As part of a strategic plan to make its hygiene, beauty, and personal care division more representative of its revenue than its pharmaceutical division, the pharmaceutical company Cimedannounced on Monday, February 2nd, the acquisition of the oral hygiene manufacturer IceFresh, a company with annual revenues of R$ 200 million.
The expectation is that, with the arrival of IceFresh, the company will be able to capture 10% of the Brazilian oral hygiene market, currently worth around R$ 20 billion. By 2026, Cimed is expected to have revenues of R$ 5 billion and double in size by 2030. The purchase price was not disclosed.
But the acquisition immediately brought about a decision regarding product supply. Today, IceFresh holds complete product contracts for the public sector – municipalities and state health departments.
In March 2017, IceFresh signed a one-year contract with the Ministry of Health to supply 2.6 million tubes of toothpaste, worth R$ 2.4 million. Since then, it has not won any more bids from the federal government.
Cimed will honor the contracts with public entities signed by IceFresh, but does not intend to renew them – currently, this pillar in the public sector represents half of the revenue of the company acquired by Cimed.
“The company currently has a strong presence in the cash and carry(wholesale food retail) sector and sells extensively to public entities. However, we will not renew these contracts. There is a significant opportunity to enter the retail market. Our focus is on private segments. I will leave this space to my competitors,” says João Adibe Marques, CEO of Cimed, in an interview with NeoFeed.
The company's goal is for the consumer segment to account for 55% of the pharmaceutical company's revenue by the end of 2026, compared to 45% for the original segment, that of generic drugs.
"Cimed is moving away from being a pharmaceutical company and becoming a consumer goods company as well. Over the last four years, we have accelerated this process," says Marques.
"In 2022, 80% of revenue came from the pharmaceutical sector. Today, it's close to half coming from the hygiene and personal care portfolio," he adds.
Since the end of last year, Cimed had already been outsourcing the production of its other oral hygiene line, under the Super brand, to IceFresh's manufacturing plant. Now, it will produce everything at the company's factory, located in Bauru, in the interior of São Paulo state.
“I started looking for a company that would allow us to internalize the production of the hygiene sector. And that's how we came across IceFresh, a factory with the fifth largest brand in Brazil and which has its entire production vertically integrated. It fit exactly what we needed,” explains Adibe.
The rationale is to maintain two brands on the shelves of pharmaceutical retailers, operating in different product lines – and price points. The group's new company will follow the traditional, lower-value lines.
Super's products will be more innovative, with new flavors such as melon and red berries. In May, the company will launch specific lines for daytime use and another for nighttime use.
The current production capacity of the Bauru factory is five million units per month, with the possibility of tripling that volume if it becomes necessary to generate revenue for the industry. With this operation, the president of IceFresh, José Eduardo Tobias, will continue to lead all production in the company's oral hygiene segment.
The goal is to reach 100 to 150 million items produced annually, including toothpaste, toothbrushes, dental floss, and mouthwash. However, approximately 80% of this volume is toothpaste production.
To meet part of this growing demand from the consumer sector, Cimed will inaugurate, in March, a 45,000 square meter (m²) distribution center in Pouso Alegre (MG), which generated investments of R$ 100 million.
“IceFresh is completely vertically integrated. There are few industries in Brazil today that can assemble the entire product. They make the tube, the cap, the bottle, the cup, the dental floss box. And what the company didn't have, which was the packaging part, Cimed has,” he says.
According to Adibe, entering the children's oral hygiene segment in 2025 served as a kind of "test drive" to gauge the sector's temperature and understand consumer habits. Today, the Carmed Oral Care line has a 60% market share.
The president's plan is for IceFresh to more than double its revenue, reaching R$ 500 million, since it will produce all the oral hygiene products for both brands.
The idea now is to move forward with the manufacturing of shampoo and conditioner, still in the first semester, and to produce aerosol deodorant, soap, and other products in the future. And, as an example of oral hygiene, entry into the segment could be done through partnerships with potential suppliers.
“Cimed has always been a company that people remembered when they were sick. Now, we are part of people's daily lives. The consumer goods sector is very different from the pharmaceutical segment, which has a much higher turnover. Everyone needs to buy toothpaste all the time,” says Adibe.
