Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

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Save a thought for Belgium: a nation of 12 million that just can't stop churning out world-class compounders. Think AB InBev, the largest brewer on earth. Or team.blue, a web hosting juggernaut (which we covered in 2024). Or D'Ieteren, the majority shareholder of Belron (owner of Carglass). Not to mention Lotus Bakeries aka the “Oreo nemesis”. 

But wait, we have a newcomer! 

All eyes on Quatra, an under-the-radar company that dominates Europe’s billion-dollar-plus Used Cooking Oil (UCO) collection market. Unlike its main competitor Bunge Olleco - a JV between a global agri-giant and an Irish meat processor - Quatra is owned by the Van Pollaert family (Piet, Gerald, and Pol pictured below left to right). 

Lately, the Van Pollaerts have been getting advice from Jonas Dhaenens, the founder of team.blue, and Dirk Lannoo, a senior executive at the Belgian logistics giant Katoen Natie - both of whom sit on its Supervisory Board. 

We estimate that Quatra’s run-rate revenues are approaching €300M: the outcome of a 17-year long M&A journey which saw Quatra gobble up 70+ businesses (source), the vast majority in the form of asset deals with small, local recyclers. And no, there was no “platform” to begin with. Quatra’s very first acquisition, in 2009, came with revenues and EBITDA of only c.€700K and c.€200K, respectively.

Unusually for a logistics business, Quatra runs on c.15% operating margins (€45-50M absolute EBITDA), up from 12% in 2024. 

There are two reasons for it. One, Quatra doesn't get paid to collect the oil. Instead, it pays waste producers before getting paid by refiners. Two, these onward sales are done at spot rates, meaning that Quatra takes merchant risk. Looking at the above chart, the inherent volatility is evident from the dip in 2023 revenue, likely due to a post-Covid softening in UCO prices. 

The future looks bright though. In Europe, UCO end markets have decisively shifted from road transport to aviation, helped by the EU’s Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) “mandate”: a push to decarbonise an industry culpable for 4% of the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions. Every 5 years, the minimum level of SAF supply and demand is due to increase: from 2% in 2025 to 6% by 2030… to 70% by 2050 (source). 

Fulfilling the mandate will be a stretch however, since Europe-wide SAF production capacity stands at 1.4 million tons: a fraction of jet fuel consumption of 58 million tonnes. 

Refiners have poured billions into expanding SAF production by converting existing sites to biofuels. Their biggest headache? Feedstock availability. 

In 2024, UCO represented 81% of SAF feedstock. Since Europe’s chip shops can only churn out so much oil waste, the continent’s consumption of UCO outstrips domestic supply by a factor of 8x (source). The shortfall is made up by imports, chiefly from China. However, EU’s new traceability requirements, introduced in response to growing concerns about virgin vegetable oil being mislabelled as waste, threaten to upend some of these imports.    

Meanwhile, airlines are falling over themselves to tout green credentials. By 2030, Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, aims to power 1 in 8 flights with SAF. According to a trade publication, a tough act to follow, since “if all of Ryanair’s target would be met thanks to UCO, more than 1.7 million tonnes of UCO would be required, equivalent to Europe’s entire maximum collection potential”. For context, Europe’s current UCO supply hovers around 1.3 million tonnes (source).       

With tailwinds like these, could Quatra be the next Lotus Bakeries or team.blue in the making? The founding family certainly thinks so. By 2030, it aims to control 30% of Europe’s UCO market (1.5x the current market share), with €750M in sales (2.5x the run-rate, source 1, source 2).   

A more immediate analogy would be Restaurant Technologies from the US, which has cycled through 4 PE owners in the space of 11 years, most recently Energy Capital Partners in 2022. During that period, Quatra doubled revenues (from $250M to $500M) and grew EBITDA nearly 7-fold (from $15M to $100M). The quality of earnings seems to have increased too, since ECP was able to put 8x leverage on the business. 

As refiners race to lock in supply with long-term offtake agreements, investment bankers have successfully reframed Restaurant Technologies and Quatra as Core+ infrastructure assets. Alas, as we show below, the PE playbook does not always work in this sector.    

Read on to learn about:

Before, we begin, 3 important announcements. 

The first is a shoutout to our newest investor partner: Legacy Partners.

Legacy is a Single Family Office that backs Europe’s most ambitious acquisition entrepreneurs. Legacy typically provides 10-20% of the capital and helps assemble a cap table of aligned, value-add partners - builders, operators, industry experts, seasoned investors. This isn't armchair advice. Legacy’s founder Chris von Wedemeyer scaled DrSmile to €200M+ in revenue, 600 employees and operations across 10 countries - before a successful exit.

Sounds like a fit? Reach out to Chris or Flo today - or reply to this email!

Secondly, after a summer hiatus, Rollup Bootcamp will be back, with Cohort 3 kicking off in London, on 23 September. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. More information and waitlist link here. 

