The breakdown:

0:00 - Intro + Aaron’s role at Häagen-Dazs
3:01 - The flavor development process
7:44 - How to make ice cream factory-friendly
12:00 - “Overrun” and what’s not in the ice cream
16:00 - Where flavor ideas come from
23:34 - The science of texture
25:14 - Behind the (discontinued) non-dairy experiment
35:31 - Tasting our fave new flavor + what’s next

PS. If you’re in NYC and interested in attending our seasonal trends event on 10/6, you can request to join us here!!! :)

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Tuesday newsletter coming at ya after we both took off for the Jewish holiday yesterday. Enjoy this day-late send :)

Crazy fact of the week: for the average food or bev brand, a dollar of wholesale sales translates to just ~$0.81 in the bank (after trade, promos, and deductions).

Roughly a fifth of every gross wholesale dollar never even arrives. Amazon keeps the most ($0.93); wholesale keeps the least.

This data comes from Drivepoint’s new Food & Beverage Brand Benchmark, built from the reconciled P&Ls and order-level cohorts of food, beverage, and ingestible brands, with DTC, Amazon, and wholesale kept separate. A few more sneak peeks of the gold mine of data in this report:

• $56 to win a DTC customer, breakeven at the one-year mark, and median LTV:CAC at day 360 is 1.02x.

• Amazon customers cost $16 and pay back 2.38x.... before merchant fees and fulfillment take roughly a quarter of sales.

• The pool overall: 66% gross margin, 1.8% EBITDA margin, 54% growth. Most brands are running near breakeven and buying growth on purpose!!

• 91 days of inventory, a 39-day cash conversion cycle. Food brands don’t usually die from a bad product. They die from working capital.

The guide closes with five numbers to pull from your own books this week, with the quartile thresholds to score yourself against.

Download the free Food & Beverage Benchmark here!

News From the Week

Last week, another premium, better-for-you brand launched straight into Target—adding to the growing list of brands bypassing the natural channel.

In today’s slightly different deep dive, we’re sharing an interview with the brains behind that brand, then digging into our thesis around this strategy.

Let’s get into it →

Interview with Mark Ramadan, Co-founder of Riff

Every “convenience” meal brand of the last decade has optimized for one thing: getting you further from the stove.

Riff is a new meal kit from Mark Ramadan (Sir Kensington’s, Hu) and Daniel Humm (Eleven Madison Park) that’s betting the opposite—that the 15 minutes of actually cooking is the part people want back.

We (virtually) sat down with Mark to talk about why he built a meal kit instead of a heat-and-eat, what two very different pantry categories taught him about standing out, and why Target, not Whole Foods, got the first call.

On designing for both standalone eating and customization:

The small idea for Riff is to help people make dinner; the big idea is to bring joy back into the kitchen. Riff is delicious straight out of the box, but the real opportunity is helping people feel confident experimenting with veggies, proteins, herbs, or whatever is in the fridge. Testing recipes as both standalone products and bases for customization certainly added complexity.

The baseline question for us was––can we stand behind this SKU as-is, and does it become even more restaurant-quality, even more exciting, when just a few simple ingredients are added? It’s easy for something to feel incredible if you add expensive inclusions at home (fresh grated parmigiano reggiano, for example), but our goal was for it to feel just as special with ingredients you could buy anywhere, anytime (like broccoli), so that was our focus. In practice, that meant designing a simple, standard preparation system rather than focusing on any single combination.

On choosing the format itself (inclusions optional, “riffing” encouraged):

It was a mix of data and intuition. Data shows people are cooking at home more than at any time since 2012 (over 80% of meals), but they’re also exhausted after work, budget-conscious, and overwhelmed by endless recipe content.

Intuitively, we knew that weeknight “what’s for dinner?” stress all too well. We craved an “in-between” option: not an hour-long, fully-from-scratch meal, but not expensive delivery or plastic microwave meals either. We made Riff for how people actually want to cook—providing structure and inspiration while leaving room for creativity based on what’s in the fridge.

On choosing Target as the first retail partner:

Target has always been on the side of innovation, and this has been especially true in food over the past several years. Though my experience with Sir Kensington’s and Hu has been that the natural channel typically comes first, in the case of Riff, we wanted to create something that had mainstream appeal and affordability from day one. We feel like the question of dinner is a big one, a common one, and we couldn’t think of a partner better able to deliver on that opportunity than Target.

This “day-one mainstream” bet is becoming increasingly common, and we think it could be the new trajectory of premium, better-for-you CPG brands: bypass the natural channel entirely, and launch direct-to-mass-market.

And it seems that, among the new-age brands going straight to the Targets and Walmarts, many are structured similarly: celebrity co-founded with a CPG vet, accessibly-priced, relatively simple + non-polarizing packaging.

Some recent examples:

• Earlier this summer, we broke down Glen Powell’s condiment brand, Smash Kitchen, which debuted in Walmart with its entire product assortment priced under $5 to compete head-on with Kraft-Heinz rather than court the natural aisle first—and is on track to hit $100M in sales this year.

  • Co-founder Sameer Mehta (who cut his teeth in DTC with Casper and the natural channel with Honest Company) has said getting the price point competitive with the biggest incumbents was central to the strategy from day one, just like what Ramadan is describing with Target.

• HallPass, the new candy brand from Peter Rahal (okay this one isn’t a celeb, but Rahal is basically a CPG celebrity from RXBar and David) and Michael Tierney (formerly of Stuffed Puffs), similarly launched nationwide at Walmart. It’s priced alongside classic candy brands, which is unusual for better-for-you confection.

• cadootz! is a creator-led version going through Target. Rachel Mansfield (influencer + now cookbook author) launched her kids’ cracker brand nationwide at Target in June as its first time in stores, following a DTC debut whose first production run sold out in under two hours in January. The difference is that it tested DTC briefly first, but it still went straight to a mass retailer and skipped natural.

• Bero, the premium non-alcoholic beer brand co-founded by Tom Holland and John Herman, formerly the president of Nutrabolt, launched online-only in late 2024, and its first retail step was a nationwide Target launch.

For ~15 years, the standard path for a BFY brand was natural and specialty first, then mass. But now, BFY stopped being a niche, mass retailers are explicitly asking for it, and the founders who know the natural-to-mass path best are the ones who are skipping it in their second go-around.

The risk in the mass-first strategy is that it doesn’t leave much room for error. While a brand that isn’t flying off shelves in specialty can stealthily fix itself, a brand in 4,000 Walmart doors gets delisted publicly. That’s why this model works best for founders with a track record—but we’re curious to see if first-time founders start attempting this track.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• The Swedish candy boom is here.

  • Sweden’s most-bought car is now at Target, and we’re only kind of kidding here… Cloetta Group, the 164-year-old Swedish confectionery company, launched its Ahlgrens bilar candy car brand exclusively at Target stores nationwide. The car-shaped foam candy has been a Swedish staple since 1953 and comes in four varieties including Original, Sour, Fruity Duo, and Sour & Fruity. Cloetta says the brand sells ~2.6 billion candy cars every year in Sweden alone.

    

  • And in the same week, BonBon launched its two Moomin-branded varieties in more than 1,900 Target stores nationwide for $4.99 a bag. The rollout marks a major leap from niche specialty treat to mass-market category

  • The past few years have made one thing pretty clear: American candy does not cut it for consumers anymore. There has been a huge rush of Swedish and Swedish-adjacent candy, all building up for this moment.

    • The story actually begins in 2010, when Sockerbit, a pick-and-mix Swedish candy shop founded by a Swedish-American couple, opened in the West Village—years before it was a trend. But BonBon, founded in 2017 on the Lower East Side, was the real catalyst for the viral Swedish candy takeover. Rather than importing and reselling Swedish candy like Sockerbit, BonBon built original, Swedish-inspired products and invested heavily in design and a cohesive brand world. It was the perfect storefront for the social media era, and blossomed from a retailer into a beloved brand.

      

    • From there, the pick-and-mix format multiplied—Lil Sweet Treat, Candor, and others opened in its wake, offering the experiential shopping moment of choosing your own sweets. And once shoppers expect a format in-store, grocery follows, because it always does.

    • Bubs went from zero US presence to 60,000 retail stores in twelve months. Katjes has been having its moment in the sun, too, and recently named TikTok comedian Jake Shane its chief creative officer and launched Sourpuss—an octopus-shaped sour gummy named for his TikTok handle—into 1,200 Target stores.

    • And Funday—Australian, not Swedish, but featuring the same foam-on-gummy texture play—hit $100M in sales in five years and just landed 1,300 Target stores.

    • Even Smart Sweets, a brand with zero Swedish DNA, launched its first-ever foam candy this year (and it’s SO GOOD)—because the texture itself has become the trend, independent of the country of origin that popularized it.

    • This trend really shapeshifted from being more about experiential retail into being more about the product itself. The product was introduced into the US at the exact right time in wellness + food culture history: a bouncy, foam-forward texture American candy never had, sour profiles built for a generation that treats sour as a flex, and clean-label positioning (no dyes, no high-fructose corn syrup, natural colors) that reads as healthier even when the sugar content mostly isn’t.

• Add this to the growing list of things that didn’t need to exist: C4 Energy just launched a beer-flavored energy drink, All Hopped Up, with its classic 200 mg of caffeine and added vitamin B12—no alcohol (thank goodness), but flavor inspired by a hoppy brew. It’ll be sold on TikTok Shop (of course) and Amazon.

  • As a sucker for a pun, I’m glad this product exists so this name can shine. But as a discerning human with taste, I’m… concerned. Are people really seeking the taste of beer at the same hour that they’re seeking 200mg of caffeine?

  • In the last two weeks, we saw two other attempts to functionalize non-alcoholic beer: first, Herb Light came out with a first-of-its-kind NA beer featuring 1mg of hemp-derived THC. Then last week, Optimum Nutrition launched the first protein NA beer—we shared our thoughts on that in last week’s newsie. 🙃 Clearly, brands think that NA beer is a format that is ripe for functionalizing; the irony isn’t lost on us that it was created explicitly to de-functionalize beer.

  • Separately, C4 seems to be experimenting with trends. Last month, the brand came out with its first non-energy drink RTD: a protein soda. The lesson we’re learning here: when in doubt, launch something with protein or non-alc beer and hope for the best.

• In other energy news, is Red Bull on the outs?? Kroger has stopped selling Red Bull nationwide, citing that the last units sold in August and in-store coolers/displays were removed at the end of last month, while continuing to carry other energy drink brands.

  • The reason? According to inside sources, it was something of a pricing standoff: Red Bull wanted to raise wholesale prices, and Kroger wasn’t interested.

  • The reality is that a major retailer like Kroger would be willing to pay for a brand driving incremental growth to its category. Red Bull is, unfortunately, no longer that brand. As brands like Alani Nu and Celsius command shelf space with colorful brand blocks and pull in new consumers, that silver can is struggling to justify its existence.

• And one last piece of energy news… Nello is expanding its RTD energy drink line after a successful initial launch with Apple Rush. Now the functional powder brand is bringing four new flavors of its energy line to Target. Flavors that interestingly all feel surprisingly summer-coded. Rainbow Sherbet, in particular, has our attention.

• The new generation of Halloween candy is coming.

  • SmartSweets is launching its 2026 Halloween lineup at Target, including returning Gummy Worms and Sour Zombie Buddies (3g sugar, 50g bags) plus a new Mini Sweet Fish in 24-count snack packs.

  • This adds to a growing stack of new better-for-you Halloween candies emerging: Last year, Unreal Snacks launched its 26-count Halloween-branded variety packs of better-for-you chocolate-based candies. Other better-for-you brands with Halloween-specific snack-packs include YumEarth and Skinnydipped. Curious to see how the transition from the old guard (Snickers, Milky Ways, M&Ms, Skittles… and my personal favorite, Almond Joy) to these new, “cleaner” candies plays out as younger Millennials and Gen Z become parents.

  • But, despite legal efforts, a new, more realistic Reese’s pumpkin will not be part of the stack: Hershey secured dismissal of a lawsuit alleging its Reese’s Halloween pumpkins lacked the carved designs shown on packaging. The judge found plaintiffs suffered only “subjective disappointment,” not economic harm. And TBH… yea.

• A better bowel movement, now in gummy form! Grüns launched its newest product, Müves, a prebiotic fiber gummy with 10 grams of soluble fiber per pack. The Strawberry Kiwi gummies come in low- and no-sugar options.

  • Slowly but surely, Grüns is following the same path as many other gummy supplements: start with the multivitamin to get mass market appeal, then break the benefits out into many single-purpose products (see: OLLY). Across the Ü Snacks portfolio, it now has Grüns for greens, Nütrops for cognition, Immün for immunity, Jüced for pre-workout energy, and Müves for digestion—all (except the energy SKU) functions promised in the OG Grüns gummy product.

  • AG1 is also moving in a similar direction from “all-in-one” promise to a multi-SKU brand: It began with its all-in-one powder and had that for around 15 years before adding other products like AG1 Pro with creatine for the wellness maximizers, AGZ for sleep, and they even launched gummies for a more casual users. The play for both of these brands is to build a portfolio for every type of wellness consumer all under one roof.

  • At $66 for 28 servings, this is still very expensive fiber. Most consumers can get the same nutrient for much less from a powder or, you know, a salad (without the cyclospora of course). But the gummy format is much likelier to become a daily habit. There’s a reason Grüns was sold to Unilever for $1.2 billion!

• Prestige laundry hits mass retail. The Laundress, which Unilever acquired in January 2019 for a reported $100 million after it built its business mostly through its own website and Amazon, is headed to 600 Target stores with 15 SKUs and a Target-exclusive fragrance called Cloud. This marks the brand’s first major move beyond DTC into national brick-and-mortar retail, with over 1,000 stores planned by March 2027.

  • These scents were developed with a perfumer, and Target is even adding scent testers to the display! Fragrance has become one of the biggest trends in personal care, across traditional perfume to body wash, deodorant, and now laundry—offering an elevated feel that makes a chore feel like an upgraded ritual.

• Home care, meet the wellness industrial complex. Dropps, the DTC home-care brand best known for plastic-free laundry and dishwasher detergent pods, rebranded with updated packaging, website, and positioning (”Messy Life. Kind Ingredients. Actually Clean.”).

  

  • Function is only one part of how a product wins these days. Yes, the cleaner needs to clean your clothes or clean the floor or clean your dishes, but it also has to fit into the consumer’s current view of wellness. The old Dropps branding spoke more directly to a plant-based, sustainability-first shopper who may have even been on the crunchier side. But this new identity keeps their ingredient credibility they’re known for but packages it in a more modern and premium way. It then opens up the brand to this new wave of consumers who care just as much about how a product looks in their home as what’s inside it.

  • In case you’re unfamiliar, this brand kinda invented laundry pods: Jonathan Propper founded Dropps in 2006, spinning it out of Cot’n Wash, a gentler-detergent formula his mother developed in the 1980s for her cotton mill. He patented the pod format years before Tide brought its own version to shelves in 2012, and the brand ran on that eco-first identity for over a decade before taking its first outside money—$16M in 2020 from The Craftory, a firm that explicitly funds “anti-VC,” slow-growth, mission-driven brands. Dropps is now officially translating cred it’s held since before “clean” was a shelf category.

• A recipe for hyptertension (AKA, electrolytes for the “everyday consumer”). Momentous launched Daily Hydration, an electrolyte powder made for everyday use (not workouts) with 100mg sodium, 150mg chloride, 50mg potassium, and 2g functional carbohydrate.

  • We’ve been seeing more and more brands launch hydration products catered to the “everyday consumer,” and honestly, we’re getting a little concerned. If you’re not profusely sweating on a day-to-day basis, you likely don’t need to down a bev with added sodium for funsies. If anything, you may be overdoing it on the sodium front… and a generation of wellness-obsessed non-athletes hooked on electrolyte powders may lead to an aging population with seriously high blood pressure 🙃 - J

• Everyone wants in on matcha. La Colombe launched a line of RTD Matcha Lattes—Everyday, Strawberry, and Vanilla—made with single-origin Japanese matcha and lactose-free whole milk. Unsurprisingly, matcha sales at La Colombe cafés have grown 188% since 2023.

Retail

• Costco bets big on same-day. Costco expanded nationwide same-day delivery to Uber Eats (~600 locations) and DoorDash (~630 locations, 47 states + D.C.), adding two marketplace partners alongside incumbent Instacart. CEO Ron Vachris called same-day the fastest-growing segment of Costco’s digital business, and Uber One perks (fees waived on $60+ orders) makes Costco a loyalty amplifier for both brands

  • This will be interesting for Instacart in particular, which, up until this point, had been the go-to for Costco ecomm orders.

Funding, Mergers, & Acquisitions

• Celebrity checks keep flowing into CPG. Podcaster Jay Shetty has invested in Sleep or Die, the buzzy new wellness brand behind Sleep Strips (think Listerine stripes but for sleep). Shetty is no stranger to the CPG world. He also owns Juni, a sparkling tea brand that’s sold nationwide.

  • High-profile names are increasingly investing in brands rather than starting another their own brand from scratch. In the past few months alone we saw, Alix Earle invest in Cymbiotika, Bethenny Frankel took an ownership stake in DpHue, TikTok creators Katie Fang and Aliya Rachinski became equity partners in ESW Beauty, and NBA players including Draymond Green and Anthony Davis invested in Beekeeper Coffee. And then there are brands like TRIP, which has added a whole roster of high-profile names—including Joe Jonas, Alessandra Ambrosio, Paul Wesley, Ashley Graham, and last week just added Kylie Jenner—to its cap table. For the brands? It’s a way to get capital and reach and cultural relevance in one fell swoop. For the celebrities and talent? It’s more often than not a much better way to participate in the crazy CPG without having to actually build something from scratch.

  • This brand also feels very aligned with the type of content and vibe that Jay Shetty puts out there into the world. Maybe this is a bit more bold of a brand but what it’s trying to get at, especially in the sleep category, feels very aligned with everything else that he’s building for his personal brand.

• Allergy care gets a glow-up. Wizard Wellness, the allergy brand launched in January by beauty-industry veteran Lorne Lucree, raised $1 million. Wizard is also expandin while rolling into more than 4,000 Target, Walmart, and CVS stores. The company is also bringing in Clueless actress Elisa Donovan for its first celebrity campaign.

• A French beauty portfolio. Caudalie, the family-owned skincare company known for grape-powered formulas, acquired Talm, a French sensitive-skin and maternity brand sold in about 60 doors across 12 countries. It’s Caudalie’s first acquisition, and Talm will remain independently run by founder Kenza Keller

• Little bottles, big bucks. Sol-ti has raised $30.3M in equity, per an SEC Form D filed in June, as the glass-bottled juice and shot brand positions for expansion in retail and foodservice.

• Loves an RTD. Sazerac acquired Au Vodka, the UK-based gold-bottle vodka and RTD brand founded in Swansea in 2015, expanding its UK portfolio and giving Au a path into more global markets. Terms were not disclosed, though Bloomberg’s source puts the deal at more than £300 million.

  • Au is the second-largest player in the UK’s RTD cocktail market, and it now sits in the same portfolio as the category leader, BuzzBallz, which Sazerac bought in 2024. Together the two brands hold about a fifth of UK RTD sales by value (per NIQ data cited by The Grocer).

  • Au is also Sazerac’s third RTD bet this year, following its March purchase of the canned cocktail brand Dirty Shirley and a May stake in Sipmargs, the canned margarita brand backed by TikTok creator Alix Earle. IWSR expects RTDs to be the only alc category to grow in 2026, so the owner is buying its way into the one corner of spirits that’s still growing.

• Brain food buys snack food. Cerebelly, the company that makes brain-focused baby food, acquired Fresh Bellies, a plant-based, freeze-dried kids snack brand founded in 2015, to expand into snacking. Financial terms weren’t disclosed; both brands will operate separately under shared ownership with distinct retail presences.

In case you missed it… 🎧

Last week, we caught up on a bunch of launches from the past few weeks, from David Protein’s new ready-to-drink milkshakes (fresh off a $2.2B valuation), to the Liquid Death founder’s new canned bubbly brand, and Beyond Meat’s latest (bizarre) attempt to regain relevancy.

Plus, what “peak function” looks like now that Folgers is doing functional coffee, why “supplements for your supplements” might be the next big thing, and more.

Catch the full episode below 👇

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, like, leave a comment, and share it! It helps us continue to bring you the most interesting news + nuance in consumer and retail every week.

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Now, let’s get into our picks of the week →

Nate’s Pickups:

Chocxo Dark Milk Chocolate Cookie Butter Cups

This might surprise many, but I’m not always the biggest chocolate fan all the time. When I do enjoy chocolate, I prefer either very dark chocolate or chocolate that’s richly flavored and filled, usually with peanut butter or caramel. But, I’m a candy person, so I try everything. And it’s my job but that’s besides the point.

