Waterland takes majority stake in Lavollée Group

Waterland Private Equity acquired a majority stake in Lavollée Group on 22 January 2025, investing alongside chairman Hervé Ory-Lavollée, son of the founder, and the company’s managers, who reinvested. Waterland invested through its ninth fund, raised at 3.5 billion euros. More than sixty years after its creation, the business passed out of family control, while Ory-Lavollée kept the chairmanship. Founded in 1963 and based in Levallois-Perret, Lavollée distributes specialty ingredients bought from international producers and resold to manufacturers. The group had grown to around 100 million euros of revenue across three companies: Lavollée itself, Firmalis in food and nutrition, and Sipa A.Ch Berthier in flavours and fragrances, covering between them the life sciences, where its customers formulate food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical products, and industry, where they make coatings, adhesives, polymers, lubricants and water treatment chemicals. The three companies became the core of a new holding, Speciality Ingredients Distribution Group, created to consolidate a fragmented European market in which distribution remains organised country by country, each operator holding its own supplier agreements and technical knowledge of local regulation. Waterland set out to triple the group’s size over three to four years through acquisitions, while keeping the family model under which each business retains its own identity and management. Specialty ingredient distribution rests on two assets that take years to build: the agency agreements under which a distributor represents a producer in a given territory, and the regulatory expertise required to supply materials into food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications, where each ingredient must be documented and traceable. Neither transfers readily, which is why growth in the sector comes through acquiring established distributors rather than entering markets directly. Lavollée had itself been consolidating on a smaller scale, having acquired the assets of Société Versaillaise de Produits Chimiques and its Spanish subsidiary in 2021.