And thirdly, get ready for our biggest conference yet! London, 24 September. We know you can't get enough of HVAC, MSP & TICC platforms, so here’s your chance to meet them all! Tickets will go on sale in August. In the meantime, if you'd like to sponsor the conference, 1) check out the marketing flyer and 2) get in touch by replying to this email.   

Quatra’s humble beginnings are well documented in two Belgian press articles (here and here). Very briefly, in the 1960s, Gerald’s father founded a fat rendering plant - a facility where animal waste was processed into feed for cattle, dogs and cats, with a small UCO side hustle. The business grew steadily but suffered in the wake of the 1999 Dioxin Scandal, which led to farm closures and killed the UCO collection business after a competitor was caught adding toxic transformer oil to animal feed. 

In 2005, Gerald and his cousin exited the company. Silver lining? According to Gerald, the sale pre-empted “the risk of significant dispersal of shares during the transfer from the 2nd to the 3rd generation. My children would have to work with my cousin’s children. Was this situation manageable?”. 

Almost immediately, the Pollaerts began looking for a new company to acquire, self-funded searcher style. Avid equestrians, they had briefly considered a horse vitamin maker and a horseshoe manufacturer, before landing on Atravet in 2009. With a staff of 3, Atravet was a UCO processor servicing several hundred chip shops and pubs in the area where the Pollaerts lived. In 2008, Atravet reported revenues of €730K with a c.30% EBITDA margin. 

Immediately, the Van Pollaerts were startled by the industry’s inefficiency. Across Benelux, dozens of small players were trucking tiny loads to refiners. Despite the inefficiencies, these were profitable businesses with highly loyal customer bases. The Van Pollaerts began rolling up the industry one operation at a time, relentlessly integrating and optimising along the way. 

We’ll get back to the Quatra’s operating playbook in a moment, but first:

UCO is a type of waste produced by the hospitality and food industries in particular. This precious waste, consistently trading above $1,000 / tonne, is highly sought after by European biofuel producers as feedstock for SAF, HVO (renewable diesel) and FAME (conventional biodiesel). 

Between 2012 and 2019, EU-27 biofuel output surged by 40%, from 10 million to 14 million tones, before easing off somewhat. A second wave is coming, fuelled by the EU’s Renewable Energy Directives II and III. Also known as RED II/III, these regulations mandate a minimum of 42.5% of all energy generated from renewables - by 2030. 

But why so much focus on UCO - given that it’s far from the only feedstock available? There are 4 main reasons: 

Firstly, UCO has very high calorific values (85-90% of conventional fuel)...

…whilst being prized for lower carbon intensity scores compared to crop-based feedstock. According to one study, “Substituting crude palm oil or soybean oil with UCO results in more than a 60% life cycle carbon emissions”. 

Thirdly, and related to the above, UCO does not displace land that could be used for food production.

And fourthly, UCO is eligible for double-counting towards the EU’s renewable energy targets (vs. rapeseed / soybeans counted at 1x, and soybeans being gradually phased out). 

Notwithstanding these benefits, Europe’s UCO supply is peaking, with an estimated 75% collection rate in the commercial sector, which represents the bulk of total. All the more leverage for Quatra with 250,000 collection points Europe-wide (source). Customers love Quatra: according to Piet Van Pollaert, “a well-running chip shop can earn an extra €1,000-2,000 per year”. 

Two grand a year for letting someone collect your trash! How can Quatra afford to pay so much - and still make a tidy profit?  

What happens next is dictated by meticulous calculations. An ERP from Odoo (another Belgian compounder!) enabled Quatra fully digitise its operating system. Every collection is scanned and tracked. Routes are drawn up and modified to maximise efficiency. How do we know? Because the Odoo implementation partner wrote it all up. 

Nowadays, Quatra not only collects used cooking oil, but supplies fresh oil too - a business line which apparently represents 10% of revenue: 

As Pol Van Pollaert explained in this interview, “We store the product in one of our many warehouses where we bulk up the volumes. Once these volumes reach more or less 25 metric tonnes, we bring the product to one of our factories”. 

The decision where to process the oil is based on a fully-loaded cost per tonne, including collection, transport, treatment, and final sale economics. Typically, oil collected within a 500 km radius of the Belgium HQ is processed at the central facility (source); the rest in regional hubs (it recently opened in Bilbao, Spain) or at third-party processors. Quatra does not aspire to be a “full-cycle” recycler. The goal is to remove impurities such as water, food residues, plastic, metal, and glass before shipping to refineries. 

In the final step, the purified product is loaded into a tanker in either Ghent or Antwerp (both are located a mere 1/2h drive from the facility), for delivery to refinery customers such as Nesté, BP, Total, and Repsol. 

Quatra’s immense volumes give it significant leverage. In 2025, it signed a 60,000 tonne / year offtake agreement with Total to supply its biofuel refineries near Paris and Marseille. That’s the equivalent of 26 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with Used Cooking Oil!  

The glue that holds it all together is Quatra’s corporate governance structure.