IN Brief:
- La Crema gives Nexture its first food-ingredients manufacturing operation in the Middle East.
- The Dubai business produces chocolate and value-added ingredients for bakery, ice cream, and fine pastry applications.
- Completion is expected by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Nexture has agreed to acquire Dubai-based La Crema, adding its first manufacturing operation in the Middle East and expanding its portfolio of chocolate and value-added ingredients for bakery, ice cream, and fine pastry applications.
The transaction was announced on 21 September and remains subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Completion is expected by the end of 2026. La Crema combines food-ingredient production in Dubai with a distribution network serving wholesalers, distributors, retailers, and HoReCa customers.
La Crema was founded in 2016 as a trading business before beginning in-house manufacturing in 2018. Its Dubai operation now employs around 170 people across production, operations, sales, and marketing, giving Nexture an established manufacturing and commercial platform rather than requiring the group to build a regional plant from the ground up.
The acquisition adds capacity in a part of the ingredients market where manufacturing location can influence lead times, product adaptation, inventory requirements, and customer support. Chocolate, bakery, and frozen-dessert manufacturers frequently work with multiple fillings, coatings, creams, inclusions, bases, and semi-finished ingredients, creating demand for short production runs as well as larger standard batches.
A regional plant can support those requirements without every finished ingredient moving from a European production site. Raw materials may still travel internationally, particularly in cocoa-derived products, fats, nuts, and specialist functional ingredients, but local conversion and finishing can shorten the final supply route and give customers more flexibility over order timing.
Nexture has been expanding rapidly through acquisitions. The group brings together businesses covering bakery and fine pastry ingredients, fruit preparations, creams and fillings, ice cream ingredients, beverages, plant-based products, and other value-added food applications. Its current network includes 29 manufacturing sites and 21 innovation centres, with more than 2,800 employees and sales into more than 120 countries.
La Crema adds a different geographic component to that network. Nexture’s existing manufacturing base is spread across established ingredients markets, while Dubai gives it a plant within a region where food manufacturing, hospitality, and premium bakery and confectionery production have continued to develop. The acquisition also gives the group an existing customer network and workforce familiar with regional specifications and purchasing patterns.
The operational value will depend on how La Crema is connected with the wider group. Recipe development, procurement, application support, quality systems, and production planning all offer potential areas for coordination, but ingredient manufacturing remains sensitive to local customer requirements. A formulation that performs correctly in one bakery or confectionery process may need adjustment when equipment, temperature conditions, raw materials, or final-product specifications change.
Chocolate-based ingredients introduce their own manufacturing constraints. Viscosity, fat composition, crystallisation behaviour, temperature, and particle size can affect pumping, depositing, coating, filling, and finished texture. Bakery creams and fillings must also remain stable through processing and shelf life, while ice-cream ingredients have to perform under freezing and storage conditions.
Those technical requirements place application work close to commercial production. A regional manufacturing site can give product developers a shorter route between customer trials, reformulation, scale-up, and routine manufacture, particularly where an ingredient needs to be adjusted for a local product format rather than shipped as a standard global specification.
The Dubai operation also creates another point in Nexture’s procurement network. Greater scale can increase purchasing leverage across common raw materials and packaging, although chocolate and specialty-ingredient supply chains remain exposed to commodity pricing, crop conditions, international freight, and supplier qualification requirements. Integration will therefore involve more than combining sales portfolios.
Production systems and quality controls will also have to align without disrupting existing customers. Ingredient plants handle products that can move through different processing temperatures, allergen regimes, and packaging formats, making changeover control and traceability important when production volume or recipe variety increases.
La Crema’s distribution operation gives the combined business another route to market. Its established relationships with wholesalers and distributors can provide channels for a wider Nexture portfolio, while existing La Crema products may gain access to customers served elsewhere within the group. The extent of that cross-selling will depend on specification compatibility, pricing, regulatory requirements, and available capacity rather than portfolio breadth alone.
The acquisition follows other additions to Nexture’s ingredients platform and extends the group into a new production region at the same time. Subject to completion, the Dubai plant will become its first Middle Eastern manufacturing site, adding local chocolate and ingredient production to a network that is increasingly being organised across multiple food categories and geographic markets.
