to become an all-family snacking brand.”

Prelude’s three other exits this year are the condiment brand Bachan’s, which sold to publicly-traded food manufacturer The Marzetti Company; the wellness brand So Good So You, which sold to the PE firm Bansk Group; and the body products brand Saltair, which sold to another PE firm, TSG Consumer.

“We have sold back to a family, we have sold to private equity, we have sold to a publicly-traded global strategic, [with] well north of $2 billion of valuation across those four businesses,” Daneshzadeh adds. “If you are in great categories with multi-decade secular tailwinds, where the consumer’s wallet is moving in that direction, and you build a great business, there will always be exit opportunities.”