Chocxo makes some of my favorite filled (and lower sugar) chocolate candies, and this is probably their best one. I mean, come on. Who doesn’t like taste cookie butter, speculoos, or a Biscoff cookie on a Delta flight? Mhmm?! You know you do. That’s exactly what it is, you take a Biscoff cookie and a jar of cookie butter and put it in a chocolate cup….but with a twist! 👀

• Quick Facts: These are speculoos-inspired cups with a cookie butter center made from cashew butter blended with white chocolate, cinnamon, and molasses, all wrapped in 43% organic dark milk chocolate and finished with toasted graham cracker crumbs on top. Each cup has 5 grams of sugar, sweetened with organic cane sugar. They’re also USDA Organic, Non-GMO Project Verified, and certified gluten free.

• Reasons to love:

  • Great flavor formulation. Shockingly, there are no speculoos or Biscoff cookies in the filling. It’s cashew butter blended with white chocolate, cinnamon, and molasses to achieve that speculoos flavor. Until I sat down to write this, I hadn’t realized that! That’s some impressive flavor science at work. The taste of a Biscoff cookie is so universally well-known, it’s a beloved thing, that the only way to make this product good is to do it 100%. It must taste exactly like the original, and it does.

  • Well-constructed. This is a well built piece of candy. The filling-to-chocolate ratio is perfect, for my taste at least. There’s enough filling that every bite delivers and enough chocolate that it still feels like candy and not a spoonful of just the spread. If I wanted that I’d buy some Oat Haus. And one thing I love about Chocxo’s chocolate cups is that they have a little texture on top. In this product it’s graham cracker bits, but almost all of their products have some added crunch and it just adds so much to the experience.

  • Low sugar that doesn’t taste like it. If sugar alternatives mess you up, this is the candy for you. Chocxo uses real cane sugar and no artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols in any of their products, so if other sweeteners upset your stomach or you simply dislike their taste, this option should work for you. You might wonder how it can be low sugar when it uses real cane sugar. Well, according to the brand, the way they source their cocoa and the quality of the beans make the chocolate naturally sweeter so less added sugar is needed to coverup anything.

Where to buy. Online and retailers nationwide

Jenna’s Pickup:

Tsubi Soup - Red Miso Soup with Spicy Mushrooms

It’s back-to-school season, AKA illness season, and last week, I humbly discovered that I have not outgrown it (perhaps because I still refer to weeknights as “school nights,” and essentially live on a college campus, but I digress). While I was down for the count, I was craving soup constantly—and felt like the luckiest girl in the world when a package of Tsubi Soup arrived at my door. I proceeded to have Tsubi nearly every day last week.

If you (like me) grew up on the delicacy that is Cup Noodles, this format won’t be too surprising to you. A just-add-hot-water freeze-dried soup situation, with real veggies magically sprinkled in. But Tsubi is a major flavor + nutritional upgrade from its styrofoamed predecessor, and I am so excited to have it as part of my Fall-Winter soup rotation.

• Quick Facts: Premium, freeze-dried instant soup cubes (just add hot water), made in Japan.

• Reasons to love:

  • You can taste the quality. Every ingredient in Tsubi is sourced from Japan, and the product was made in Japan in small batches—and it tastes like it. If I didn’t make it myself, I’d never know it came from a freeze-dried cube! As a mushroom enthusiast, I LOVE the Red Miso with Spicy Mushrooms. It includes four gourmet Japanese mushrooms—shiitake, enoki, maitake, and nameko—so you get full mushroom (and lots of variety, umami-style) in every bite.

  • SaaS (Soup as a Snack). I’m gonna be real with you: these are nowhere near hearty enough to have as a full meal. They’re mostly a rich miso broth with some mushrooms (other flavors have tofu, but it’s still a small portion), and come out to just 35-45 calories depending on the flavor. That is at MOST a small snack, but I actually love that reframe: a warm, flavor-packed snack you can slowly sip rather than mindlessly chow down in 2 minutes. It feels so luxurious—as a vegetarian, I imagine this is how the bone broth girlies feel.

  • Ridiculously convenient. Have you ever wanted to BYOSoup? Or literally throw soup in your bag and take it on-the-go? Now you can! I love that these come in small, super light packets you can fit in anything and take anywhere (take THAT Cup Noodles). These would be fabulous to stock at your desk as a office snack, bring along on travel days, or just keep in your bag as an emergency snack that isn’t another protein bar.

Where to buy: Online or in stores (Whole Foods North Atlantic)!

In case you missed it… 🎧

This week, we’re catching up on a bunch of launches from the past few weeks, from David Protein’s new ready-to-drink milkshakes (fresh off a $2.2B valuation), to the Liquid Death founder’s new canned bubbly brand, and Beyond Meat’s latest (bizarre) attempt to regain relevancy.

Plus, we’re getting into what “peak function” looks like now that Folgers is doing functional coffee, why “supplements for your supplements” might be the next big thing, and more.

Catch the full episode below 👇

This week, we’re catching up on a bunch of launches from the past few weeks, from David Protein’s new ready-to-drink milkshake, to the Liquid Death’s founder’s new brand and Beyond Meat’s latest (bizarre) attempt to regain relevancy.

Plus, we’re getting into what “peak function” looks like, why “supplements for your supplements” might be the next big thing, and more.

Let’s get into it →

The Breakdown

0:00 - What we’ve been loving lately

4:55 - David Protein milkshakes and $250M raise

10:43 - Liquid Death’s founder’s new business

17:36 - Bero’s NA beer goes premium in glass

22:05 - Girl Scout Cookies x BARK and Partake

25:53 - Alec’s Ice Cream x Purely Elizabeth

29:19 - Beyond Meat’s bizarre new direction

38:46 - Folgers goes functional

43:38 - Optimum Nutrition’s NA protein beer

46:17 - Supplements for your supplements

PS. If you’re in NYC and interested in attending our seasonal trends event on 10/6, you can request to join us here :)

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We have two very exciting events coming up in NYC, and we’re looking for the right folks to join us:

First, we’re hosting a private dinner next Tuesday at a stunning NYC spot, exclusively for marketing and growth leaders at $20M+ brands. We’ll be chatting about how to turn AI discovery into your next major growth channel! We have very limited seats remaining for some of our lovely newsletter readers—if you fall within that category and you’re hoping to attend, reply to this email.

And on October 6th, we’re putting on our most exciting event yet: the second edition of In Season, Express Checkout’s quarterly event featuring the top three biggest trends of the season and the brands behind them. This time around, we’re hosting at a gallery in downtown NYC… basically a museum of trends, where tasting opportunities are abundant (giving Willy Wonka a run for his money).

• Note: This event is for select brands, investors, media, and tastemakers only—if you’re a B2B platform or service provider hoping to join + activate, please reply to this email to chat about remaining sponsorship options!

We’re so excited to see some of our incredible NYC community in one room. :) If you’re interested in putting on a highly-curated, private dinner with our network of CPG professionals, or if you want to learn more about getting involved in our larger-scale events, hit reply to this email.

News From the Week

If everybody else is proteinmaxxing, how do you retain your status as a superior, highly-informed wellness consumer?

You supplement your supplements, of course.

This week, Thorne launched Protein Optimizer, a probiotic-enzyme formula combining active cultures with the digestive enzyme, amylase, marketed to “work along the gut-muscle axis” to “maximize the benefits of every gram of protein you consume.”

In other words, it’s a supplement for your supplements. A meta-supplement, if you will. Welcome to wellness dystopia 😈.

How the heck did we get here?

We don’t need to tell you that protein is everywhere now. But just to really drill it in: this week, Optimum Nutrition launched a non-alcoholic protein beer, and Folgers launched protein coffee (more on both in the newsie below). Every category has been utterly doused in protein, to the point that the latest wellness trend, proteinmaxxing, is inescapably mass-market.

But the whole point of wellness is to keep consumers forever striving towards something that’s juuuust out of reach. Once Folgers is offering protein, once it’s in every single category including NA Beer, it’s probably too reachable. And the industry must do its job to introduce something that, once again, reminds you that you aren’t doing enough.

Once an ingredient goes mass-market, the category doesn’t die—it just moves up a level of abstraction, from “do you take X“ to “are you taking X correctly? How fluently can you describe what happens to it once you’ve swallowed it?” (followed by a slew of terms that trigger AP Bio anxiety like: Gut-muscle axis, amino acid absorption, bioavailability). The meta-supplements layer is where the next round of premium pricing and consumer anxiety gets manufactured.

Just look at what’s happening to the GLP-1 market. GLP-1s went mainstream fast (15% of Americans have now tried GLP-1s), and once being on one stopped being differentiated, an entire secondary industry sprang up purely to manage what the primary product does to your body:

• Nestlé built an entire brand, Vital Pursuit, explicitly for GLP-1 users—cauliflower-crust pizzas, chicken bowls, sandwich melts, while Danone launched Oikos Protein Shakes “geared to GLP-1 users.”

• Conagra put the words “GLP-1 Friendly” directly on packaging, an “On Track” badge slapped across 26 Healthy Choice frozen meals.

• Herbalife launched a GLP-1 Nutrition Companion line built around its existing protein shake, marketed to fill the nutritional gaps created by appetite suppression.

None of these compete with the GLP-1, but they all exist because the GLP-1 alone wasn’t enough to feel “done.”

“GLP-1 creates new nutritional gaps” is similar in rhetoric to “you’re not absorbing all your protein”; it takes something people feel good about doing correctly and reveals a new, previously invisible problem underneath it.

So what’s next? If the pattern holds, meta-supplements won’t stay a one-off Thorne launch—they’ll become their own aisle. Here’s what we’re watching for:

• Gut-muscle-axis vocabulary migrating out of sports nutrition and into everyday wellness. Right now “optimizer” language lives mostly in performance and longevity circles. Expect it on mainstream shelf tags within the year like Nature Made, Olly, and the private-label brands that usually lag trends by 12-18 months.

• Bundling, not swapping. These products only work as an add-on, never a replacement—so we’re watching for protein powder sold packaged with its own optimizer, at a combined price higher than either would command alone.

• A GLP-1-style taxonomy forming around protein specifically: side-effect mitigation (bloating, digestion), gap-filling (absorption, amino acid completeness), and eventually post-optimization support—something to help you taper off the Optimizer once your gut’s “recalibrated.” Because of course there will be an off-ramp product too.

And if we’re really getting meta here, we just might see a product positioned to help you absorb your absorption enzyme. Dear god….

There is always a higher-order function to be sold in the hamster wheel that we call Wellness. Just make sure you know why you’re running on it in the first place.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Beyond Meat is having a major identity crisis. In the latest edition of “Beyond Meat tries something weird in hopes of making a comeback” (see two more examples here), the brand launched its “Phytosphere portfolio”—protein powder (”Beyond Starmatter”), jerky (”Beyond Starcut”), and a veggie burger (”Beyond Veggie”). Every product in the line is focused on complete nutrition featuring protein, fiber, and in the case of “Starmatter,” polyphenols, adaptogens, and biotin.

  

• As a veg girl, I was really rooting for Beyond’s comeback, and I cannot stress enough how disappointed I am to see where it’s landed. For starters, “phytosphere” is giving me chilling flashbacks to “metaverse,” AKA out-of-touch tech company attempting to sound hip. But my biggest gripe with this line is that the core objection to alt meat has always been its “lab-made” framing, that consumers “don’t know what’s in it.” Leaning into this celestial theme only further alienates the product—and the literal black-box design, which offers no on-pack product imagery, wholly removes any possibility of gaining trust.

• Just last year, Beyond’s CEO Ethan Brown told Inc that he wanted to focus on “producing food that doesn’t imitate anything,”—clearly aware that trying to compete against animal-based protein wasn’t a winning game. While the veggie burgers (which are made from whole-ingredients, reminiscent of Actual Veggies) do seem in line with this thesis, Starmatter and Starcut both diverge. Starcut is literally marketed as jerky…during the height of the meat stick craze, no less. And Starmatter, the protein powder that seems to have thrown every single nutrition trend into one bag, competes with countless whey powders and, by nature of its format, drives the consumer even further away from the “whole food” messaging. Color me (galactically) confused.

• Cookies for all! The Girl Scouts are adding two new cookies to the 2027 lineup, and both arrive by way of a collaboration: Patch Pals, a blueberry dog treat made with BARK, and Girl Scout Sparkables, an allergy-friendly oatmeal cookie made with Partake. Both of these are a first for this organization—its first cookie for dogs, and its first free of the top nine major allergens.

  • Partake is a fascinating brand to watch. The brand itself, founded in 2016, seemed to peak when allergen-friendly products were all the rage, hitting national retail in 2024. Since then, it’s maintained relevance through smart co-branding and ingredient supply: The Ben & Jerry’s Oatmeal Dream Pie (2023, a permanent non-dairy flavor using Partake’s oatmeal cookies), plus deals with JetBlue and DoubleTree by Hilton, show a company that licenses its allergy-friendly credibility into other people’s products, just like it’s now doing with Girl Scouts. It’s a great example of a brand creatively transcending the perceived ceiling of nationwide mass-market retail distro.

• Ice cream for breakfast. Alec’s Ice Cream just launched the Ice Cream for Breakfast Culture Cup with Purely Elizabeth, a probiotic cereal milk ice cream under a crackable strawberry shell, finished with Purely Elizabeth granola clusters.

  • Alec’s Culture Cup, an A2 dairy, single-serve, pre- and probiotic, clean-label, gluten-free ice cream cup, launched in early 2025 and had a viral sellout. Though Alec’s was already known for its A2 pints, it was these single-serve cups that really helped the brand take off. By October 2025, the brand closed an oversubscribed $11 million Series A.

  • “Ice Cream for Breakfast is more of a feeling than a flavor and Purely Elizabeth was a natural partner to bring this to life! We share the same philosophy: craveable foods and foods that make you feel good don’t have to be mutually exclusive.” - Alec Jaffe founder and CEO of Alec’s Ice Cream

• Now THIS is peak function. JM Smucker’s Folgers, AKA the coffee that’s been in your grandparents’ cabinet since the 60s, is launching its first-ever instant functional coffee blends this November: four varieties including Protein, Focus, Boost, and Prebiotic.

  

  • You heard that right folks, the legacy players are coming for functional beverages. And you know what that means: we’ve reached the peak. Enough functional brands have launched in recent years that there’s no clear winner, which communicates to legacy players that they can develop something like this internally rather than acquiring it.

  • It’s further proof that wellness culture is now mass‑market and everywhere. If Folgers is doing this, there’s no stopping the wellness boom that we’ve been seeing over the past few years.

• ….this also might be peak function. Optimum Nutrition, the world’s No. 1 sports nutrition brand, launched ChampionSips, a limited-edition non-alcoholic beer with Wisconsin Brewing Company, featuring 10g of protein.

  

  • It’s not just protein beer; it’s protein non‑alcoholic beer, which is just putting too many different trends into one can. At least it’s limited edition and not something sticking around on shelf. I personally do not want protein beer. I would like to keep those things to be as separate as possible - Nate

• We told you, Apple is fall’s new flavor. Culture Pop is joining the apple craze with a limited-edition Sparkling Apple probiotic soda, sold at Albertsons, Wegmans, H-E-B, and Amazon.

  • Side note: Culture Pop is a sleeper brand in the better-for-you soda category! This fast-growing brand is tracking toward more than $25 million in revenue this year. What’s different about it is that it’s made with organic fruit juice and no added sugar or sweeteners, and it’s probiotic, not prebiotic.

• The DTC-to-retail pipeline strikes again! Factor is expanding its fresh, refrigerated, ready-made meals to 800+ Target stores across 47 states. This comes nine months after a 70-store Midwest pilot where its meals became top sellers in the category.

  • But why now? Like so many things, it traces back to the pandemic. Everyone was trapped inside, at home and online subscriptions surged. Now that the world has fully reopened and shoppers have returned to many of their usual routines, most shoppers want to shop IRL… while maintaining the convenience shortcuts they learned during Covid times. They want Factor to be their meal-plan provider and a stop on the grocery run where they can pick up other essentials, and a store like Target is where that happens.

  • And then there’s GLP-1s. It’s 2026 after all! Ready-to-eat, pre-portioned meals are winning right now partially because there’s a large, motivated group of people who need exactly this type of product. In the US, there are roughly 16 million active GLP-1 users and this is projected to hit ~30 million by 2030. Per BCG’s new survey of GLP-1 users, they’re willing to pay for it too. Active users plan to spend 11% more each month on high-protein foods. Total calorie intake might be shrinking, but budget is not—the perfect set of conditions for a premium, high-protein, prepared meal line to take off.

  • I also loved this take from one of my favorite Substacks, Kevin Ryan’s FoodStuff, on how we’re “post-meal kit now.” HelloFresh, Factor’s parent company, is betting on Factor’s ready-to-eat meals instead of its own meal kit subscription as Americans move further and further away from cooking. Kevin also offered the other great point that a deli case communicates higher-quality and fresher than many frozen meals, even as the frozen aisle constantly improves.

• Carbone exits the pasta aisle. Carbone Fine Food launched Italian Chili Crisp in two varieties, Calabrian Chili Crisp and Aglio e Peperoncino, exclusively at Whole Foods for $13.99 a jar. It’s the brand’s first category expansion since launching pasta sauce in 2021.

  

  • Chili crisp is already a crowded category, with Fly By Jing, LAOGANMA, Momofuku, S&B and Trader Joe’s all competing for your pantry space. Momofuku even owns the trademark for “chili crunch,” though it stopped enforcing it in 2024 after industry backlash.

  • Carbone is betting its Italian spin and restaurant name cache will help it stand out. A Whole Foods launch exclusivity keeps it at premium, but does cap the volume ceiling. The bigger question here is whether the Carbone name can sell its condiments as well as it sells pasta sauces.

  • I actually got to try this at a Carbone Fine Foods event early last year….it was so freaking good! Especially that green one. DAMN. I will be running to buy a jar or two when it hit shelves near me. - Nate

eCommerce

• Every delivery service is launching an AI shopping tool:

  • This week, Instacart launched Cart Assistant, a white-label AI shopping tool regional grocers can embed on their own sites, alongside Clementine, its own marketplace assistant, which builds personalized, ready-to-buy carts from simple text prompts.

    • Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group, and Woodman’s are already live; ads will be layered into both by year-end.

  • Meanwhile, Target-owned Shipt is doing something very similar: the delivery service launched Ask Shipt, an AI tool that generates shopping carts from meal photos or text prompts across 100+ retailers. Users can snap a dish photo or describe a spread, and ingredients get added to their carts automatically.

  • Kroger rolled out its own version this year, and now, delivery services are offering the same capability to basically any regional grocery chain that wants it. Expect nearly every grocer to have an “AI shopping assistant” within a year.

  • Definitely curious to see the stats on adoption here. The revenue promise isn’t about getting customers to add more to cart, necessarily; it’s more about the new ad units tucked into these platforms.

Retail

• Whole Foods gets a raise. Amazon is investing more than $230 million in pay and benefits for 100,000+ Whole Foods employees, raising average pay to $21/hr ($29/hr in total comp) starting Sept. 28, with health plans from $5/week beginning January 2027.

  • Amazon has spent the better part of a decade unsure what to do with grocery—opening and subsequently shuttering Fresh and Go formats, never fully committing. But now that it’s dropping $230M into Whole Foods labor, it feels like Amazon is finally picking a lane: WFM is Amazon’s grocery identity now. But the question remains: will a ~75% jump in benefits actually rewrite Whole Foods’ post-Amazon reputation , or just buy goodwill headlines heading into the holidays?

• Pay-to-play, but make it a felony. 😇 Southern Glazer’s, the largest U.S. wine and spirits distributor, will pay $12.5 million and enter a non-prosecution agreement with the DOJ after employees allegedly funneled cash, gift cards, golf trips, and luxury goods to California retailers—hidden behind false invoices—in exchange for better shelf placement between 2016 and 2024.

  • Every operator reading this knows shelf placement is, to some degree, bought (slotting fees, trade spend, “marketing support”). The distributor tier is the least visible and most powerful part of alcohol retail (thank the three-tier system), so this is a rare look at how the sausage actually gets made.

• Grocery deserts get a lifeline. Illinois Gov. Pritzker announced more than $26M in grants through the Illinois Grocery Initiative—$20.8M for new stores in food deserts, $4.5M to reopen recently closed stores, and $750K for equipment upgrades—building on $19M already distributed since 2024.

  • While the national chains chase functional SKUs and reshuffle their wellness sets, ~$27M is going toward whether some Illinois towns have a grocery store at all. “Retail” isn’t only the Targets and Walmarts fighting over shelf space… a lot of the country is still fighting for access at all.

Funding news

• Pouring cash into protein. Protein2o, the clear protein brand, announced a new growth investment, though it did not disclose the amount. The funding will support further brand building, retail expansion, hiring, and product development. The company also named Mark Rappaport CEO and added him to its board. Rappaport was previously global chief commercial officer at Congo Brands, the company behind Alani Nu, and held senior roles at Red Bull.

