Gail’s shareholders have hired Goldman Sachs to run an auction of the bakery chain after it sparked a gentrification row.
Gail’s parent company, Bread Holdings, appointed the wall street bank ‘in recent days’ to oversee a sale next year, according to Sky News.
The move will allow the company’s current backers to make a partial or full exit from the business, sources told Sky.
Analysts anticipate Gail’s could be worth as much as £500m, which is a significant increase in windfall for the company that was valued at £200m in 2021.
Gail’s has more than 130 shops across Britain already and is seen by many as the successor to Waitrose.
It opened in 2005 in Hampstead, north London, and slowly began to spread across the capital before cherry picking new towns and cities to set up in.
The bakery chain became embroiled in a gentrification row earlier this year over its plans to open a new site in Walthamstow Village.
A number of locals came out against the move and started a petition to stop the shop from opening.
Gail’s shareholders have hired Goldman Sachs to run an auction of the bakery chain after it sparked a gentrification row (Stock image)
The organiser of the petition, James Harvey, argued that if the brand opened, then local alternatives would be forced to close and the village would lose its character.
Addressing the row at the time, Gail’s founder Tom Molnar told The Times: ‘We build small sites so they are a part of a diverse high street, so whenever I build a Gail’s I think what it would be like if I was a resident here.
‘I’d encourage people to look at what we’re trying to do, rather than taglines.
‘There’s good independents and bad, and good chains and bad chains.’