  • The brand might have a relatively generic name and pretty simple branding, but it clearly works: it surpassed $60 million in retail sales by late 2025 and is sold in more than 10,000 doors nationwide. Just because a brand doesn’t have flashy branding or marketing doesn’t mean it won’t perform well.

  • Brian Folmer, founder of FirstLook VC, a platform that puts emerging CPG brands in front of investors, saw Protein2o very early and told me most investors passed at the time, and the numbers definitely weren’t the issue. The company just didn’t fit the usual venture mold. The team was comprised of seasoned operators rather than a pair of young founders with a compelling origin story, and the branding wasn’t the polished, design-forward look investors have been trained to expect.

“They were not a standard VC-looking brand. Sometimes people put way too much emphasis on branding, like the actual appearance... To only pay attention to the brands that are in the VC buzzy circles is a complete mistake. You’re going to miss out on all these brands that are not in the VC bubble.” - Brian Folmer

• • Consumers mostly just want a product that works. And this focus and lack of flashiness can be a huge leg up for brands because it doesn’t alienate some consumers who might find extremely well-done branding a barrier to purchase.

• The tampon gets a redesign. Viv, a Gen Z-founded period-care brand, just raised $2M to launch its patented Cottonlock™ tampon nationwide. The fiber-resistant design aims to prevent residue and protect the vaginal microbiome, and will roll out across all 526 Whole Foods locations.

• A different kind of international delight. Petit Pot raised a seven-figure Series A co-led by Eclair Partners and Terri and John Penshorn to expand distribution of its French-inspired refrigerated desserts—pot de crème, rice pudding—already at Whole Foods, Costco, and Target nationwide.

  • Refrigerated dessert has been a sleepy, low-expectations category forever, the thing you grab on impulse while perusing for yogurt. Petit Pot’s whole bet is that Americans will pay up for a premium version, the same way they did for yogurt (hi, Chobani) and, lately, protein pudding cups.

  • While a seven-figure A is small, the brand’s retail footprint is already in place, and has potential to see some success from what we predict will be a new wave of “small, intentional indulgences”: products made with real ingredients and real sugar, but packaged in premium, portioned vessels. As appetites shrink (xoxo, GLP-1s), luxe, pre-portioned indulgences will likely see a surge over artificially sweet, ultraprocessed sweet snacks designed for volume eating.

  • “Pudding still has a special place in people’s memories, but the category has been stuck for years with low expectations, and uninspiring choices,” says Eric Lallart, CEO of Petit Pot. “American consumers are raising the bar for what they eat, and dessert should be no exception. Made with real ingredients and perfectly portioned, Petit Pot is a little treat worth slowing down for.”

• Oral care first, everything else negotiable. Colgate-Palmolive is weighing the sale of Softsoap, Irish Spring, and Speed Stick in a deal that could top $1 billion, with Goldman Sachs hired to run the process. Its personal care unit generated ~$3.5B in 2025—17% of net sales.

  • This news comes off of last week’s announcement that S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed that Colgate-Palmolive was removed from the S&P 100 index in favor of AI-adjacent tech companies (go figure).

  • This is the same portfolio-pruning move we keep seeing from the giants: shed the mature, slow-growth brands, concentrate on the core. Colgate’s core is oral care, which makes Softsoap, Irish Spring, and Speed Stick suddenly non-essential.

  • Just last week, we saw Nestlé dumping $1B of vitamins. These brands aren’t failing, they’re just not the core. And there’s a deep bench of PE firms and roll-ups happy to buy steady, unsexy cash cows. Speed Stick getting squeezed by DTC deodorant on one side and labeled “non-core” on the other is SUCH a classic tale of mid-tier CPG these days.

• Kendall gets calm. Kendall Jenner is joining TRIP, the magnesium-based calming drink brand, as a global ambassador and equity partner. She will front the brand’s new global campaign and take a stake in the business as TRIP projects $200 million+ in revenue for 2026.

  • And miss Jenner here is far from the first celebrity to touch TRIP. The brand recently raised $40 million at a valuation north of $300 million in late 2025, with Joe Jonas, Alessandra Ambrosio, Paul Wesley, and Ashley Graham joining the round alongside Coefficient Capital. Millie Mackintosh has also been named as an investor, while Graham previously worked with TRIP on its Calm partnership. Earlier in 2025, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s Equity Studio took a multimillion-pound stake in the company. At this point, TRIP has assembled a full cast ready for a Netflix original!

• Keeping the CSA box alive. Farm to People, a Brooklyn-based online farmers’ market, raised $5 million from New Fare Partners, Stonyfield founders, and a former Whole Foods exec—its first outside investment. The company serves 13,000+ monthly customers across 200+ NYC-area farms and will use the funds to open a 40,000-square-foot Bronx facility in 2027.

In case you missed it… 🎧

This week on the pod, we were joined by Adam Terry, CEO and co-founder of Cantrip and On the Brightside—and absolute WEALTH of knowledge on all things THC regulation and functional beverages.

Adam walks us through his journey in the cannabis beverage industry and pivot into a new kind of functional drink. He explains why the low-dose THC hypothesis didn’t pan out, the science behind the new functional ingredient he’s betting on, and the tricky retail landscape of functional beverages.

This is a great follow-up episode to our interview with Jake Bullock, CEO and co-founder of Cann—offering some updates and rare insights into the ever-changing THC regulatory environment!

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, like, leave a comment, and share it! It helps us continue to bring you the most interesting news + nuance in consumer and retail every week.

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Now, let’s get into our picks of the week →

Nate’s Pickups:

Dairy and dairy-free protein shakes. (David and Grounded)

This week, I wanted to offer you a two-for-one deal. David just released their protein shakes, and I’ll talk a lot about them because they’re absolutely delicious and wildly impressive. These are David’s best product by far! But I didn’t want to leave my dairy-free friends out to pasture, so I’m also including one of my favorite dairy-free protein shakes from Grounded.

The protein shake space, while not as crowded as the protein bar space, still has a lot of players right now. Standing out isn’t always about macros. Taste and texture are what win, if anything. And both of these brands nail everything. They nail macros, they nail taste, and they definitely nail texture.

David protein milkshakes

• Quick Facts: David’s first ready-to-drink product, launched in Vanilla and Chocolate. Each 12 oz bottle is made with ultra-filtered skim milk and, of course, EPG, and delivers 30g of protein with ~150 calories and less than 1g of sugar.

• Reasons to love:

  • It’s a milkshake. It says “milkshake” on the front of the bottle, and it definitely tastes and feels like a milkshake too. The texture is not too thick nor is it too thin despite being a skim milk base. This is where the infamous EPG comes into play in particular. EPG, for those that somehow don’t know, is the modified plant-based fat alternative that gives David products the same taste and texture of conventional fat but with over 90% fewer calories. So when you put it all together, you get the texture you want from a drink like this with the incredible macros as well. And these drinks are a really drinkable texture.

    • You may be asking, “Doesn’t Fairlife have the same macros?” They do, but the biggest difference here is EPG, which enables them to achieve such an amazing texture that you can’t get with ultra-filtered low-fat milk. Definitely read my friend Eli Mack’s post on this.

  • Zero aftertaste. This is the one product from Medici and the David family of products that I don’t think really has any aftertaste whatsoever. Usually, with these lower-calorie sugar-alternative types of products, there’s always some aftertaste. There’s some trade-off in some way. These really just taste like a vanilla and chocolate milkshakes. I’m very, very impressed with this product, which is why, above, I said this is my favorite product from David. If you don’t like the bars or the frozen pints or even the Hall Pass candy, you will like these shakes. This is probably their most mass-market palate-compliant product that they make right now.

Where to buy: Online and select retailers

Grounded protein shakes

• Quick Facts: Grounded makes dairy-free, vegan protein shakes with no artificial sweeteners, in Chocolate and Mint Chocolate. The full-size 16.6 oz bottle has 20g of plant protein, and the new 8.5 oz mini has 10g.

• Reasons to Love:

  • Smooth as silk. When I think plant-based protein shake, I normally don’t think smooth and never silky smooth! I think grainy and pain. This? Perfection 🤌. I remember the first time I tried this product, and I actually didn’t realize it was plant-based for a long time. That’s how good it is and how well-formulated it is as a product.

  • Bold af. I try a lot of protein shakes, both because of my job and because I’m interested in finding the best protein shake. These are some of the boldest-flavored protein shakes I’ve had. Especially the mint one. I love love love chocolate mint, and this just scratches that itch.

  • The bottle. I love the original bottle they launched with; its short, stout, slightly triangular shape makes it stand out and feel very different from everything else on the shelf right now. I also like their new product. They just launched an 8.5 oz bottle with 10g of protein (instead of the regular 20g). It feels fun and nice, and almost like an adult version of the milk boxes I had as a kid!

Where to buy. Online, Whole Foods, and select retailers

Jenna’s Pickup:

OHME! Strawberry Yogurt Crunch

New snack alert!!!!

These days, it can be hard to impress me with a new snack. I’ve tried a lot of snacks, and honestly, innovation has been somewhat lacking in the sweet snack department. But these really surprised me. OHME! took a concept that I thought was reserved for kiddos (yogurt bites), stripped down the ingredients and added probiotics, matured the packaging and presentation, and offered something so texturally unique and craveable, I now seek it out daily.

• Quick Facts: Freeze-dried bites of yogurt + real fruit + probiotics. I love the strawberry flavor, but the brand also offers mango and blueberry SKUs!

• Reasons to love:

  • The CRONCH. I am all for a product with a satisfying crunch, and these do not disappoint. If you’ve had freeze-dried products before, you’ll be familiar with the texture. But the combo of the creaminess of the yogurt paired with that foamy freeze-dried crunch is especially satisfying. I also really enjoy the cube shape—its thick and dense enough to offer a real bite to it.

    • Note: They can get a stuck to your teeth, especially if you’re downing the bag as quickly as I do. 🙃 It’s my only critique of the product, and something I felt the need to flag for my texturally-sensitive friends!

  • Real ingredients + probiotics. These crunchy bites are made with just yogurt, real strawberry, apple juice, and bacterial culture to load you with probiotics (the brand even lists the added probiotic strains, so you know you’re getting the real deal!). There’s no added sugar (or added artificial sweetener of any kind), but these bites still deliver on fulfilling a sweet craving.

  • Packaging + convenience. OHME! knows how to make a product worthy of your purse. Its adorable gingham-esque packaging is also functional, with a flat bottom and seal (if you manage to not finish the whole bag in one sitting…). This product is effectively a shelf-stable yogurt with fruit, making a perfect on-the-go option that isn’t another bar.

Where to buy: Online

In case you missed it… 🎧

This week on the pod, we were joined by Adam Terry, CEO and co-founder of Cantrip and On the Brightside—and absolute WEALTH of knowledge on all things THC regulation and functional beverages.

Adam walks us through his journey in the cannabis beverage industry and pivot into a new kind of functional drink. He explains why the low-dose THC hypothesis didn’t pan out, the science behind the new functional ingredient he’s betting on, and the tricky retail landscape of functional beverages.

This is a great follow-up episode to our interview with Jake Bullock, CEO and co-founder of Cann—offering some updates and rare insights into the ever-changing THC regulatory environment!

Adam walks us through his journey in the cannabis beverage industry and pivot into a new kind of functional drink. He explains why the low-dose THC hypothesis didn’t pan out, the science behind the new functional ingredient he’s betting on, and the tricky retail landscape of functional beverages.

This is a great follow-up episode to our interview with Jake Bullock, CEO and co-founder of Cann—offering some updates and rare insights into the ever-changing THC regulatory environment!

The breakdown

0:00 - Intro and Adam Terry’s background

1:56 - The low-dose THC hypothesis

6:13 - The hemp ban and birth of On the Brightside

7:14 - What is kanna?

9:09 - Educating consumers on an unknown ingredient

13:20 - Retail strategy: soda, function & shelf placement

19:55 - Kanna vs. other functional ingredients

24:01 - The science: why kanna is more pro-social than THC

27:50 - Rethinking the functional beverage category

37:22 - The future of Cantrip & hemp ban outlook

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Retail ops is hard, and gets HARDER with every incremental store door.

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News From the Week

There’s no ignoring it: money is pouring (dare we say, flooding?) into CPG right now. In the past two weeks, we’ve seen two historic acquisitions and one mind-boggling raise:

• Purely Elizabeth was acquired by Ferrero Group, the global giant behind Nutella, Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, and Tic Tac.

• GOODLES was acquired by Barilla Group, the 149-year-old Italian pasta company.

• Medici Brands, the parent company of David Protein and now HallPass, raised $250 million at a $2.25 Billion valuation (with a B) in a round co-led by Greenoaks and Valor Equity Partners.

Three very different transactions, three very different brands. But taken together, they’re a pretty perfect snapshot of why CPG—specifically food & beverage—is so exciting right now.

Let’s get into the deets →

Ferrero bought its health halo. We already talked about the Purely Elizabeth deal when it was announced, so we won’t rehash it. The short version:

• After spending $3.1 billion on WK Kellogg, Ferrero bought one of the clearest leaders in modern, better-for-you breakfast.

• Purely Elizabeth reportedly generated around $200 million in brand sales in 2025 and more than doubled sales in two years, building a portfolio on granola, oatmeal, whole grains, protein, fiber, and cleaner ingredients—the exact qualities legacy cereal has struggled to own.

Ferrero is making a serious bet on the American breakfast aisle, and it’s buying the health halo it couldn’t build itself.

Barilla bought the future of mac & cheese. GOODLES was founded in 2020 and hit shelves a little over four years ago. It already controls nearly 8% of U.S. consumer spending on boxed mac & cheese and added roughly 2 million new customers in the last 90 days (!!), according to the brand.

• That’s wild for a startup going up against Kraft, which literally invented the category in 1937. GOODLES won by making boxed mac and cheese exciting again: more nutrition, bolder flavors, packaging worth looking at, and a brand voice pitched at adults as much as kids.

• We’ve seen some great analyses on how this brand won through brilliant brand world building and a keen focus on product. But one point we haven’t seen raised was that it also won because it both was, and strategically wasn’t, a celeb brad:

  • Gal Gadot was presented as a co-founder at launch, her name attached to just about every news item in the early days of the brand, and then seemingly fell off of all promotion. Today, we’d bet that next to nobody picking up a box of Goodles at the grocery store knows that she was ever involved. This isn’t what we’d normally tout as a prime example of a great celebrity brand; usually, we look for a celebrity who is deeply involved in the brand, regularly uses it in their daily lives, and doesn’t just slap a name on it and disappear.

  • The fact that this ultimately wasn’t a celebrity brand is almost key to its success: Gadot gave GOODLES credibility and, critically, capital at the start. But the brand was built on a product, not a person, which is why it survived her exit and why Barilla wanted it.

• GOODLES will reportedly stay standalone, with co-founder and CEO Jen Zeszut, all 73 employees, and the Santa Cruz headquarters in place. Post-acquisition independence is easy to promise, but consumers have watched plenty of brands in this exact position get sanded down. Whether Barilla can scale GOODLES without dulling its sparkle is the question.

…and David reached $2.2 billion valuation at startup speed. Then there’s David. Oh, David. Medici Brands raised $250 Million at a $2.2 billion valuation less than two years after David was founded in 2024, possibly the fastest any CPG company has ever crossed the $2 billion mark (Grüns certainly tried to give it a run for its money).

• When you look a little closer, it all comes together. David launched with an extreme promise: the most protein possible for the fewest possible calories. Its original bar delivered 28g of protein, 150 calories, and zero sugar… unheard of.

• David didn’t stop at the bar. It acquired Epogee, the company behind EPG—the modified plant fat that makes those unheard-of macros possible. Medici then used that technology and brand-building machine to expand David into ice cream (well, “frozen pints”) and protein shakes, launch HallPass (a better-for-you candy brand), and soon, chips.

  • As Chuck Cotter, Partner at Morrison Foerster (the law firm that’s advised David since its early days) told us, “Through its parent company Medici, the team isn’t just growing category-defining brands—they’re building a next-generation nutrition platform.”

• Medici is building a platform around the EPG ingredient, emphasizing what consumers increasingly want: indulgence and restriction at the same time. That’s also made David controversial from day one. It’s faced lawsuits over EPG, calorie claims, and allulose labeling (more on that below), all while pulling off some insane marketing stunts. As Jenna wrote on LinkedIn, David keeps pissing people off, generating discourse, and selling anyway. You don’t have to love the tactics to respect the outcome.

  

So, what ties these deals together? All of these brands changed what people expect from a category the giants assumed was finished or oversaturated. They’ve evolved the breakfast aisle, the protein aisle, and the boxed mac and cheese aisle into something way more culturally relevant, with better (or in one case, more innovative + macro-friendly) ingredients.

They’re all playing in the same intersection of forces pushing CPG forward: more protein, more fiber, fewer calories, cleaner labels, better taste, sharper branding, and products that manage to feel functional and indulgent at once.

The strategics are paying attention because challengers keep proving the same thing: the oldest, most familiar categories are never done evolving—the incumbents just aren’t the ones who evolve them. There’s always another tired aisle waiting for someone to make it better, and another giant that will have to buy its way back in.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• “Zero-sugar” is on trial. Liquid Death, David protein, and now Grüns each face class action complaints over zero-sugar labeling after an FDA amicus brief confirmed allulose—a natural sweetener in both products—counts as sugar under federal law, citing a revived Chobani lawsuit as precedent. There’s a lot going on here, so it’s worth breaking down:

  • Allulose is a completely natural sweetener (simple sugar, or monosaccharide) found in foods like figs and molasses. But allulose isn’t like the other sugars: it has a rare molecular structure that doesn’t get broken down by the body into energy (read: calories) and therefore contributes no glycemic response. For all intents and purposes, it offers a sweet taste to your food, and then you pee it out—no calories contributed or blood sugar spike. We SHOULD see this as a really exciting, naturally-derived ingredient, but instead, it’s being subjected to some silly scrutiny.

    • Basically, the claim here is that allulose is technically a sugar, and therefore these brands shouldn’t be able to claim “zero-sugar.” The FDA’s guidance states that sugars are “the sum of all free mono- and disaccharides” —if a product contains >.5g of “sugar” by that definition, it cannot be advertised as “sugar-free.” Definitionally, the litigators have every right to sue. But frankly, this is a misleading lawsuit.

    • In my (Jenna’s) opinion, the point of something being labeled “sugar-free” isn’t to confirm that there is nothing molecularly similar to sugar in the product; it’s to confirm that someone who is trying to limit their sugar intake or is managing blood sugar can enjoy the product. In the case of allulose, they can. This kind of litigation only encourages companies to opt for more artificial alternatives—the exact kind of alternatives that similar scare tactics are trying to push consumers away from. Consumers seeking sugar-free options will see this headline, and, in all likelihood, they will not opt for an apple instead; they’ll go for the yogurt, bar, or soda sweetened with (gasp!) aspartame or sucralose. Is that really a win?

    • My concern is that this could also steer food companies back towards real sugar—great for some consumers, but really harmful for others. In demonizing all sugar alternatives, even the natural ones, we’re simply limiting food options. Would love to hear opposing POVs, though—feel free to reply to this email if you have thoughts!

  • It’s no surprise that David was on the target list here. It seems that litigators are hellbent on exposing David as nutritionally fraudulent, from claiming its calories were wildly underreported thanks to its fat source, to now claiming its sweetener source is actually sugar. If you’re looking at David like a real food, then yea, you’re gonna spot some red flags. But David isn’t trying to be “real food,” and never was—its nutrition label literally lists ingredients in “systems” (ex. “fat sytem,” “protein system”). And as evidenced by David’s raise last week, these lawsuits aren’t achieving their goal. You’re going to have to get a lot more creative to take down this brand. 🤷‍♀️

• Chobani keeps building. Chobani is acquiring a Keurig Dr Pepper facility in Allentown, PA for $125 million and investing $1.2 billion total to convert it into a high-protein milk and shake production hub, creating 900 jobs—part of a $4B+ U.S. manufacturing buildout fueled by 20% annual growth over three years.

  • While everyone fears data centers and AI stealing their jobs, yogurt, of all things, is creating jobs. We <3 CPG.

  • We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: Chobani is the next 100-year brand. Even as the aforementioned allulose lawsuit, along with multiple other lawsuits like Danone’s over its high-protein claim, the brand seems to be pushing forward with no signs of slowing down. We’re excited to see the innovation that comes along with its increased manufacturing capabilities!

  • Separately: this week, Chobani launched its newest SKU in its delicious line of creamers made with simple ingredients, Ube Sweet Cream! Chobani partnered with an artist from the Philippines on the spooky packaging, celebrating the origins of this trending flavor. I already tried my sample and it may just be my favorite of their whole line (not to mention the stunning purple color, achieved solely through real ube!).

    

• Battle over the crustless rages on. J.M. Smucker Co.’s Uncrustables lawsuit against Trader Joe’s ‘dupe’ has moved forward after a federal judge ruled the case can proceed. Smucker’s alleges Trader Joe’s frozen “crustless” PB&J sandwiches and packaging are too similar to their Uncrustables’ trade dress.

  • Hopefully the other crustless PB&J brands are keeping a close eye on this one. Smucker previously sued Chubby Snacks for trademark dilution and false advertising; the startup shut down in early 2025 after four years, citing financial and legal difficulties—including its fight with the $1 billion (with a B) Uncrustables brand. Smucker also came after Gallant Tiger over its crustless PB&J back in 2022.

• The cupcake leader is back. CRUMBS Bakeshop, the iconic bakery brand, is launching Piñata Cakes nationwide in nearly 3,000 Kroger-owned stores. The new line brings candy-filled, three-layer cakes into the supermarket aisle.

  • CRUMBS originally helped build the gourmet cupcake category and turn cupcakes into a full-blown nationwide obsession in the early 2000s. After being sold off, founder Jason Bauer bought the brand back a few year later for around $300 and is now rebuilding it as a retail-ready bakery brand.

• Kangaroos in the candy aisle. Australia’s No. 1 better-for-you candy brand, Funday Natural Sweets, is launching five flavors in around 1,200 Target stores. And Funday isn’t a tiny brand with no traction setting off in pursuit of the American Dream: it surpassed $100 million in Australian sales just a few months ago.

  • Funday is entering a packed better-for-you candy aisle. SmartSweets grew into a major acquisition and a brand you can now find pretty much everywhere. JOYRIDE went from relative obscurity to Target’s No. 1 non-chocolate candy brand in just a few short years, largely on the back of viral YouTuber Ryan Trahan and his millions of fans. Then there’s a growing bench of brands like Harken, Rotten, Blobs, BEHAVE, Better Sour, Good Greed, and Good Candy all fighting for their own piece of the shelf. Consumers clearly know the category exists—62% are aware of better-for-you confectionery—but only 10% buy it regularly. So Funday’s real challenge is giving them a reason to choose its candy over countless others.

  • We’ve seen a similar playbook with established UK brands coming stateside—and wrote about the British brand invasion here. TRIP, Misfits, and Barebells, for example, all built meaningful traction at home before chasing the US market’s higher prices, greater volume, and more discovery-driven consumer. Funday is a big opening bet by going directly into roughly 1,200 Target stores. Its Australian success lowers the risk, sure, but they need to treat America like a brand-new launch, not an extension of the home market. Americans don’t even know half the brands sold nationwide anyways!

• Plant-based keeps innovating. Daring Foods launched six frozen skillet meals at Sprouts Farmers Market, delivering 21–25g of protein and 9–13g of fiber per serving: a direct play for GLP-1 users.

  • This is happening within the context of a plant-based meal segment that fell 12% last year. While other alt meat players like Beyond scramble to pivot into entirely different categories (like beverage), Daring is taking a different approach: maintain alternative meat as the hero ingredient, just make it more convenient, emphasize macros, and put flavor first. If you look at the packaging, these just look like convenient ready-to-heat meals with tons of protein—you have to squint (or already know the brand Daring) to understand that it’s not real chicken.

  • As a veg girl myself, I love seeing a brand make this move. You can’t convince people to swap to plant-based for ethical or sustainability reasons… you just need to create a product that’s better than its meat counterpart, on all fronts: flavor, convenience, and macros. Excited to try these!

• Power Crunch needed a reset. Ferrero has announced a full relaunch of the wafer protein bar—new formula, packaging, and “A Lighter Way to Protein” slogan—after sales slipped double digits in the year since its 2025 acquisition.

• All the trends, in one small shot. Pure Genius Protein, co-founded by Mel Robbins, launched Protein + Fiber shots: 20g protein and 5g fiber in a 3.38oz, 100-calorie, zero-sugar shot. The brand says they’re targeting GLP-1 users, busy parents, and older adults with shrinking appetites. We were destined to get a product like this at some point, just shocked it wasn’t a gummy 😂

• Back with more bubbles. Mike Cessario, best known as the founder of Liquid Death, is partnering with spirits giant Sazerac to launch Mr. Fancy, a ready-to-drink canned sparkling wine positioned as “American bubbly.”⁠

  • This is a very interesting departure in many ways from the Liquid Death brand. For one, it’s booze! Liquid Death’s whole shtick was giving people who didn’t want a drink a way to look like they were, to make it less taboo to not drink in normal drinking settings. Also, the branding is so….tame, even leaning on generic. It doesn’t have the same pizazz as Liquid Death did at launch and over the years since then. Maybe that restraint is intentional. Maybe it was what Sazerac wanted. After years of building Liquid Death, perhaps Cessario learned some vital insights about what consumers want and what will last.

• Coulda had a V8. The Campbell’s Company, owners of V8, is doing what any reasonable bev owner would do in these trying times: adding electrolytes to its energy drink line.

  • V8 is actually one of my favorite energy drinks! It’s only 80 mg of caffeine and made with real fruit and veg juice (quintessential to the V8 brand) and no artificial sweeteners. It feels like real juice, because it is, with a hit of a pick-me-up that doesn’t leave me jittery. - Jenna

  • Adding electrolytes is just about the least surprising move Campbell’s could make, as every brand seems to be coming out with a “hydration” line.

Retail

• So smol!! NYC is getting a minis-focused beauty store near Union Square called Little Luxuries. It’s being launched by Beautyspace, the prestige beauty curator formerly part of Space NK, and will carry a little over 100 brands. Loyalty members can credit mini purchases toward corresponding full-size products online.

  • This is such a smart concept, and I really hope we see more stores like it! Target’s mini section is already one of my favorite ways to sample a new product—or grab a travel size—without committing to a full sized bottle. Especially if something is pricey, I want to know if it’s really worth the investment. Plus, with beauty interest booming and new brands launching constantly, a dedicated discovery format feels like a no-brainer. - Nate

Funding

• Nestlé continues selling out. Nestlé sold its mainstream vitamins and supplements portfolio—Nature’s Bounty, Nuun, Puritan’s Pride, and four other brands—to Yellow Wood Partners (yes, private equity) for $1 billion. The business did $1.2B in 2025 sales; Nestlé retains premium brands Solgar and Pure Encapsulations.

  • This is all part of a much larger move for Nestlé to shift its focus to its best businesses: coffee, petcare, food, and snacks. In July, the company sold half of its premium waters business to private equity for $3.4 billion, creating a joint venture including S.Pellegrino, Source Perrier and Essentia

  • As CEO Philipp Navratil said in a statement, “This is another important step in the strategic transformation of our portfolio. We are focusing our resources where we have the strongest competitive advantage.”

• Everyone is betting on personal care.

  • Dollar Shave Club acquired Truly Beauty, a Gen Z-focused mass-premium body care brand with a viral TikTok marketing engine, in its first acquisition—pivoting from grooming challenger to multi-brand personal care platform across Ulta, Walmart, Target, and CVS. Financial terms were not disclosed.

  • Skyline Beauty Group acquired men’s skincare brand Lumin alongside its sister-brand Meridian, from Pangaea Holdings for an undisclosed amount.

• The NBA loves coffee. Beekeeper Coffee, a ready-to-drink latte brand founded in 2023, raised an undisclosed round from NBA players Draymond Green, Anthony Davis, Zach LaVine, Fred VanVleet, and De’Aaron Fox, plus sports agent Rich Paul. It’s now targeting Target and natural grocery after reaching 2,500+ retail doors.

If you’re a brand trying to understand the nuances of creator marketing (and how it’s different from—and more sustainable than—influencer marketing) you’re gonna want to listen to the most recent episode of the Express Checkout podcast, featuring Agentio.

Check it out below or on your pod streaming platform of choice!

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Now, let’s get into our picks of the week →

Nate’s Pickup:

All my travel essentials!

As some of you know, I recently spent a week in Lisbon. We ate well, drank well, and took so many photos. Lisbon was such a fun and interesting city! Literally some of the best meals and wine I’ve ever had. If anyone wants recommendations, I have so so many!!

But, what I really want to talk about is what products I brought with me! That’s why were here, to talk about all the fun CPG products. And guess what, I brought so many things! Guess what though, they’re all amazing and most of the products I literally use multiple times a day. So let’s freaking go!

• 4AM wipes - these are magical

• Flaus flosser - I’m a terrible flosser and this literally saved me

• Neuro energy mints/gum - good breath and energy?! hell yes.

• goodwipes - because i need a clean tushy and these are truly flushable

• swishables - also for good breath

• SURI toothbrush - best toothbrush since sliced bread! (granted I haven’t tried the new Dyson one lol)

• WashWise reset spray - this is literally a life shave!! It’s essentially dry shampoo for your clothing

• HAESKN - great skincare-Infused suncare

• DUNE SUNCARE mug guard - literally the best face sunscreen! I use it daily. WEAR YOUR SUNSCREEN

• Vacation Inc. sunscreen - for the body

• gemi beauty hand sanni - because the plane surfaces is kinda dirty

• Ranger Station Smooth Operator parfume - both the scent and the parfume brand I get THE MOST compliments on. I even convinced my doorman to buy it because I walked by so many times and he asked why I smelled so good

• Experiment super saturated - I use this 2x a day and it has saved my skin!

• Prequel face moisturizer and face wash - also use this stuff 2x a day and it’s perfection.

• Leaf Shave twig razor - my favorite razor, been using it for years!!

• PAUME anti-bac hand gel

• EDJY clipper - I was shocked how good this nail clipper is!

• Carpe deodorant - keeps me smelling good and dry as a towel (or whatever the phrase is)

• KRISTIN ESS loose styling powder - I’ve been using styling powder for a while now and been loving this!

• Medicube eye patches - the plane is drying and I don’t want under eye bags!

Where to buy: https://shopmy.us/shop/collections/7234315

Jenna’s Pickup:

Algae Cooking Club - Smoked Tomato Oil

There’s been a whooooole lot of oil noise lately. Whether it’s criminalizing seed oils, exposing avocado oil fraud (what a hilarious string of words), or finding another olive oil to accuse of stealing Graza’s shtick, there’s always some kind of oil scandal happening (and this just the small-potatoes, consumable oil stuff… lest we get into the fuel and global crisis of it all 🙃).

While everyone else is pulling their hair out over which oil is the best for their health, clout, and/or roasted veg, I’m sitting pretty. Because this year, I had the pleasure of being introduced to Algae Cooking Club—and most recently its Smoked Tomato variety—and I no longer fret over the olive/avocado/seed varieties. If you’ve never tried algae oil, I’m about to change your life (in the least dramatic, most practical way).

• Quick Facts: Algae oil (made by fermenting microalgae in steel tanks, like how beer is made), with a gorgeous smoked tomato flavor, perfected by Chef Musashi Osaki.

• Reasons to love:

  • Ridiculously good flavor. When I was presented with the idea of “smoked tomato oil,” I can’t say I had much of an understanding of how that would translate to the palate. What I can now tell you is that it is *delightful—*and unlike anything I’ve had before. It’s a true grilled tomato flavor: deeply savory, with the brightness of basil and umami hit of smoke. I loved the way this utterly transforms my veggie-based dishes, offering incredible depth of flavor and savoriness I usually associate with meat. And because the algae oil base is neutral in flavor, there are no competing flavors happening (something I find in something like a flavored olive oil, for instance).

  • Algae oil is a dream to cook with. It has a naturally high smoke point of 535°F, 125°F higher than EVOO! This means you can sear/fry/grill the heck out of your produce with this oil without fear of burning or bitterness. This particular SKU is also lovely for a finishing oil, for all of the aforementioned flavor accolades.

  • The best oil choice for your health and the planet. Algae oil is naturally rich in heart- and gut-friendly Omega-9s and over 75% lower in saturated fat than olive or avocado oil. For those who care, this isn’t a seed oil, and for those who don’t care (sorry… 🙋‍♀️), here’s something easier to get behind: algae oil has roughly half the carbon emissions of avocado, canola, or olive oil because it uses a fraction of the land and water required by these oil-producing crops.

  • It’s stunning on the counter. In 2026, there is no kitchen accessory that subtly flexes elevated taste quite like the oil bottle du moment left out on your counter. For a while, that was Graza (now, it feels like Graza is a demonstration of baseline income, not “taste” per se). If you’re really looking to showcase your culinary trend awareness (while also nodding to your environmental benevolence) this is your bottle. The packaging is whimsical yet elegant, and the bottle is a stark contrast to the dark greens and ambers cluttering the oil aisle.

  • It would also make for a fantastic gift… expect to see this in our gift guides!

Where to buy: Online (and it’s apparently limited-edition, so get it while you can!)

In case you missed it… 🎧

Last week, we sat sitting down with Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, the buying platform for creator media. We dove into how creator marketing has evolved beyond the old influencer model and why most digital attention now lives with creator content (yet there’s still a spend gap).

We also get into the non-obvious creator matches that drive real results—like how a lobster fisherman became a top performer for Grüns—and why the best brands treat creators as a channel, not a one-off campaign. Book a demo with Agentio here!

Hello from Lisbon (Nate) and Denver (Jenna)! We’re both technically on vacation this week, so there’s no deep dive, but we couldn’t not keep you in-the-know on all the consumer brands and retail news.

But first: some CPG footage from our respective locations:

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Is Starbucks the new destination for brand discovery? Floura Fiber, founded by Jeni’s Ice Cream founder Jeni Britton, is rolling out its Blueberry Matcha Daily Fiber Bar to Starbucks nationwide—its first major retail rollout since launching back in January 2025.

  • Starbucks is no stranger to bringing emerging brands into its stores. Over the years, it has carried Popchips, Koia, Spindrift, OLIPOP, Country Archer meat sticks, SkinnyDipped, SoL-Ti, and Perfect Snacks—often giving these brands one of their first, or at least earliest, national retail accounts. Starbucks is keeps its assortment limited, but it has made some great bets.

  • Recently, it seems to be making more bets than usual. Chomps and Floura hit stores, and Starbucks also announced a partnership with Owala to launch co-branded bottles when they normally made their own. Just a few months ago, Khloud popcorn entered Starbucks and it sounds like it’s been a great channel for them. The strategy makes a lot of sense: Starbucks needs to give consumers more reasons to come into its stores, and trendy CPG brands (especially those promising fiber and protein) are one way to do that. Starbucks gets to borrow some of these brands’ equity and cultural relevance while giving consumers another destination to grab a quick snack instead of defaulting to some corner market.

• It’s never been easier to get your protein. Chomps, the beloved meat stick brand, simple keeps on growing. The brand is now in more than 65,000 retail locations, with recent launches at Starbucks nationwide, Costco Canada, Marriott, and Home Depot.

  • This really is a beast of a brand. Forbes estimates Chomps will surpass $900 million in revenue this year, up roughly 36% from $660 million last year, selling around 2 million sticks per day!! So much meat.This is a wild ride from the $4 million in revenue in 2016, $20 million in 2018 and $100 million during the pandemic. The brand also controls around 10% of the meat-snack market.

  • Just to show you how impressive this brand is: earlier this year, its new chicken line became the No. 1 brand in the chicken-meat-stick segment within 12 weeks, capturing 43% of dollar sales. Its products are also the three fastest-selling chicken items in the category, and 34% of chicken buyers are completely new to Chomps! We interviewed Stacey Hartnett, SVP of Marketing at Chomps on our podcast to learn more about the logic behind the chicken launch.

• Clean tea energy. Saint James Iced Tea launched Saint James Yerba Mate, its first new line outside its organic iced teas. This line will come in three flavors with 150mg natural caffeine, 20-25 calories, and 3-4g sugar per 16oz bottle, expanding to Kroger and Albertsons nationwide.

  • Saint James is chasing bev where it’s actually going: energy. US retail energy drink sales climbed 15% last year, setting the pace for the entire beverage sector. Yerba mate lets a tea brand step into that momentum without walking away from the organic, clean-label identity it already owns.

• The bar guy goes liquid. David Protein launched gold-labeled (of course), ultra-filtered RTD protein shakes. The shakes only have 140 calories, are packed with 30g of protein, and less than 1g of sugar… basically their bars in liquid form.

  

  • Unlike the protein bar aisle, where David clearly wins on protein-to-calorie ratio, the ready-to-drink shake category is a little different. Brands like Fairlife, Nurri, and Slate all boast similar macros and calories thanks to their ultra-filtered milk base (which removes milk’s water and lactose, concentrating natural protein and calcium for a naturally higher-protein liquid).

  • So if David isn’t competing on protein-to-macro ratio, which has been the brand’s whole shtick (lest we forget the cod ordeal…) what exactly is it competing on? Though we haven’t yet tried the product, we predict the differentiator here will be mouthfeel. This product still employs EPG, the novel fat ingredient produced by Epogee (which David acquired) which should make this a thicker, richer, more full-fat-tasting indulgence—actually closer to a “milkshake” as advertised. If the taste isn’t obviously more indulgent, I (Jenna) predict that this will likely be the first David line extension to get cut.

• Come for the tennis, stay for the brand activations. The US Open officially kicked off last week, which is effectively the Met Gala of US sport events. Over the past few years, this Grand Slam has become an increasingly cultural moment, particularly in food + bev (see: the Honey Deuce craze). This year, the USTA announced its first “official hydration beverage,” Electrolit—separate from its official water sponsor, Evian. Even the USTA is saying that mere water isn’t enough.

  • Electrolit is a 76-year-old (!!) bev brand founded in Mexico, and it continues to find ways to stay relevant, culturally and globally. This past weekend, Electrolit hosted an Aryna Sabalenka fan contest with FINI Pizza in NYC. And spoiler alert: we are ELATED to be attending the US Open with Electrolit in T-10 days!!!! Recap to come :)

• Talk about product-market fit! Wiz Khalifa is taking his premium cannabis lifestyle brand into the beverage aisle with Khalifa Kush & Orange Juice, a hemp-derived THC ready-to-drink created in partnership with Scofflaw Brewing. The drink comes in 5mg and 10mg available in select U.S. states.

• Nothing like a glass bottle. Tom Holland’s fast-growing non-alcoholic beer brand, BERO, has launched its Kingston Golden Pils in glass bottles nationwide—the first craft NA beer in the US to do so.

  • This is leaning hard into expanding their on-premise opportunities to keep elevating and growing market share of the brand. Switching to glass gives the brand a premium feel, offering distributors, retailers, restaurants, and bars more opportunities to sell the product in various settings that match the vibe they’re going for.

  • The category is also still very early. Domestic NA beer volumes are projected to grow 18% annually through 2029, but very few brands—big or emerging ones—are really chasing the premium end of the market. BERO has a massive opportunity to own that lane, especially on-premise, before everyone else can catch up.

• Beyond Meat’s comeback plan. Amid six consecutive quarters of revenue declines—including a 15% drop last quarter to its lowest quarterly total in seven years—rumored bankruptcy, a Nasdaq delisting warning, and a reverse stock split, the brand is trying a few kind of weird things to claw its way back:

  • Milk Bar, the famous bakery chain by pastry chef Christina Tosi, has partnered with Beyond Meat to launch its first savory products in many years: two limited-edition vegetarian items, a sausage and egg spiral and a meatball parm roll. In all honesty, we do not see this moving the needle. Another viral foodie brand can do a lot in validating a product, but when that brand is known for its ridiculously indulgent birthday cakes, it’s hardly selling Beyond’s new approach to messaging around health.

  • Beyond is also launching its Beyond Immerse sparkling protein drinks at all 14 Erewhon locations in Southern California. This is the brand’s first brick-and-mortar retail push beyond New York, where it’s sold via Big Geyser since June 2026.

    • Thanks to Beyond’s existing retail relationships, it feels like the sub-brand could launch anywhere. Choosing Erewhon seems to signal that Beyond wants its drink line to be perceived as premium and up-and-coming, not established and mass-market.

• The protein bar wars are getting heated. Mondelēz is launching Grenade—the UK’s top-selling protein bar—in the US, debuting four flavors including Oreo, each with 20g protein and 1g sugar. The brand will first be available at GNC, Vitamin Shoppe, and Amazon.

  

  • We know what you’re thinking: do we really need another protein bar? But this launch makes sense: it’s a wildly popular protein bar brand (similar in texture and taste to the beloved Barebells) that continues popping up in online rankings, despite its lack of presence in the US. I (Jenna) discovered this bar over four years ago while visiting my family in South Africa, and became so obsessed I brought home a handful. My family was shocked to hear that this brand hadn’t yet made its way to the US!

  • We’ve also seen many UK brands launch successfully in the US. As we covered a few months ago in our newsletter, The British (brands) are coming, UK brands like TRIP, Misfits (another protein bar), GROUNDED (plant-based protein shakes) have all successfully made their way across the pond. With Mondelēz backing Grenade, the brand will enjoy incredible distribution and marketing opportunities, and, as we see with this launch, great flavor collaborations with Mondelēz’s iconic brands such as Oreo.

• NA beer + THC bevs have officially converged. The founders behind Quality Meats, an award-winning creative agency, are launching Herb Light, a lager-style beverage with zero alcohol and just 1mg of THC and 1mg of CBD. It’s for people who want a little more than an NA beer, but less than a typical microdosed cannabis drink. Herb Light is now available around Chicago and online via their DTC site.

• From acquisition to lawsuit. In 2024, Simply Good Foods (owners of Quest) purchased protein drink brand Owyn for a cool $280 million—and two years later, there’s a class-action lawsuit targeting the acquirer. Investors are suing Simply Good Foods, saying that it botched Owyn’s integration by switching to an inferior pea protein supplier. This has, supposedly, lead to quality issues, lost distributors, a 70% stock drop, and ~$200M in brand impairments.

• Butt care is going mainstream. Future Method, a sexual wellness brand focused on anal health, is bringing douche kits and dilators to 800+ CVS stores nationwide. The brand was started by anal surgeon Dr. Evan Goldstein to offer safer, clinically backed products, and education for a category largely ignored—and hidden—in mainstream retail.

  • Just the other week, we did a whole deep dive on the new sexual wellness aisle. But(t) this is bigger than just sex. Nearly every “unsexy” category is being wellnessified as brands turn taboo topics into modern, shelf-ready—and even trendy—products. Norms and Asset are doing it for butt care, Dame and plusOne for intimacy, and even Wonderbelly and Lemme for bloating (not as taboo, but not something everyone wants to talk about). These aren’t exactly topics most Americans readily discuss, but it turns out a good rebrand can do a lot.

• When in doubt, launch a sleep gummy. Willie's Remedy+, the “social tonic” (AKA THC beverage) brand by Willie Nelson, is expanding beyond beverage with the launch of its Stardust Sleep Gummies, tart cherry bites designed for full-night sleep support and inspired by Willie Nelson's iconic album exclusively at drinkwillies.com.

• Creatine-in-hydration. Create launched a four-flavor Lemonade Collection for its Creatine + Electrolytes line—Classic, Strawberry, Raspberry, and Peach—each with 5g creatine monohydrate, 1g+ electrolytes, and 1g taurine. Create’s Creatine + Electrolyte line launched earlier this year, and this expansion indicates that something is going well.

  • Beyond betting on hydration, Create is also clearly betting on format diversification. Create launched as a creatine gummy brand—and as more and more consumers seek out creatine, they’re also discovering the many studies exposing gummies as an iffy format for creatine delivery. Though Create has loudly supported its claims with its own research, it’s wise to offer additional, more familiar formats in a plethora of flavors for the skeptics.

Retail

• Target goes all-in on beauty. Target is launching Target Beauty Studio on Sept. 10 in more than 600 stores and on Target.com, bringing together 1,600+ products from 90 prestige and emerging brands—most of them new to Target—alongside dedicated Beauty Advisors and exclusive Target Circle offers.

  

  • Earlier this month, we wrote about how Target is becoming the next Whole Foods. Now it looks like it’s becoming the next Ulta, too. When the two retailers announced their breakup almost exactly a year ago, we predicted Target would lean into affordable products, strong merchandising, exclusives, and discovery… and they’re doing just that.

  • This is Target using the same playbook that is clearly working in grocery for beauty and skincare, mixing trusted staples with buzzy emerging brands and affordable aspiration. If it works, Target becomes the one-stop shop for everything cool and new in CPG. Come in for paper towels, find a new protein bar, and leave with a viral K-beauty serum.

• Meanwhile, Ulta (now Target’s ex) continues killing it. Ulta Beauty reported Q2 net sales up nearly 9% to $3 billion with comps +3.8%, and raised full-year guidance to 6.7%–7.2% net sales growth. Fragrance remained the company’s biggest growing category, and hair care comps also increased in the period.

Funding

• That’s too much mustard. Unilever is putting Colman’s Mustard up for sale ahead of its £33 billion food business sale to McCormick. Since McCormick already owns French’s, combining the two mustard giants could get a little too spicy for regulators. Premier Foods and Associated British Foods are reportedly interested, though there’s no further details yet.

• The founder bought it back. Nyakio Grieco and original backers Brain Trust and Fearless Fund have reacquired Thirteen Lune, an inclusive online retailer for global beauty brands, from SNR Capital.

  • As a quick refresher, Thirteen Lune’s rise was fast, but so was its fall. After expanding its J.C. Penney partnership to over 600 stores, the company fell behind on vendor payments, saw their revenue drop from $24 million in 2023 to $7 million in 2024, and went through an assignment for the benefit of creditors—basically an alternative to bankruptcy—before SNR acquired it in December 2024. J.C. Penney later ended the partnership altogether. Now, less than two years later, Grieco and the original backers are taking it back in their control.

• Period care is consolidating fast. TowerBrook Capital Partners has invested in Rael, the organic cotton period care brand projected to hit $125–$150M in global sales last year, with distribution in 40,000+ U.S. and South Korea doors. Terms undisclosed; TowerBrook typically takes majority stakes.

• Premium water keeps winning. Path, a purified-water brand in reusable aluminum bottles, raised an undisclosed late-stage round from Agility Ventures (the corporate VC arm of global logistics firm Agility) to fund US and international expansion.

If you’re a brand trying to understand the nuances of creator marketing (and how it’s different from—and more sustainable than—influencer marketing) you’re gonna want to listen to the most recent episode of the Express Checkout podcast, featuring Agentio.

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This week, we’re sitting down with Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, the buying platform for creator media. We dive into how creator marketing has evolved beyond the old influencer model and why most digital attention now lives with creator content (yet there’s still a spend gap). We also get into the non-obvious creator matches that drive real results—like how a lobster fisherman became a top performer for Grüns—and why the best brands treat creators as a channel, not a one-off campaign. If you want to learn more about Agentio click below!

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Let’s get into it!

The Breakdown

0:00 - What is Agentio?

2:54 - What is creator marketing?

4:53 - Influencer vs creator

6:59 - Making content that resonates

8:13 - CPG brand success stories

11:06 - The creator spend gap

16:19 - Activating creators the right way

18:52 - Creator partnership formats

23:18 - The future of creator marketing

27:10 - Creators building their own brands

28:27 - Outro

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News From the Week

Guess what?? Express Checkout went to yet another trade show. I (Nate) just got back from Denver, Colorado, where I attended the third annual Newtopia Now show. We always enjoy these events because we get to try new products, meet founders, and, of course, catch up with longtime friends in the industry.

While this show isn’t the biggest of the year, I noticed a few patterns that have been showing up at trade shows for a while now. They’re reinforcing themes we’ve been seeing across the CPG world. So first I’ll go through some of the themes that I saw at the show and then I will talk about my favorite bites and sips that I had.

Themes from Newtopia Now 2026

Sweet as a Bee

Honey, as either a stand-alone product (like Manukora or Honey House) or as a sweetener (like in BEEPOP or Yes Honey), was very present at the show. For good reason. As some consumers push back on artificial sweeteners and even some other natural sweeteners (sorry monk fruit and stevia), I think we’re going to continue to see a push towards very natural-leaning sweeteners like honey or date in a lot of the products, both food and beverages. Honey is something that people are very familiar with and are also very much leaning into the health benefits of. As more brands want to add more function to their products, if your sweetener doubles as a sweetener and a functional ingredient, why the hell not use it?

Innovative international

International and globally inspired flavors is definitely something we’ve been seeing over the past few years start to come up a lot more, especially Indian and certain Asian flavors. One thing I noticed on the show was a resurgence of innovative international formats. Definitely in prior years there were normal American snacks with an international flavor twist on it. I feel like those went away and now they’re starting to trickle back as hopefully consumers are more open to globally inspired flavors. At the show we had everything from bars (like from Posana and Beni Bites) to pad thai popcorn (Party Of) to masala dried cranberries (Varah Gourmet) to potato chips (Keyas Snacks) and to ice cream (Heratige Kulfi).

Protein still going strong.

It’s 2026. Did you expect me to not mention protein as a trend in the food and beverage space? You’re crazy. There was absolutely no way protein was disappearing and it shows no signs of stopping or slowing down. You can thank GLP-1, the broadening wellness category, and also just all of the brands that are making protein products are creating a lot of me too products in that space as well. I think a lot of brands are feeling like they need to add protein to stay relevant in this current industry. Protein showed up in muffins (Muffits), chocolate spread (Smudge), all the bars (like Mosh’s new 20g protein bars), and even drinks (Drink LOVE clear protein).

Liquid (and powder) function

Everything and their mother is a functional beverage these days. I feel like we had a brief reprieve when it was all just gut health focused and now you can find every damn function in a can or a sachet. And guess what? They were all at Newtopia Now! Brightside, Journee, Preme, Avro, Melting Forest, The Cycle, Joggy, Skewl, Four Sigmatic, and so many more. While there were plenty of brands that had products with solo functions such as focus or energy, there were lots of brands that had products with stacked functions. Mixing protein, gut health, fiber, energy, creatine, and so many more functions all together.

Favorite bites and sips from the show floor

This is what everybody really wants to know…. What was my favorite thing at the show? Well I had a few! There’s always so many amazing brands I could never just pick one. And these were all products that were new to me that I haven’t had before. There were plenty of other products there that I’ve had before that are absolutely excellent.

Tangoz - there’s a lot of dried mango and dried fruits out there but this one tastes so much different. These are infused with flavor and it is some of the boldest most real tasting flavored dried fruit I’ve ever had. Like the sour lime one tasted like you put fresh lime on a mango. It was insane.

El Horno Chimi - yes this is another crispy oily condiment but it’s a chimichurri and it is so damn good. I think one of my favorite things about it was that the crunch felt incorporated throughout the entire condiment rather than there just being sort of like big pieces of crunchiness. It felt almost like there was this puffed rice throughout the product that went to a really good mouth feel.

Venturi - this is a brand new coffee company that just launched at the show. Alongside having regular Nitro cold brews, they also have a few SKUs that are 80% cold brew iced tea and 20% cold brew coffee, which is something I have never seen before. It was incredibly delicious and incredibly smar. This strawberry hibiscus one was probably my favorite sip at the booth but they also had a blueberry one. They had a maple flavored one. They were so good.

Tozi - This brand knows how to use corn. These tortillas and tortilla chips were absolutely excellent. They’re made with amaranth, which is an ancient Aztec superfood, and it just adds this boldness to it. They all just taste so fresh and good. I really appreciate the level of thickness and salt on the tortilla chips. Too many tortilla chips are either too thin or way too thick and these are the absolute perfect thickness.

Oatlandia - I was drawn to this brand because it falls into this category of products we’ve been seeing around the new lunchbox. There are all these new kids’ brands that are elevating themselves to what adults normally eat but are branded and formulated for kids. I think they did a really good job with building a very aesthetically pleasing brand that’s very fun but not juvenile. They also knighted me with a giant spoon, which was very fun.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• At this point, is anyone even dehydrated anymore? Hydration brand Cure is launching in 4,500 Walmart stores and online—its largest retail expansion to date—bringing its total door count to 27,000+, up 35% YoY. The brand, reportedly profitable since 2024, has grown 561% over three years!

  • The category itself is sizable but not exactly defensible on formulation… the global electrolyte drinks market sits around $7.1 billion and growing near 9% annually, yet a mix of sodium, potassium, and magnesium is effectively unpatentable, meaning differentiation has to come from brand and distribution (and perhaps flavor) rather than the function itself. LMNT is the clearest proof of that: reportedly built on under $5 million raised, it became one of the category’s most recognizable names through podcast ads and a free-sample funnel rather than massive distribution.

  • Today, the massively saturated hydration category almost feels more like a group of micro-tribes than one big winner: Liquid IV (Unilever) still largely owns mass, but LMNT seems to own the health optimizers, Nuun still gets the endurance athletes, and Cure is coming for the casual wellness consumer looking to switch it up from Liquid IV.

• Rocky Road to court. A federal judge dismissed seven of ten claims in Ben and Jerry’s (the founders of Ben & Jerry’s the brand) lawsuit against Unilever, which alleged censorship of its social activism and $4.5 million in missed payments. Magnum, which acquired the brand from Unilever last year, now steps in as the primary defendant.

  • So why is this all happening? It all goes back to the 2000 merger, which handed the brand unusually strong protections with an independent board that had primary say over its social mission, carried over from their 1978 founding. Things started to unravel after the 2021 decision to stop selling in the West Bank, and the board says Unilever spent the years after blocking posts calling for ceasefire, withholding approved donations to various causes, skipping $4.5 million owed under a 2022 settlement, and abruptly removing CEO David Stever back in March 2025. Unilever denies censoring anyone and says that Stever left voluntarily. And now with the ice cream business spun into Magnum, the case comes down to whether that independence will keep on going under the new owner.

  • In the meantime, Ben Cohen in particular has been about as loud as a founder can get, posting nonstop about Gaza, healthcare and free speech, and even getting arrested at a Senate hearing for interrupting RFK Jr. to protest the Gaza blockade. He and Jerry have since run a public #FreeBenandJerrys campaign and tried to line up investors to buy the brand back for $1.5–2B, which Magnum has out right refused. It’s pretty clear that selling to Unilever in 2000 for $326M is one of the biggest regrets of their lives.

• Protein for relevance. Caulipower (now owned by Urban Farmer, a specialty dough manufacturer) debuted a high-protein pizza made with greek yogurt, extending its better-for-you frozen pizza lineup beyond its cauliflower-crust roots and leaning further into the protein-forward convenience trend.

  • Caulipower built its brand on what it didn’t have (gluten, excess carbs) in an era that was obsessed with paleo diets and restriction. Now, the tune is changing to emphasize what’s being added, and Caulipower needs to catch up with its new competitors in the frozen pizza aisle. Brands like Yough! which really introduced the greek yogurt base and went nationwide at Target in March this year, and Loopini, which makes high-protein frozen pizza using lupini beans and is now in multiple regions of Target and Whole Foods, have already brought incredibly high-quality, taste-forward, high-protein pies to the freezer section—it’ll be interesting to see how a big brand like Caulipower competes through its sheer scale (read: price).

• Your favorite mall kiosk snack just got healthified. Hero Bread teamed up with beloved Auntie Anne’s on a limited-time SKU, their new Hero Pretzel Bites. For each 5-bite serving, these come in at 110 calories, 3g net carb, 16g of protein, 18g of fiber, and 0g of sugar.

  • This is a GENIUS collab for so many reasons, tapping into basically every trend: nostalgia (who isn’t still dreaming about the mere scent of Auntie Anne’s?) meets protein + fiber. But while the Auntie Anne’s name holds a lot of weight, Hero Bread’s name is catching up quickly. The brand just hit number 122 overall in Inc’s 5000 fastest-growing businesses (#4 in Food & Beverage), and hit ~$54 million in revenue last year. Meanwhile, they are innovating like crazy, constantly putting out new products that seem to defy the rules of carbs, from croissants to scones and even noodles. In other words, 🚨 SLEEPER BRAND ALERT 🚨

• From Vegas Strip to Target aisles. UNDO Gummies launched at select Target stores nationwide and Target.com, backed by a $1M seed round. The pre-alcohol DHM gummy brand hit 1,000+ retail doors in 18 months and outsold leading hydration brands 5-to-1 at MGM Resorts.

  • Dihydromyricetin (DHM) is a natural extract from the Hovenia dulcis (oriental raisin tree) vine that naturally supports liver function. UNDO isn’t first to the ingredient. Cheers, founded in 2014, popularized DHM in capsule form and now sits in 30,000 retailers; No Days Wasted, founded in 2017, built a following doing the same. As with most supplement categories, format ends up mattering more than the active ingredient once a market matures, and gummies have consistently outperformed capsules on repeat purchase.

  • The rest of the pre-alcohol field split into two other camps rather than DHM gummies. ZBiotics took the genetically engineered probiotic drink route, has raised $40.3 million, sold more than 15 million units, and posted roughly 113% compound annual growth from 2021 through 2025 while reaching profitability, now expanding into Total Wine, BevMo, and restaurant accounts. Myrkl came in from Sweden with a proprietary probiotic pill, sold out its UK launch, and entered the U.S. at a premium $35 price point. Both prove the demand is real, but neither has UNDO’s edge in occasion-based retail.

  • What UNDO did particularly well was immediately getting in front of its target audience—during the exact occasion they’d be using the product—to demonstrate its efficacy. The brand used the Vegas Strip as its proving ground, growing from a launch party with The Chainsmokers (ok, flex) to MGM Resorts’ six-month testing program for new brands where it saw explosive consumer demand.

  • Cheers and No Days Wasted built DHM awareness through capsules and Amazon, and ZBiotics and Myrkl created the broader market for “pre-alcohol supplements.” But UNDO’s move was skipping the supplement aisle entirely and planting itself inside the exact drinking occasions where the product’s value is obvious, then using that proof point to get into Target. Brilliant.

• Drive-thru brand goes shelf. 7 Brew has launched canned coffees and energy drinks at Walmart, moving the fast-growing beverage chain from foodservice into retail.

  • The rollout is sizable for a chain this young. Canned 7 Brew Coffee lands in roughly 4,400 Walmart stores and 7 Brew Energy in over 1,100, a national footprint that outpaces the brand’s own physical presence of 800+ stands across 38 states. Retail shelf space is reaching markets 7 Brew hasn’t opened a drive-thru in yet, which functions as free brand introduction ahead of real estate.

  • 7 Brew isn’t first through this door. Dutch Bros signed with Trilliant Food & Nutrition in 2025 to launch ground coffee, K-cups, creamers, and ready-to-drink lattes, now sitting in Walmart, H-E-B, Albertsons, and Amazon. Dutch Bros was explicit that the goal is brand awareness in states where it doesn’t yet have stores, which is what 7 Brew seems to be testing.

  • The category context matters here too: Coffee-adjacent RTDs and energy drinks are two of the more crowded shelves in beverage right now, so a drive-thru brand entering isn’t finding white space, it’s betting that existing customer loyalty transfers to a canned format sitting next to Celsius and Starbucks Doubleshot.

  • Looks like fast-growing regional chains are now treating retail as a growth lever (alongside unit expansion) instead of waiting until they’re a mature national brand to license into CPG. Both 7 Brew and Dutch Bros hit retail while still under 1,100 physical locations, using shelf presence to do brand-building work their store count can’t yet do on its own.

eCommerce

• Look, up in the sky! It’s… hand soap? Amazon recently announced it will be expanding Prime Air drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities by end of 2026 adding Atlanta, Chicago, and Cleveland as it battles other retailers like Walmart and DoorDash for fast-shipping supremacy.

  • And Walmart has been doubling down here all year. In January it committed to adding drone delivery at 150 more stores with Alphabet’s Wing, building toward 270+ locations and 40 million Americans covered by the end of 2027. In June they named seven more metros—Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the SF Bay Area, Salt Lake City, Memphis, and New Orleans—pushing them to nearly 20 U.S. markets. Wing has now cleared over a million commercial deliveries, so it’s looking like drone deliveries will be a serious thing across the US in the near future.

  • Drones are really just the flashiest piece of a much bigger delivery speed race. Amazon delivered nearly 70% more items same-day in 2025 than the year before, pushed same-day perishable groceries into 2,300+ cities and towns, rolled out one- and three-hour delivery windows across the U.S. in March, and is spending $4B to triple its rural delivery network. Even FedEx jumped into same-day this spring with a partnership with OneRail. And shoppers are pulling right along with it—AlixPartners’ 2026 home delivery survey found consumers now expect free delivery in 2.7 days on average, down from 3.5 days or more in prior years, and in under a day for groceries. The bar for “fast enough” keeps moving, and drones are a great way to beat it.

Retail

• Target is officially cooking again!! Q2 was a genuinely great quarter across the board. Their net sales grew 5.3% to $26.5 billion (with a B!), comps rose 3.8% on 3.6% more traffic, all six merchandise categories grew, and EPS doubled to $4.11.

  • A big chunk of the shine did come from a $994 million pretax tariff refund.

  • The quarter’s biggest winner was food & beverage, which did $5.99B in sales, up ~7% year over year and comfortably Target’s biggest category by far—bigger than beauty, apparel, or home. This is exactly what we were getting at in Is Target the new Whole Foods? Target has spent years building grocery into a destination and discovery trip instead of just a fill-in errand, and the doubling down is clearly paying off!

• Gopuff is going deeper on private label. Gopuff is expanding its Crave Shoppe and Basically lines with its first-ever seasonal assortment: iced pumpkin cake, pumpkin donut holes, edible cookie dough, apple cider, and snack mixes, all limited-time. The company says it built the lineup off its own ordering and search data after fall-flavored sales jumped 19.4% YoY last fall. Private label now shows up in nearly 1 in 5 Gopuff orders and is up 20% YTD in 2026.

  • Private label keeps taking share across retail. U.S. store brand sales hit a record $282.8B in 2025, up 3.3%—nearly 3x the 1.2% growth of national brands—with dollar share at 21.3% and unit share at 23.5%, both all-time highs per PLMA 2026 Private Label report. Dollar share has also climbed every year since 2021 (19.1%), which is why retailers from Walmart, to Target, to Gopuff are treating own brands as brands.

• Hey Walmart… welcome to the 2020s? Walmart FINALLY announced support for Apple Pay and Google Pay starting Aug. 24, with full U.S. rollout planned by end of 2026—joining the 85% of U.S. retailers that already accept Apple Pay.

Funding news

• An $11M tan. Dolce Glow, the at-home self-tanning brand founded by celebrity spray tan artist Isabel Alysa, has raised an $11 million Series A led by CAVU Consumer Partners, with more than 10 celebrities and influencers joining the round. Miley Cyrus became an investor back in 2023 and returned for this round alongside Sofia Richie Grainge, Olivia Culpo, Jaclyn Hill, and others.

  • That’s some goooood cash for a glow. But it makes sense for the moment we’re in: there’s been rising UV and skin cancer awareness pushing people away from sun exposure and towards protection… but people still crave the confidence boost of a tan. As SPF products gain popularity, the complementary product would be a self-tan product—protection without aesthetic compromise.

  • The celeb-service-provider-to-brand-aficionado pipeline is strong: Mario Dedivanovic went viral off a Kim Kardashian tutorial and built Makeup by Mario into a $200 million brand; Patrick Ta bootstrapped to $30 million before taking outside money; Gucci Westman’s Westman Atelier raised roughly $37 million on the strength of her A-list client roster. A celebrity clientele becomes the origin story, and the origin story becomes the marketing engine. Where Dolce Glow diverges is financing structure, those brands raised from traditional growth equity, while Dolce Glow stacked its cap table with the celebrities themselves, turning ambassadors into investors.

  • And the retail + product expansion timeline has been intentional, with Ulta in 2024, then roughly 300 Sephora doors plus online this past February, with bestsellers sitting at premium price points ($36 for the Acqua Hydrating Face Mist, $49 for the Lusso Self-Tanning Mousse). The August launch of a $28 self-tanning blush pushes the brand toward hybrid tanning makeup, widening the category it’s playing in rather than just adding SKUs to the existing one.

• Ice cream courtroom drama. Rebel Creamery has filed for Chapter 11 after losing a trade dress suit to Van Leeuwen, which sued in 2021 claiming Rebel copied its pastel, minimalist pint packaging.

  • Rebel listed about $13.78 million in assets against $23.85 million in liabilities, with the Van Leeuwen judgment alone accounting for nearly all of its unsecured debt. A company selling in Walmart, Kroger, and Safeway nationwide got wiped out by a single packaging decision.

• Sazerac goes K-wave. Sazerac launched Dalho, its first soju brand, in the U.S. in four flavors with a 50ml bottle—a category first for a spirit traditionally shared at meals. The U.S. soju market is projected to grow 16% annually through 2029.

  • Dalho slots into an acquisition run that’s been almost entirely about category diversification, not brand consolidation. In the past year alone, Sazerac picked up SVEDKA from Constellation Brands, Western Son Vodka and Distillery out of Texas, and RTD brand Dirty Shirley, then signed to acquire UK canned-cocktail brand Au Vodka, the country’s top-selling RTD line.

  • The throughline is chasing growth demographics rather than defending core bourbon share. SVEDKA hit a Super Bowl spot and 16.7% year-over-year growth within a year of joining the portfolio; Au Vodka brings a Gen Z-coded ambassador roster (Jake Paul, Floyd Mayweather, Soulja Boy) straight into the fold. Dalho fits the same logic applied to a spirits category the U.S. barely has yet.

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I (Nate) just got back from a few days in Denver, Colorado at Newtopia Now. Yet another food and beverage trade show that we of course had to attend. It’s always a good time when you get to try a bunch of new CPG products with your friends.

Make sure you’re subscribed because we will be putting out our thoughts on the show, our favorite bites and sips, in our newsletter on Monday. So stay tuned for that!

Now, let’s get into our picks of the week →

Nate’s Pickup:

PopSips

Prebiotic soda should not sound unfamiliar to you at this point in the year of our Lord 2026. Almost every new beverage brand is some version of a prebiotic soda. Thank you Poppi and Olipop for starting that trend but this trend has trickled down into the alcohol space. Now does this actually make me want to buy a product more or less? Not at all but it is a fun premise for the health-conscious consumer. Of course I was a little skeptical when I first saw these come up on my feed. I think I first saw PopSips on TikTok, where they are absolutely crushing it, but I was intrigued. Spiked soda is a very interesting concept. And that interesting concept is absolutely delicious and I am excited to share these with the world.

• Quick Facts: A brand of spike prebiotics sodas made with alcohol from fermented cane sugar, real fruit juice, apple cider vinegar, and plant based fiber. Each 7.5 oz can has 90 calories, 1g of sugar, and 2g of plant based fiber from chicory root. Comes in flavors such as Ginger Lime, Raspberry Rose, Strawberry Lemon, and Berry.

• Reasons to love:

  • Damn good flavors. If you were around for the White Claw era of canned boozy beverages, you know that taste and nailing flavor was very hard. Luckily since then there’s been a lot of really good beverages coming out that actually land on flavor that don’t taste boozy and that don’t taste fake. These drinks are extremely fruit-forward. They’re bold and don’t taste really boozy at all. I mean look at these flavors: Raspberry Rose, Berry, strawberry lemonade, and ginger lime. I think my favorite one was the BERO one, which leans very blueberry flavored, which I’m a huge fan of. And it’s because they use real fruit juice instead of anything artificial or fake.

  • The right size. I really just love the short can. It makes it easier to get through and a little bit more sessionable for those nights you want just a little bit more 👀. 7.5 oz is really nice, just how I want my energy drink. I actually think I want a lot of my RTDs in this size.

    • This is also why I’m a huge fan of Goldilocks as they’re around 8 oz as well. (I wrote about them here)

  • Great marketers. Now this isn’t exactly about the product itself but I am very impressed with the way this team has marketed and brought this product to life. An alcoholic beverage, more often than not, should be so much fun and I think that this brand exudes fun. The founders are out on TikTok generating really good fresh organic content. And one of their series is the founder going around putting together PR packages and even asking if non-influencers want PR packages, which I just think is such a fun, smart way to engage a community of people in a unique and different way.

    • This video from co-founder Andy Kooks crushed it!

Where to buy: Online and in select retailers nationwide (including Target!!)

Jenna’s Pickup:

Muracha - Yame No. 89 Matcha

Since matcha became popularized in the US ~5 years ago, I’ve had some royally bad matcha lattes. I’ve dropped $10+ on a grayish-green, sickly-looking bev; choked through grassy, bitter clumps; and even tried to make my own, slaving over the right technique but—unbeknownst to me—using a powder that leaves me with a brownish, astringent liquid with a metallic aftertaste. Nasty.

Matcha’s Western boom has been exciting in many ways, but largely disappointing in others. In a classic American fashion, we took another culture’s sacred sips and overproduced it to slop. But Muracha, a new matcha brand by two sisters living in Atlanta and Nashville, returned my faith in the sanctity of matcha and gave me the confidence to make it at home.

• Quick Facts: First-harvest (we’ll get into that) single cultivar (as in, only comes from one specific plant) matcha from a family-run tea farm in Yame, Japan. The name is an homage to the place and its people; the woman behind Yame 89 began working in the fields at 19 and still oversees each harvest at 89 years old.

• Reasons to love:

  • Robust, intricate flavor and insane quality. This is the kind of matcha I thought I could only get at an authentically Japanese matcha spot (my local one in Princeton is called Ooika, and it’s fabulous). Now, I have it in my very own kitchen. It is the brightest, most inviting green color (thanks to its shade-grown origins) and has a robust flavor—notes of cocoa, toasty/nutty grain and a soft creaminess and sweetness. It isn’t bitter, but it offers that complexity of flavor through a mild umami finish. I’ve loved making mine with Strange Water, which I recently shared on our podcast. Strange Water is my fave coconut water brand, and its natural sweetness and nuttiness pairs beautifully with the bright matcha. I’m usually only into matcha lattes, but this brand is such high-quality that there’s no milk required IMO.

  • Transparency + education. If you’re into matcha, there’s a large chance you’ve seen the term “ceremonial grade,” and perhaps even made a purchase decision based on its presence. But as it turns out, that term is kinda… meaningless.

    • As the Muracha site thoughtfully explains: “Ceremonial grade” … is not an official or regulated standard in Japan or the United States. Because there is no governing definition, the phrase can appear on a wide range of matcha, from truly exceptional powders to lower-quality blends with added sugar and flavors.”

    • What you should look for instead is “first harvest,” which refers to the earliest picking of the tea season, after the tea bushes were shaded for a month—a process that makes for a greener color, increased L-theanine, and “softer” texture and flavor (none of that weird fishy flavor).

• STUNNING packaging. Everything about this brand has been thoroughly considered, from the product itself to the tin it comes in. This is the kind of packaging you absolutely want to leave out on your counter—a beautiful, deep green tin with a playful lid and imprinted logo. The brand also makes tools (a hand-carved whisk and Chashaku, the spoon used to measure matcha) that are equally intricate and gorgeous, with this hand-crafted quality that makes any home feel a little more welcoming.

Where to buy: Online

This week, we’re talking about AG1’s entrance in the greens gummy space, the decaf coffee movement, and why Alex Cooper’s beverage brand couldn’t make it. Plus, we’re getting into the headlines on Liquid Death’s weirdest new collabs, Goldfish going gluten-free, Purely Elizabeth’s acquisition and so much more.

Stick around to the end for a fascinating interview with Jacques Spitzer, founder and CEO of Raindrop Agency—the creative agency behind brands like Grüns, Native, Poopourri, Magic Spoon, and so many more. We get into what it means to be an “aspirational” brand, and how the best brands are thinking about creative content.

Let's get into it!

The Breakdown

0:00 - What we’re been obsessing over

5:27 - AG1 enters the gummy game

11:32 - The decaf coffee movement is here

20:49 - Alex Cooper’s Unwell Beverage shuts down

28:00 - Liquid Death’s wildest stunts yet?

33:40 - Goldfish finally goes gluten-free

36:10 - Zero-sugar candy from David Protein’s founder

41:00 - Ferrero acquires Purely Elizabeth

46:04 - Interview with Jacques Spitzer of Raindrop Agency

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We hear it all the time from our favorite brands: they finally land their dream retailer (Whole Foods, Target, Sephora...) and then face an operational reality that can feel totally impossible to manage:

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News From the Week

Every week, we get pitched coffee brands moving in entirely opposite directions. One end packs in added function—like protein, adoptogens, l-theanine—similar to what we see in other categories. The other camp strips function entirely, going full decaf mode.

Today, Stephen Bruner, the former co-founder of Corkcicle, launches his first CPG brand: Heist, a premium decaf coffee brand with the bold goal of reframing decaf as a taste-first, high-quality category rather than an afterthought.

But Stephen isn’t alone: Decca (formerly Tranquila) and All Day Coffee Co are other recent entrants in the decaf space with similar founding stories, following in the footsteps of Cason Crane, who founded Explorer Cold Brew six years ago—the first successful brand (to our knowledge) positioned around leveled caffeine and quality decaf.

There’s a decaf wave forming… but what are they actually selling?

The pitch these founders share is less about restricting caffeine, and more about expanding usage occasions and removing negative perceptions around decaf:

• Heist’s tagline—“coffee without a curfew”—bets the most compelling case for decaf is the second half of the day—evening espresso martinis, post-dinner affogatos, and late-night cappuccinos.

• Eric Gonzalez, founder of Decca, shared the same: the goal for Decca’s decaf, RTD lattes isn’t replacing your morning cup, but owning the moment later in they day. That afternoon occasion is what pushed Decca into ready-to-drink—convenience over a multi-step brew—and positions it against soda and seltzer, each a $10B+ category in the US.

• When Cason Crane founded Explorer Cold Brew in 2020, it was built around a spectrum of caffeination levels—and the promise of giving customers more control over their caffeine consumption in RTD coffee: decaf, half-caf, and full-caf.

  • He’s now building a whole platform brand around controlled caffeination. Earlier this year, Explorer acquired Savorista, a roasted coffee brand explicitly dedicated to decaf and half-caf—which Cason claims was a more specific shelf proposition than Explorer Cold Brew could offer on its own.

• What all of these brands promise is a quality unlock—decaf options that don’t just taste different, but are derived differently. As chemphobia runs rampant, the callout of “only using water” in the decaffeination process is strong against the chemical-solvent processes most associated with bad decaf. Decca, Explorer, and Heist all boast the same “Swiss Water Process,” the only process certifiable as Organic.

  • Heist backs that promise at the source, developing its coffee alongside a Certified Q Grader (essentially a sommelier for coffee) to prove decaf can earn a taste-first reputation.

The ambition here is pretty lofty. These founders are trying to do three things at once: change the perception of a small subcategory inside of a massive one, invent new occasions for it, and educate shoppers at the shelf.

• ~70% of American adults drink coffee daily per the National Coffee Association’s 2026 National Coffee Data Trends, while decaf sales only make up around 12% of US coffee in 2025 (though that’s up sharply from 9% the year before). The opportunity is real and growing, but these brands are still fighting for a small slice and betting they can widen it.

• Meanwhile, education remains a huge barrier. Many consumers have no idea what “decaf” even means—does it have no caffeine, or just low-caffeine? (According to Cason, the water-based method puts it at 99% caffeine-free). The obvious workaround for limited education is DTC, where there’s room to teach—but DTC feels like a non-starter for RTDs right now (acquisition costs are so high, shipping a heavy, low-margin bev doesn’t make sense).

So, is the market even there? Maybe, but it’s still early. To get past our bicoastal, wellness-focused bias, we used Pogo to survey* 526 frequent coffee drinkers from across the country and outside our networks—a group skewing middle-aged, lower- to middle-income, and female—and asked whether most Americans actually want less caffeine, or just the wellness-focused few.

• Our findings told us that there’s no clear groundswell of people trying to cut back on caffeine: 56% said they’re satisfied with their current caffeine intake, and 77% are drinking the same or more coffee than they were three to six months ago.

• But then we looked at why they drink coffee: 56% said they drink it for the taste, followed by morning ritual at 50% and indulgence at 44%, while only 22% pointed to productivity or focus (multi-select options). And when asked the one thing they’d improve about their coffee, a mere 7% named added benefits like protein or function.

This is a group that drinks coffee for many reasons beyond caffeine, and isn’t clamoring for more function on top—the exact audience decaf could win, it just doesn’t know it yet.

As Cason told me: decaf isn’t a category being pulled into the mainstream by a trend catalyst, the way seed oils went from fringe worry to shelf-clearing mandate once MAHA made them a villain. It’s the opposite pattern, where the product arrives before the demand.

The founders building it are, as Cason said, “the earliest of adopters.” Their job isn’t to ride a wave, it’s to show consumers a want they don’t know they have yet. That means creating reasons to try, teaching occasions for additional coffee enjoyment (not replacement), and killing the stigma the only way that actually works: by pouring something that tastes damn good.

Whether the decaf trend catalyst ever comes—a celebrity, a study, a politician, something nobody can schedule—is the one variable no founder controls. But the logic of the category is complete, and now, the quality players are there—so who’s going to add-to-cart?

*: We LOVED using Pogo to gather data for this piece!!! Pogo lets you survey or interview the people who actually bought your product, verified by their real purchase data, and get answers back in hours instead of weeks. All you need to do is share your research intent and audience of interest, and it will build the survey for you, run it (quickly), and give you clear takeaways and next-steps.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Liquid Death is on a collab roll. The brand launched a limited-edition pack of sCREAM Soda-scented flushable wipes with Goodwipes, negotiated by agency SonderCo. The collab includes The Buttler Sweepstakes—one winner gets a live-in butler to personally wipe them, which, in prime Liquid Death style, is criminally INSANE. But also so on-brand.

  • But that’s not the only partnership the sparkling water brand is running right now: two weeks ago, the brand launched its limited-edition, soda-style sparkling water flavored like MrBeast’s Feastables peanut butter cups. It contains no actual peanuts, so it’s somehow allergen-friendly, and transparently tastes like artificial chocolate above all else.

  • There’s another Liquid Death collab coming out tomorrow that just might be the wackiest of the bunch—more on that in our IG post tomorrow!

• The David Protein founder is at it again. Peter Rahal, former founder of RxBar and current founder of the ever-controversial David Protein, just announced his latest venture (alongside Stuffed Puffs founder Michael Tierney): HallPass, a low-calorie, zero-sugar candy brand made possible by—you guessed it—EPG.

  • ICYMI: David, under the parent brand Medici, acquired the EPG developer Epogee last year, giving the company the opportunity to develop products outside of David’s bars with this magical plant-based fat ingredient.

  • HallPass’s peanut butter cups will launch nationwide at Walmart later this month, priced just slightly above Reese’s at $2.69—a strategy that looks far different from David, which still sells for a premium ~$4 per bar, even at supermarket chains. A Walmart launch this accessible pricing points to a more mass-market approach.

• Farmer’s Dog’s first format innovation. The Farmer’s Dog, one of the OG premium, fresh DTC dog food brands (now valued between $2.5 billion and $3 billion+), launched Instant Fresh. This is the brand’s first format innovation beyond its original frozen meals—a shelf-stable dry food which rehydrates into a fresh meal in under 30 seconds via proprietary Low-Heat Drying Technology.

  • Last year, we wrote about the “human-grade” dog food boom—and it seems like the demand for more premium pup food options is only growing. Since we wrote that piece in October, Maev launched its Nordic Fish Raw Formulation, Citizens Pet launched its “air-dried” dog food recipes, and Ollie launched a turkey recipe, just to name a few. At this point, “human-grade” feels more like a baseline expectation than an added perk.

  • The Farmer’s Dog in particular seems to be gearing up for something big (perhaps an IPO? Canadian brand Open Farm is likely preparing for an IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange…). Just last week, we wrote about how The Farmer’s Dog acquired Woof, an enrichment toy brand.

• Celiacs, rejoice!! After years of consumers begging and begging, Goldfish (owned by Pepperidge Farms, under Campbell’s) is launching its first-ever Certified Gluten Free cheese crackers, hitting stores nationwide in November 2026.

  

  • We were curious why the HECK it took so long for them to develop this product, so we asked. The response (from Tiphanie Maronta, SVP, Crackers, The Campbell’s Company):

    ”[GF Goldfish] are one of our most requested products in brand history – and knowing how deeply fans desired a gluten free version, we wanted to take the time to make sure every detail, from the taste and texture to the iconic shape, was true to Goldfish.”

  • Earlier this year, Cheez-It also launched a gluten-free version after years of consumers asking for one. Sure, these companies can say they wanted to take their time and get the taste exactly right—but let’s be honest, they’re massive businesses making billions a year. They should be able to formulate this in their sleep…

• Beverage isn’t for the faint of heart. Just one year after launching Unwell Beverage Co. in partnership with Nestlé, Alex Cooper is reportedly shutting it down per Bloomberg.

  • The timing is especially interesting, as the news comes right after the broader Unwell media empire scored some fresh funding at a $500M valuation. Sounds like some new investor was not down with the BRUTAL margins of CPG, and likely wanted Cooper to stick to her media thing. She’ll probably do better with brand deals and investing anyways.

  • There are probably countless reasons why this brand is shutting down. Maybe it was the taste, or maybe it’s because beverage—and particularly, the massively competitive hydration category—is hard. One thing it definitely showcases is that celebrity hype + a massive audience doesn’t always correlate to a successful business. Check out our analysis on IG. We also wrote about Building the perfect celebrity brand earlier this year.

  • We’re also looking at this within the context of other celeb hydration brands in particular: Just look at Logan Paul’s Prime Hydration, which has suffered a massive global sales collapse—dropping by as much as 70% to 90% from its 2023 peak—or Mas+ by Messi, the sports drink brand co-launched by Lionel Messi that was discontinued after less than two years on the market and struggling to secure long-term consumer demand. Is celeb + hydration particularly oversaturated?

• Kim’s psoriasis as a pitch? Kim Kardashian announced a brand advocate partnership with Broc Shot, a sulforaphane supplement and the first recognized by the National Psoriasis Foundation. The company projects 20x its typical daily revenue and 1 million new customers over the six-month campaign (!!).

  

  • Now this is an interesting celebrity partnership. Rather than solely relying on the clout and general lifestyle influence of a celeb, Broc Shot is leaning into something much more interesting: a celeb endorsement of a cure to their medical condition. Kim has spoken publicly about her psoriasis for over a decade, so her credibility was pre-established. This is less about her being a figure with a following, and more about her being a poster child for a specific diagnosis—a version of celebrity marketing that (we think) actually has legs.

• Every road leads to gummy supplements. The greens powder king, AG1, has launched AG1 Essentials Gummies. These greens gummies pack 50 vitamins and minerals into NSF Certified for Sport berry gummies.

  • CEO Kat Cole is framing it as a portfolio play, basically they can now tier out their whole supplement lineup: gummies for the casual wellness consumers, AG1 Next Gen for a significant step up, and AG1 Pro (with 5g creatine, launched in June) for the wellness maximizers.

  • When we first saw this launch, our knee-jerk reaction was that it felt a little desperate. Kind of like AG1 was trying to claw back share from brands like Grüns and Bloom Nutrition that made wellness feel more portable, snackable, and fun (and part of us still sees it that way). But the portfolio play framing brings some more clarity to the move. Not every wellness consumer wants the most optimized, top-tier daily greens powder. Some just want something easy, familiar, and still effective. AG1 has the capital, scale, and scientific resources to make a (slightly) cheaper, more accessible version of its OG product that still carries the real credibility the brand is known for. Also, this lets them serve the casual wellness consumer without abandoning the serious one, thus broadening their reach and getting new consumers in who will eventually upgrade.

  • The harder part is the brand tension. AG1 has spent years building credibility around science and efficacy, while gummies have often been treated by AG1 and other science-forward wellness folks as a less effective format than something like powders or capsules. So it’s interesting to watch the brand try to reconcile that, but this might be the format that actually gets more people to build the habit and upgrade to the other AG1 products.

• Everyone wants in on kids’ routines. Frida, a brand best known for its baby, postpartum, and parenting products, is getting in on the kids skincare and personal care boom with Frida for Kids, a 32-piece line of “age-appropriate personal care essentials”—ranging from toothpaste to deodorant and shampoo—for kids ages 6–11. It’s now available at Walmart, Amazon, and Frida.com.

  • If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you already know that kids’ and tweens’ skincare and personal care categories are having a growth spurt. Just three weeks ago, we talked about California Naturals’ new line for kids, and only two weeks before that, we shared Rini’s new daily care collection for Gen Alpha. And for the past year or so, we’ve been citing multiple skincare brands built specifically for tweens and teens, like Sincerely Yours, Evereden, Rally Skin, JB Skrub, and more.

  • The move from baby → school-aged kids is also echoed in food + bev (we spoke about this in-depth in our recent newsletter, “the lunchbox officially grows up”. Brands like Little Spoon and Once Upon a Farm are bumping up their age range, giving parents options to “grow up” with their brands.

  • Side note: In February, Frida briefly got “canceled” for using sexual innuendos in its social media marketing and packaging design, which felt pretty out of place the baby aisle. Now, the brand is back—and gearing towards an older audience. It’ll be interesting to see if the brand can regain its pre-cancelation clout, especially with a new target.

eCommerce

• Your new holiday shopping homepage. Shopify announced a multiphase holiday push for its Shop app, the app that started as a package-tracking hub but has become a place to discover and directly buy from brands. It now has 250 million verified shoppers and saw 70%+ GMV growth in Q2.

  • Shopify, even though a lot of consumers might know the name, is mostly B2B software. It is the infrastructure that lets so many brands sell online. But Shopify also wants to be consumer-facing, and that is where Shop comes in. It’s the company’s main consumer-facing arm. Anecdotally, I don’t think a lot of people really know much about the Shop app yet, so this push is about building brand awareness and keeping people inside the Shopify ecosystem before they go discover or buy somewhere else, whether that’s TikTok, Instagram, Amazon, or ChatGPT.

  • I love using the Shop app personally, of course for tracking my packages but there’s also sometimes better discounts and really good cash back offers directly within the app. - Nate

Retail

• Apparel retailers want in on beauty. Anthropologie is expanding its beauty business with 50 shop-in-shops by year-end, up from 27 last year. The retailer has sold beauty and skin care for years through a mix of national brands like Phlur and L’Occitane plus private-label SKUs like Maeve, but now the category is becoming a bigger part of the store experience. Over the past 12 months, 1 in 6 Anthropologie customers bought a beauty product, and hair care has become one of its fastest-growing categories.

  • This is bigger than Anthro. Gap and Old Navy are also doubling down on beauty, with Old Navy rolling out beauty and personal care across more stores and Gap relaunching its iconic 90s fragrance business. It makes sense. Beauty is a great add-on category for apparel retailers, and the Gap CEO is saying that beauty can be anywhere from 5% to 20% of sales in the future.

  • Beauty and skincare are also just booming. As Modern Retail cited from Circana data, prestige beauty sales grew 7% to $17.1 billion in the U.S. during the first half of the year, while mass beauty also grew 7% to $39.2 billion. McKinsey also expects the global beauty market to grow 5% annually through 2030. A lot of that comes back to the same broader shift we keep seeing across the consumer landscape. Wellness. As consumers put more focus on self-care routines and looking and feeling better day to day, beauty and skincare naturally have become bigger spending categories. Then social media, celebrity-led brands, and new product demands amplify it all, turning beauty into something that shows up across more parts of everyday life including next to apparel.

• Target built its own digital twin. Target announced its development of Proxima, an in-house inventory digital twin, an attempt to improve inventory levels in stores. A pilot with 63 fresh food items improved on-shelf availability by 2.5%.

Funding

• Purely acquired. Ferrero Group, the global confectionery giant behind Nutella, Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, and Tic Tac, is acquiring Purely Elizabeth, the 17-year-old Boulder-based better-for-you granola and oatmeal brand.

  • Clearly Ferrero Group thinks that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because this comes after their $3.1 billion acquisition of WK Kellogg Co, Kellogg’s entire cereal business.

  • So why Purely Elizabeth? It checks a lot of consumer boxes right now: “clean,” simple, filling, and better-for-you without being boring or overly processed. It’s high-protein and high-fiber (especially with the recent launch of its Ancient Grain Protein line), and we all know everyone is looking for more P&F. In comparison to cereal, which has been fighting long-term decline and a perception problem around sugar and processing, granola feels like the healthier alternative—which is why we’re seeing this acquisition, alongside endless launches of granola products from both new brands and established ones.

  • Purely Elizabeth is a leader in the modern breakfast set, reportedly doing $200M in total brand sales in 2025 and more than doubling sales in the past two years. So for Ferrero, this isn’t just buying granola; it’s buying a fast-growing better-for-you platform right as breakfast is being rewritten around protein, fiber, and cleaner alternatives to legacy cereal.

• Euro (candy) summer. Orkla Snacks has acquired European Candy Group (CCI) for €207M ($239M) to scale production of its Bubs vegan gummies, which triggered a global shortage after going viral on TikTok in 2024. CCI posted €94M in 2025 revenue across four European facilities.

  • Swedish candy has been having a moment over the past few years, and it sits at the center of a lot of food trends we’ve been writing about. Part of the appeal is that it feels relatively “cleaner” than a lot of American candy. Many of these brands are vegan (no pork or fish gelatin), use real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and rely on natural fruit extracts for flavoring and coloring instead of the artificial dyes and flavors that the U.S. brands are now racing to remove. In this wellness-maxxing world, it gives those consumers permission to treat themselves without feeling like they’re buying the same old ultra-processed candy.

  • The other piece is virality, and this is where stores like Lil Sweet Treat and BonBon have really moved the needle. Lil Sweet Treat only launched two years ago and already has 10 stores across the country, a Poppi partnership, and millions of views across its social channels. BonBon has also helped make Swedish candy feel like a New York cult favorite. Together, these stores and their social content have educated consumers on what Swedish candy is and why it feels different from the mainstream American candy aisle.

  • Other brands like Katje’s (which smartly brought on Jake Shane as its Chief Creative Officer) and Sockerbit (which I’ve been obsessing over - Jenna) have leaned more into product: Swedish candy tastes and looks different enough from American candy to feel more exciting and exotic. The flavors are weirder, the textures are more fun, and the combinations feel way more interesting than another sour watermelon or blue raspberry gummy, which makes it perfect TikTok haul content.

• Celebrities <3 (putting their money into) supplements. Alix Earle, the influencer and soon-to-be reality TV star, just invested in Cymbiotika, the liposomal supplement brand. She also previously backed Poppi before its nearly $2 billion PepsiCo acquisition, so her brand portfolio is starting to look pretty pretty solid.

  • Cymbiotika is a seriously impressive brand in its own right, reportedly doing $150 million in 2025 revenue. The brand has been on a run recently, raising $25 million in January with investors including The Weeknd and Post Malone, then quickly expanding into Target and Ulta Beauty.

  • For most celebrities and influencers and talent, this is probably the best way to leverage your fame and fortune: invest in the brands. More often than not, the biggest unlock for a growing consumer company is not that a celebrity starts it themselves, it’s that they bring capital, cultural relevance, and a massive awareness engine. They can help open doors, create press moments, get in front of buyers, and keep putting it in front of consumers over and over again. A celebrity investor almost gives it more credibility than if they started it themselves—it’s less heavy handed than starting a brand and gives the product more credibility. We’re in a world where celebrity-brand fatigue is a very real thing. As we’ve talked about with Alex Cooper, attaching a famous person as the face and founder of a company does not automatically make consumers care. But when the celebrity is used more like a amplifier, someone who brings attention and trust to a product with some PMF, it will feel more effective.

• Building a beverage brand stack. Axum Capital Partners announced a strategic partnership with L.A. Libations, the beverage incubator and commercialization platform behind a bunch of emerging health and wellness brands. As part of the deal, L.A. Libations CEO and co-founder Danny Stepper is joining Axum’s advisory board to help portfolio companies with brand strategy, retail expansion, distribution, operations, and go-to-market.

  • Axum might sound familiar because just last week it acquired a controlling stake in BARCODE, the better-for-you performance hydration brand. Adding L.A. Libations gives Axum more of the operating and retail muscle to actually scale brands like BARCODE, not just buy them.

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We see it all the time, from basically every angle: Building a brand is beast of an endeavor. It feels like the odds are never in your favor, which is why we love accelerators like SKU!

SKU, an Austin-based CPG accelerator, just named its Fall 2026 cohort consisting of seven companies across food, bev, supplements, hair and oral care, and we couldn’t be more excited to support. :) The 12-week program begins September 1st, culminating in the SKU Demo Day and Showcase on November 17th in Austin, TX.

If you’re interested in trying, we got some special deals for you:

Bellycious’s low FODMAP Italian meal kits (code: SKULAUNCH20 for 20% off)
Kaurina’s kulfi ice cream bars
magic milk’s colostrum that tastes like chocolate milk (code: SKULAUNCH for $5 off)
Orita’s agave Mexican soda
Singular Care’s steel toothbrushes on subscription (code: SKULAUNCH)
Twice as Good Hair’s haircare products
WonderPop’s water lily seed snacks (code: SKULAUNCH15 for 15% off)

Congrats to the Fall 2026 SKU cohort!

Now, let’s get into our picks of the week →

Nate’s Pickup:

TRUBAR PRO

Finding a protein bar you like is incredibly difficult. They’re often too chewy, too sweet, too thick, too dry, lack enough protein, or contain the wrong sweetener. It’s hard to find one that meets all the criteria you want. Most protein bars I try are either terrible or just okay. There really is no in-between. Very few are actually good. I think I might place these new higher‑protein TRUBARs in the good category of protein bars. It is a real testament.

• Reasons to love:

  • Like a thicker PowerBar. Do you remember Power Bars? I loved them. They had a weird, thick fruit‑leather texture, chewy but not overly so. The only downside was that they lacked protein; they were purely an energy bar. I’ve been seeking that texture ever since. I think these TRUBAR match that texture nicely. I know it sounds unappealing, but trust me, they’re the perfect thickness and texture for a protein bar.

  • Spot on flavors. I thought the bars tasted great. They weren’t too sweet or artificial tasting in any way I often find that protein bars, especially plant‑based ones, tend to taste like. I wish there had been more variety in the flavors. All of them were fairly similar, caramel, triple chocolate, and peanut butter, but each was chocolate‑based. I would have liked at least one non‑chocolate option or a flavor with more punch, such as mint chocolate chip. That being said, I thought they all tasted very good.

  • Another win for simple. If you’ve read my previous weekly picks, you may have noticed a trend: I’m always impressed when a brand offers a product with few, simple ingredients that still tastes good, feels robust, and makes me want to keep coming back. I think there’s something about overly processed snacks that contain many ingredients. They’re designed to taste good, and they usually do, so I’m always surprised when a product with fewer than 15 ingredients tastes just as good as one with over 50.

Where to buy: Online and in stores nationwide

Jenna’s Pickup:

Superb Bakehouse Waffles

I can’t say I typically reach for a frozen waffle for breakfast, though there was a time when that was different. Growing up, I was totally an Eggo kid—I’d toss one in the toaster (or sometimes, criminally, the microwave) mere seconds before it was time to leave for school, then wrap my soggy waffle in a paper towel to take on the go. Needless to say, my freezer waffle standards are low, which is why I hadn’t thought to return to the frozen delicacy as an adult.

But when Superb Bakehouse shared their waffles, I was curious about how these secretly gluten- and dairy-free waffles could stack up to the decadent product imagery on each box. And I’m pleased to report that they far surpassed my expectations and have returned me to my waffle-for-breakfast roots—this time, with pride.

• Quick facts: Gluten- and dairy-free frozen waffles made with the simplest whole ingredients and no added sugar.

• Reasons to love:

  • Not your standard frozen waffle. It is actually mind-boggling to me that these came out of my freezer, and frankly, insulting to loop them into the “frozen waffle” category—they are that standout. Turns out, it’s all a result of Superb’s meticulous process: These are handcrafted (more on that later) in Belgian waffle irons and then flash-frozen to lock in all the goodness. Once reheated (I tossed mine in an air fryer, but only because I don’t have a toaster…), they taste like they are fresh-baked from your favorite fancy brunch spot—featuring ridiculously crispy edges and the fluffiest centers.

  • Gluten-free, dairy-free, and no added sugar—but you’d never know. These are one of those allergy-/restriction-friendly products that you would never know have anything left out. Made with a base of just banana, whole eggs, quinoa, and flax seed (plus fun additions like chocolate chips, wild blueberries, and cinnamon), these are so simple, but taste elevated.

  • Owned manufacturing means complete control. Though the brand is now in ~1,000 stores nationwide (and quickly growing!), it still owns its manufacturing. Founder and CEO Stacie Skinner opened a nearly 10,000 sq ft facility earlier this year in Columbus, Ohio, designed to support up to $50M in capacity. Even as the business has scaled, the waffles are still made with the same whole ingredients she used when creating this recipe in her kitchen for her family, including cracking real eggs rather than relying on liquid alternatives!

    • This is one of the first brands I’ve seen that flexes its manufacturing on the very first page of its site, featuring the header: “Meet the waffle company that actually makes its own waffles.” This is such a unique education opportunity—I have a feeling many consumers have no idea what a co-packer is and why self-manufacturing is a big deal, and Superb makes it a point to call it out before anything else.

Where to buy: Online and in stores nationwide

This week we’re exploring sexual wellness's leap into mainstream beauty retail with plusOne launching at Ulta, and how it differs from Sephora’s wellness strategy.

Check out our full deep dive on sexual wellness here!

Then, we dig into the laundry care category's unexpected glow-up, K-beauty's big Sephora takeover via Olive Young, the protein soda showdown, and how apple is quickly becoming the new pumpkin spice.

Let's get into it!

The Breakdown

00:00 Intro

07:43 Ulta launches sexual wellness with plusOne

15:31 The luxe laundry care boom

28:04 K-beauty comes to Sephora via Olive Young

32:02 Protein soda wars

44:30 Apple is the new pumpkin spice

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Upcoming must-attend NYC event alert: Wayflyer’s Visionaries Summit is coming to KidSuper Studios in Brooklyn on August 26th and 27th and you will NOT want to miss it!!!

You might’ve seen clips of the London edition online, featuring UK brands like Trip, SURI and PerfectTed. Now Wayflyer is bringing the Summit to New York, with speakers confirmed from Dame, Bobbie, Ghia, Dad Gang, Stakt, Jones, Sauz, and more to be announced. Picture a room packed with brand owners, operators and investors, all speaking openly about what has and hasn’t worked as they’ve grown their businesses.

Tickets are FREE but spaces are limited, so book the panels you want to attend now 👀

We can’t wait to see you there!!!

News From the Week

The hottest new products are hiding in the… laundry room?

This week, WashWise—a clothing care brand built entirely around the “between-wears” moment—raised $1.2M in pre-seed via a SAFE.

The debut product is Reset Spray, which the brand describes as “the dry shampoo for clothes” (brilliant). It neutralizes odor at the source, releases wrinkles, and buys you another wear. WashWise claims a single bottle saves up to $300 in dry cleaning, ~6 hours of laundry, 110 gallons of water, and 13 kWh of energy. 🤯

Admittedly, it’s a small round, and the brand just launched. But it lands in an aisle that is absolutely heating up right now: laundry-care.

U.S. laundry-care sales hit $19.4B last year, up 3% across price points, with the global market at roughly $110B and a projected 4.7% CAGR over the next five years. P&G’s laundry care business alone does nearly $3 billion (they own about 60% of market share)! It’s a serious market that was ripe for some disruption.

And boy is it getting disrupted. The emerging brands are coming in hot:

• Let’s back up to the first wave (cycle? 😉): Innovation in laundry-care really started with The Laundress, which was founded all the way back in 2004. The brand, positioned as the first luxury lifestyle brand in laundry-care, thoughtfully aligned itself with early lifestyle/fashion bloggers and the burgeoning clean beauty movement to in the early 2010s. By the mid-2010s, the company was sustaining a 30% year-over-year growth rate, making it an obvious target for Unilever’s $100 million buyout in 2019.

  

• Lindsey Boyd, who co-founded The Laundress, came back to laundry this past April with Lindry Lab. A luxe laundry brand with 17 SKUs—including six detergents at $45 for 32 ounces—all built around cleaner ingredients and functional fragrances.

• Laundry Sauce raised a $7.2M Series A in January (~$17.7M total from Melitas Ventures, Morrison Seger, 3cubed, Patrick Ventures, and Talent Resources Ventures), and expanded into Target stores in March—its first national retail win after years of DTC.

• Wishing Well is betting that laundry can be cool. The brand launched in 2025 with a non-toxic, ultra-concentrated detergent in a compact aluminum pump bottle in fragrance-inspired scents like Afterglow, Sunday Reset, and Boyfriend Material (one of Jenna’s fave products). The brands explicit goal is to make laundry feel like self-care rather than a boring chore.

• Homecourt, Courteney Cox’s home fragrance brand, expanded into laundry in March 2025 with a full collection built off its existing scents. Seven months later it closed an $8M Series A led by CULT Capital, and it’s now in 300+ doors across Nordstrom, Bluemercury, and Revolve.

  

• And the fragrance houses also are entering the space:

  • DedCool became Sephora’s first-ever laundry SKU back in 2022 across 210 doors, and is still the only laundry brand on those shelves.

  • Snif has a full laundry collection translating its fine fragrances directly into the wash. It’s also now on shelf at Ulta.

  • D.S. & Durga sells luxury detergent in a reusable aluminum bottle in partnership with Guests on Earth, sold through Revolve.

    • And Guests on Earth is a luxury home care brand that also sells a premium, high-concentration plant- and bio-based laundry detergent free from heavy chemicals.

Even Tide (which controls 40% of the laundry-care market) is trying to innovate here! In February, P&G rolled out Tide evo nationally—a 3.5-inch waterless “tile” of compressed detergent fiber, six layers deep, with something like 15 miles of woven scrubbers plus stain treatment, brighteners, and odor removers built in. It took 50+ patents, 15 chemists and engineers, more than a decade of development, and almost two years of test marketing in Colorado.

This is a surprising move in big CPG. The playbook in a mature, concentrated category is (usually) to defend share, cut costs, run a limited-edition scent, and buy the challenger once it clears $50M. Innovation is what you do when you’re losing, and as we said, P&G controls ~60% of the market—looks like a winner. Cannibalizing your own liquid business with a format that costs 2x per load is the harder, almost dumber-looking path, and they took it anyway.

Even the big guys are seeing that scent, format, and premiumization are about to reshape laundry.

So why is fancy laundry detergent is having a moment?

• Fragrance is booming, and it’s bled into everything. US mass fragrance grew 15% in 2025 versus 5% for prestige—the real growth is in luxe-coded scent at accessible prices. And it isn’t staying in the fragrance aisle. We’re seeing brands win on fragrance in body care, hair care, hand sanitizer, hand soap, and now the laundry. Detergent may be the purest version of this, because it’s a scent you apply to (almost) everything you own all at once.

• Everything is the lipstick index now. A $45 detergent is a lot more than Tide, sure, but it’s a small upgrade that makes an unglamorous chore feel expensive. When everything else in the cart costs more than it did two years ago, people will buy the little thing that makes them feel like they’re doing a lot better. It’s the same instinct we keep seeing at the grocery store shelf, where shoppers trade up on olive oil and soda to feel like they’re living a more luxurious life.

• Skincare-level ingredient scrutiny. Wellness culture (and its many influencers) taught everyone to read the label. Consumers now care an enormous amount about what’s in their products and what those products come in. Scrutiny that started in food and skincare has been migrating to every category under the sun, and detergent was always going to make the list. It touches every part of you! They want the free-from list (SLES, SLS, endocrine disruptors) and functional additives that do something, which is the exact tension we wrote about in clean vs. science and functionwashing.

• The home became a place for self-expression. The “shelfie” started in the bathroom, moved to the kitchen counter (see Graza, Fly By Jing, Loonen), and has now arrived in the laundry room. A neon green plastic jug is a chore you hide under the sink. A $45 aluminum bottle in a trendy, muted color is something you leave out.

Though the laundry room might be the last place you expected buzzy CPG brands to enter, it has potential to be one of the stickiest destinations. Watch (wash?) this space👀

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Some cheesy innovation. GOODLES just launched Twirly Mac, a new spiral noodle format coming in three flavors—Cheddar Weather, Alfredo Heights, and Hotshot Jackpot. Each box offers similar nutrition to its other mac & cheese: 14g protein, 7g fiber, and 21 nutrients from plants, and all Clean Label Certified.

  • Both the format and the flavors (alfredo with white miso, chili garlic) suggest that this is a launch geared more towards an adult consumer, offering a permission slip to the guilty Goodler who regularly makes mac, but wants to upgrade to the more mature pasta.

• Celebrity CPG keeps growing. Chef Esther Choi, one of Food Network’s fastest-rising personalities, just launched Sessy, a new Korean pantry staples brand starting with soy sauce, sesame oil, and gochujang. The products are made in partnership with Korea’s longtime ingredient maker Sempio. All products are available now direct-to-consumer with retail expansion planned for 2027.

  

  • It’s nice to see a celebrity-led brand launch that feels authentic, high quality, and like a meaningful addition to a very crowded category—sauces and condiments in this case, but really broader CPG too. Celebrity-led brands run the risk of just feeling like a merch line, or something that simply doesn’t have legs once the talent gets tired.

  • But alongside Sessy, we’ve seen a lot of really good creator-, celebrity-, and chef-led brands lately that lean into being authentic brands with products people actually want to buy and that also get massive national distribution: Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings keeps expanding at Target, Momofuku has become a genuine pantry brand off David Chang’s chili crunch and noodles, Molly Baz turned Ayoh into a legit condiment brand that landed national retail fast, and Chamberlain Coffee and Feastables have both scaled into real shelf presence. Sessy fits into that mold with fewer SKUs, great branding, and a engaged founder.

• America has a new favorite protein bar.* In a sea of countless protein bars, the emerging brand Prima just became the top-selling protein bar SKU at Sprouts and Erewhon, and it’s now on shelves at Kroger nationwide!! The formula: 10 recognizable ingredients, 21g of grass-fed animal protein, under 250 calories, and no seed oils, artificial sweeteners, or fillers.

  • Prima is rich and dessert-like, unlike some of its absurdly dense aisle-mates, and is available in Mint Chip, Cookie Dough, Mocha, Cacao, and Salted Caramel.

EC readers get 25% off with code EXPRESSCHECKOUT25 → Shop Prima

• Is the the beauty collab of the decade? The #1 and #2 brands with U.S. teens (according to Piper Sandler) just merged their holy grails. Beauty brands e.l.f. and Bubble just dropped three new products mixing the best of both lineups—e.l.f. bronzing drops dual-chambered with Bubble’s moisturizer, Camo blush cut with hyaluronic acid serum, and a lip balm built as a lip serum. These are currently live on both the brands sites and at Target.

  

  • THIS IS WHAT WE LOVE TO SEE!! This is an incredible collaboration, and maybe even a hint at a cheeky acquisition? We could see e.l.f scooping up Bubble in the near future.

  • This is also a continuation of the trend of beauty doubling as skincare. Curious to see if there comes a point when there is no line between the two—when all beauty products provide a function, and most skincare offers an instant appearance boost rather than long-term promises.

• Khloud launches Walmart-exclusive higher-protein chips. Khloe Kardashian’s Khloud brand just launched its first Walmart-exclusive line: Protein Chips Plus Collagen (a collagen-boosted version of their OG protein chips). At $3.49 per bag, these present a value option compared to their $5.99/bags of the OG (they’re also a single-serving at 240 calories, vs. the other line which is 4.5 servings at 170 calories and only 7g protein).

• Beyond the ointment. Beiersdorf’s Aquaphor has launched its first-ever daily lotion and cream line, featuring 6% and 9% hyaluronic acid blends respectively, both approved by the National Eczema Association and available at Walmart, Target, and Amazon.

• Hope for hemp. This weekend, the Senate voted 90-6 to pass a spending bill delaying the federal hemp THC ban from November 12 to December 11, after rejecting Sen. Ted Budd’s amendment to keep it on track (Senator Budd is a THC hater. You actually cannot make this sh*t up). As the CEO and Co-Founder of Nowadays, Justin Tidwell, explained:

“We’re seeing multiple positive signals come out of Washington at the same time. The Senate not only voted to extend the current federal framework, providing the industry additional time to work toward a long-term solution, but we’re also seeing lawmakers advance legislation like Representative Van Duyne’s Hemp-Derived Beverage Regulatory Clarity Act, which provides a thoughtful roadmap for how hemp beverages could be regulated within the traditional three-tier system.

While there is still significant work ahead, these developments suggest the conversation in Washington is beginning to shift from whether hemp beverages should exist to how they should be responsibly regulated. We believe that’s an important and encouraging change for consumers, retailers, and the industry as a whole.”

• And in other THC news: Cann, makers of low-dose THC social beverages, launched a Half & Half line with NBA legend Dwyane Wade, available in two varieties: a 3mg THC/6mg CBD microdose and a zero-THC 0MG version with functional ingredients like passionflower, magnesium, and L-theanine.

  • We spoke to Jake Bullock, co-founder of Cann, about the impending ban on the Express Checkout podcast. He gave a great insider’s view into how the impending ban has been affecting THC brands, and what they’re doing to address it.

eCommerce

• Hey ChatGPT, add lemons to my list. Albertsons launched a plugin inside ChatGPT for its Safeway brand, letting shoppers reorder lists, build carts, and discover products via natural language chat. And then, of course, check out on Safeway’s own platform. It extends the retailer’s existing AI shopping assistant and Ask AI tools it has implemented over the past year.

Retail

• Walmart’s AI just got a promotion... is your brand ready? Walmart’s global CTO says the retailer now runs AI across forecasting, replenishment, scheduling, and routing—an “intelligence layer” he calls the conductor of the whole supply chain orchestra. The result is a sub-hour delivery windows and US e-commerce up 26% in Q1.

  • But there’s a catch for suppliers: that intelligence layer only works if what’s coming in the door is clean. As Walmart’s ordering and routing get more automated, there’s less human slack to absorb someone else’s late ASN or mismatched pack count. The brands eating chargebacks and OTIF penalties will be those with backends that didn’t catch up to their biggest retail partner’s.

  • Which is exactly the gap Endless Commerce1 closes. Instead of bolting on a third-party EDI middleman, CommerceOS builds EDI right into the platform already running your inventory, orders, and warehouse—so a retail PO lands like any other order, setup takes days (not the mythical 6-8 weeks), and you keep control of your own ops. Mission control for consumer brands, built by founders who’ve lived the chaos themselves.

• Flexing their grocery authority. Target has launched “Good & Gather: Discover Delicious Every Day,” its first-ever cookbook featuring 100 recipes built around its owned food brand with every single ingredient listed shoppable at Target.

  • We (and countless people online) have said this over and over again over the past year, “Target is the new Whole Foods.” It’s become this amazing grocery destination for both quality and discovery—we wrote about it here. Using a cookbook as a way to market that is genius, better to show, not tell!

  • Private-label used to feel like the lesser choice, the option you go for if you’re shopping on a budget. But Target is pulling out all the stops to make Good & Gather feel aspirational—from partnering with Michelin-star chefs on exclusive Good & Gather product lines to creating this cookbook and sending out sharable PR mailers…

    

• Another win for the legend of the mall. Claire’s is relaunching its in-store piercing experience across the US and Canada with redesigned store layouts and updated safety/training standards. The move is part of a broader brand rebuild under Ames Watson, which acquired Claire’s out of bankruptcy last year, and comes as the retailer doubles down on brick-and-mortar while expanding through licensing partnerships with Walmart, Kohl’s, CVS, and other retailers.

  • First Bath & Body Works is getting back in the conversation with its Ulta partnership, Amazon launch, and Hilary Duff-led new Fruit Fusion line. Then Gap is bringing back its ’90s fragrance collection as part of its broader beauty push. The late ‘90s-early 2000s mall is really having a moment, and it makes sense: The people who grew up on Japanese Cherry Blossom, Gap Dream, and Claire’s piercing chairs now have jobs, kids, and disposable income. Brands are realizing there’s some power in dusting off the emotional IP of the mall era and rebuilding it for how people shop today.

• Sephora bets on K-beauty. Olive Young partnered exclusively with Sephora to bring 19 Korean skincare brands to 500 U.S. locations starting Aug. 20, with a dedicated Olive Young space at Sephora’s Times Square flagship.

  • This come four months after Olive Young opened its first two US locations in LA, with three more on the docket. Now, the retailer is expanding through the store-in-store format with Sephora. Though this does give Olive Young some credibility to the US consumer, we actually think Sephora benefits more in this partnership; U.S. K-Beauty sales hit $2.8B in early 2026, up ~48% YoY, and only seem to be growing. As Sephora battles its new competitor in beauty discovery (Ulta), it will need to present new occasions for discovery and social relevance. This partnership is a great starting point.

Funding news

• Protein coffee 🤝 $1 billion. Javvy, a functional protein coffee brand sold at Walmart, Target, Sprouts and more with ~$300M in annual revenue, is exploring a sale that could value it at ~$1 billion.

  • As the brilliant Keven Ryan of Malachite Strategy and Research detailed in his newsletter, , the biggest opportunity for today’s protein beverage market is “protein layered onto an existing daily routine.” Rather than introducing an entirely new usage occasion, or trying to compete on macros alone, adding protein on top of an existing routine (like drinking coffee) is the “lowest-friction play”…and evidently, one that’s worth a lot. Pair it with mass-market distribution, approachable pricing, and constant flavor innovation (we must try the Cookie Butter), and you have a winning product.

• The $3.8 billion acquisition decades in the making. Procter & Gamble acquired Thorne, a practitioner-trusted VMS (vitamins, minerals, supplements) brand, from L Catterton for $3.8 billion. Less than three years ago, L Catterton bought Thorne for $680 million. But, unlike Gruns’s acquisition, this was hardly an overnight success:

  • Thorne spent its first three decades building credibility the slow way, launching in Seattle in 1984 as a practitioner brand and earning trust through clinician word-of-mouth, NSF manufacturing certification (the brand is fully vertically integrated), and a 2016 Mayo Clinic research partnership rather than consumer marketing.

  • That clinical foundation became the launchpad for a DTC pivot starting around 2016, followed by a 2018 direct-to-consumer relaunch and a 2020 acquisition of at-home biomarker testing platform WellnessFX, the moves that let Thorne sell its practitioner-grade reputation directly to consumers instead of through doctors’ offices.

  • Thorne went public via SPAC in late 2021 at a $525 million valuation, but only temporarily; L Catterton took the company private in an August 2023 deal worth roughly $680 million (a 94% premium to Thorne’s unaffected share price), a signal that the growth story was still underwritten even as public investors soured on it.

  • Under L Catterton, Thorne leaned into a generational repositioning, from prevention-focused boomer brand to performance-focused Gen Z and millennial pick, posting a 30%+ compound annual growth rate and crossing $500 million in revenue in 2025, growth fast enough to draw reported interest from Unilever earlier this summer before P&G locked in the deal.

  • The story here is really: a decades-old credibility moat gets rediscovered by a new generation, scaled aggressively under sponsor ownership, then sold to a strategic acquirer once the growth curve is steep enough to justify a premium multiple… sounds familiar (see: Garden of Life, Nature’s Bounty).

• An all-in-one pet brand? The Farmer’s Dog has acquired Woof, the refillable enrichment brand behind the Pupsicle, expanding beyond fresh dog food into play and wellness. Financial terms were not disclosed, and Woof will operate as an independent division.

• The hemp hype continues. Uncle Arnie’s raised $2 million from returning backers Mindset Capital and Boston Beer co-founder Harry Rubin’s investment office, doubling down on both recreational cannabis and hemp-derived THC drinks.

• PE goes after hydration. Axum Capital Partners has acquired a controlling interest in BARCODE, the better-for-you performance hydration brand co-founded by NBA champ Kyle Kuzma, with NBA All-Star Victor Wembanyama staying on as shareholder and strategic partner. No deal terms disclosed.

• Make! Alcohol! Fun! Again! (responsibly…). Unifying Spirits, makers of Boba POPS®—an alcohol-filled popping boba brand—raised $2.238M from 462 investors on Wefunder, bringing total equity financing to ~$8M. The brand hit $2.8M in revenue in 2025 (3.6x YoY growth) and is in 10,000+ doors across 75 national chains. The funding will increase manufacturing, distro, and innovation, including an upcoming ready-to-drink beverage line.

  • Founder Ray Rozycki, a teacher and entrepreneur, brought on some beverage and CPG powerhouses, including Mark Andrews, who built Castle Brands and sold it to Pernod Ricard for $300M.

• More protein from leaves! Plantible raised $35M—a $25M USDA-backed loan via X-Caliber Rural Capital plus $10M equity from RA Capital—to expand RuBisCO production fivefold to over 1,000 metric tons at its Eldorado, Texas facility. A new duckweed strain has already boosted yield 40%!

  • A recap for those who missed the RuBisCO deep dive: RuBisCO is the most abundant protein on Earth, which exists in literally every green leaf. It has the best essential amino acid profile of any commercially available protein, a PDCAAS of 1.0 (Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score—1.0 is best-possible!), and digests 5-6x faster than whey.

  • As egg and whey volatility (avian flu, global whey shortage) create a demand catalyst for alternative proteins, companies like Plantible and Leaft will look to increase production capacity significantly.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, like, leave a comment, and share it! It helps us continue to bring you the most interesting news + nuance in consumer and retail every week.

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You may notice the podcast looks a little bit different this week.

In an effort to unify our branding across our properties, we rebranded our dear podcast The Curious Consumer to Express Checkout!

If you’re a fan of the newsletter, you just might be an even bigger fan of the pod. Express Checkout (the podcast) is where our stories really come to life—where you get all of the CPG and retail news (plus our hottest takes), recent product finds, and exclusive interviews like this week’s, where Troy Bunde, co-founder of Sauz, shared exactly how his $22M brand thinks about innovation and content.

We’re also about to hit 12,000 subscribers on Substack and 63K on Instagram, and we’ve been ramping up our events, including kicking off our new private dinner offering and quarterly event series, In Season, celebrating the biggest trends in CPG each season (next one is October 6th—save the date)!

If you’re looking to get in front of our amazing audience of emerging-to-BigCo CPG and consumer professionals, investors, and retailers, we’d love to hear from you. Fill out this quick form, and you’ll hear from us very soon :)

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Nate’s Pickup:

Hot Box Pretzels

If you came up to me on the street in one of those street interviews in Washington Square Park and asked me what is the one food I always crave, my answer every time would be a pretzel. Soft, hard, salted with cheese, with cinnamon sugar. A pretzel. I love, love, love a pretzel. And I particularly love just a plain salted pretzel. I could eat those any day of the week, any time, any season. But I will say I have a particular soft spot for a hot soft pretzel. And I’m always on the lookout for a good pretzel, whether it’s in a restaurant or a food service stand or in a grocery store. Damn do these really hit the spot.

• Quick Facts: Frozen soft pretzel bites out of Jacksonville, Florida, from Roman Desmond—who dropped out of college to run a single pretzel food truck at local markets and festivals. He ended up competing on season two of Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars, where Ramsay and Lisa Vanderpump were the first two people to ever taste the product. They use lye-dipped dough, nothing artificial, no seed oils, and ship frozen nationwide. Each bag comes with its own seasoning packet, and they’re ready in minutes in the oven or the microwave. Comes in flavors like Salt, Cinnamon, Honey Butter, and Everything Bagel.

• Reasons to love:

  • Genius simple packaging. This is somehow one of the easiest frozen food items that I have received to heat up and also be really good and really tasty. You can warm these up a few ways, either frozen or thawed but my favorite method that I’ve tried has been from frozen, directly in the bag, right into the microwave. And it doesn’t really get soggy. They get soft. They get pretzel-y. I’m really impressed at this method and at the fact that you can just heat it up right in the bag that it comes in. This product is a treat. I can easily heat the whole bag and a treat is something that I want immediately. This form of heating up, being able to microwave it just in the bag, is perfect.

  • The perfect size and texture. I have tried the bigger soft pretzels at home and they just never heat up or perform well. I’m really glad they actually went with smaller bites. Size is not too small that it doesn’t get all of the seasoning on the surface but it’s also not too big that a lot of it just falls away and you don’t get anything. It’s truly the perfect size to capture all of that flavor. I also think the size lends itself to a really fluffy and airy texture as well. Compared to the smaller bites you might find at the mall, these are a really good texture. Also, there’s just something really satisfying about popping these little bites into your mouth one at a time. It feels even more like a treat.

  • The flavors. These flavors are perfection. They’re very creative. They’re very treat-like and they lend themselves very well to the vessel that they’re attaching themselves to. The other thing is that the way that they include the flavor packets and all of that makes it really easy to season these. You put it all right into the bag. You can add the melted butter if the flavor requires it or you can just add the flavor packet that they include in the package.

    • This is really another brand that proves to me how good the frozen aisle has become.

Where to buy: Online

Jenna’s Pickup:

Noon Protein - Honey Banana

I am typically not a proponent of replacing meals with something in a can or bar form. Typically, I find these products come with a stench of guilt-induction—have this instead of your meal, because eating a full meal is synonymous with overeating, and the only way you can properly restrict is by having something contained to a package. This messaging is icky! Bad! I do not like it!

BUT (and a heavy but indeed), I do like having feel-good options for when I am, admittedly, too lazy to make a meal. Instead of the language of “replacement,” I prefer the concept of optionality, of having another choice for a meal that doesn’t shame you, but provides alternative nourishment when you’re busy. NOON Protein’s Liquid Breakfast is the perfect example of that, and I’ve really been enjoying it lately as one of multiple options on my breakfast rotation.

• Quick Facts: Australian ready-to-drink canned protein beverage (”liquid breakfast”) that just made its US debut in Targets nationwide after raising a $2.5M seed round.

• Reasons to love:

  • Tiny can packed with nourishment. In just one very-portable 8-oz can, you get 20g of protein, 5g fiber, and 150 calories. Made with super simple ingredients like milk, oats, and real banana puree, it doesn’t feel like some wacky “meal replacement” that’s engineered to keep you artificially full—it’s much closer to a liquid version of a breakfast I’d probably make when I have the time.

  • Branding. So many “meal replacements” or meal shakes feel sterile, weirdly masculine, or diet-coded. Noon just feels fun. Its bright, bold typeface, emphasis on flavor with the ingredients front-and-center, and modern feel make this a can I want to reach for, as opposed to something that feels like a punishment. The brand focuses less on restriction and what it doesn’t have, and more on what it offers: the protein of 3 eggs, the fiber of 2 bananas, and real milk + oats.

  • The banana flavor!!!! I’ve been so on-board the banana train. As many have noticed, banana has been a huge flavor trend this summer—spanning categories from protein bars (Barebells) to beauty (Glow Recipe). I know that banana-flavored things can be controversial; but this Honey Banana Flavor tastes like real banana—probably because it’s made with real banana puree. I absolutely love the combination of banana and coffee, so my recent favorite “hack” has been pouring a NOON over my cold brew for the fastest, tastiest, multifunctional “liquid breakfast” of all time.

Where to buy: Target nationwide!

This week we sit down with Troy Bonde, Co-Founder of Sauz, the brand that's rewriting the rules of the $10 billion tomato sauce category. Troy takes us through his wild journey—from a COVID-era hand sanitizer dropshipping hustle to building Sauz into a nationwide brand at Target and Sprouts, backed by $22 million in funding.

We dig into how Sauz found its brand moat, the story behind the name, their viral "pimping Troy out" social campaign, the new Basic Basil marinara launch, and what's next for the brand.

Let’s get into it!

The breakdown:
0:00 - Intro
0:36 - Introducing Troy
1:08 - From hand sanitizer to pasta sauce
5:35 - Learning CPG through angel investing
7:47 - Breaking category norms
11:33 - The story behind the name “Sauz”
14:37 - The California Naturals tomato lip balm collab
19:16 - Launching Basic Basil marinara
24:44 - Sauz’s viral social media strategy
29:31 - Measuring repeat purchase and loyalty
31:25 - Scaling distribution: Target, Erewhon, and beyond
39:17 - Closing thoughts

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