If you happen to be in London June 3-5… we are incredibly jealous. Because our friends at Wayflyer are putting on what will likely be the event of the summer.

It’s three days, featuring the founders behind some of the UK’s best consumer brands like SURI (a fave interviewee on The Curious Consumer) and Trip (the magnesium drink that inspired this newsletter), talking about what’s worked and what hasn’t. With panels ranging from “Understanding the Modern Female Wellness Consumer” to “What Creator-Led Brands Know That Traditional Founders Don’t” there’s something for everyone to learn at this iconic summit.

If you’re in London… you need to go. Your attendance is the only cure for our rampant FOMO.

We can’t wait for the event to come to New York later this year—who wants to in?

Apply To Attend Here

CPG & Consumer Goods

• CPG is officially in its avocado oil era. What was a fringe wellness obsession two years ago is now a packaging callout, a funding thesis, and—increasingly—a retail requirement.

  • Ayoh, Molly Baz’s flavored mayo brand, reformulated its full lineup, swapping high-oleic sunflower oil for avocado oil. The new formula rolls out to 4,000+ doors (Whole Foods, Target, Sprouts) this month.

    • Per Ayoh’s CEO David McCormick (via Modern Retail), avocado oil is two to three times more expensive than the high-oleic sunflower oil Ayoh was using. For SKUs with high oil concentrations—like the plain mayo—COGs jumped 50% on the oil swap alone. Ayoh chose to absorb the hit rather than raise its $8.99 shelf price, betting that premium positioning + flavor improvement + the seed-oil-free callout justifies the margin compression.

    • McCormick framed it as a flavor decision first (”creamier texture, more neutral base”), but also acknowledged that retail buyers were asking for a seed-oil-free version. And when buyers start asking, reformulating stops being a brand-values move and starts being a shelf-survival move.

  • Jesse & Ben’s, the seed-oil-free frozen french fry brand (with avocado oil and a beef tallow SKUs), closed a $10M Series A led by Greycroft after posting 1,100%+ growth in 2025 and becoming the #1 frozen potato brand at multiple retailers.

  • Doughbrik’s WAVERS, David Dobrik’s snack brand, relaunched domestically with a fully reimagined formula made with avocado oil, no seed oils, and a redesigned package that puts “made with avocado oil” on the front.

  • … and, despite what you may or may not feel about seed oils (we think the whole thing is a tad overblown, but alas) the data supports these reformulations:

    • The Seed Oil Free Alliance launched a Seed Oil Free Certified® seal that requires lab testing for “adulteration,” which is common in avocado oil. SPINS reported that sales of Seed Oil Free Alliance–certified products rose 216% YoY in Q1 2025.

    • A Cleveland Clinic–adjacent survey put the share of US consumers actively avoiding seed oils at 28%.

• The battle for bar relevance. Luna Bar launched “Easy to Love,” its first major creative campaign in seven years, featuring Jessica Alba as inaugural brand ambassador. The effort spans TikTok, Meta, and national retail display ads, timed to the debut of new Berry Bars—the brand’s first bar innovation in six years.

  

  • We don’t usually cover marketing campaigns, but Luna is a name we genuinely haven’t heard in years, and the relaunch is worth unpacking. If you didn’t have an Almond Mom in the early 2000s, here’s the lore: Luna was widely considered the first nutrition bar designed specifically for women, launched by Clif Bar in 1999 with sub-200-calorie portions and added iron, calcium, and folic acid. It was ahead of its time on both formulation and positioning—female-targeted bars weren’t really a category yet. Within a year of launch, Luna became the #1 energy bar in natural foods stores with 17% market share, beating out parent brand Clif Bar (13%) and every other competitor in a category with 700+ products.

  • Then Luna got stuck. The bar space exploded with higher-protein, cleaner-ingredient entrants (RXBar, Perfect Bar, Quest, etc.), and Luna’s soy-protein-isolate-and-rice-syrup formula started reading less “for women” and more “for women who haven’t updated their pantry since 2008.” A persistent internet rumor that the bars contained added estrogen (they didn’t—it was soy protein) didn’t help. Clif was acquired by Mondelez in 2022, and Luna has been quiet ever since. It survived on legacy distribution and the loyalty of customers who'd been buying LemonZest since college, but as a cultural force, it was effectively dormant.

  • So why the comeback now? First, the bar category is bigger and more lucrative than it's ever been (David, Built, Aloha, GoMacro all hitting peak relevance), and a name with Luna's brand equity is too valuable to leave sitting. Plus, the conditions are finally right: women-targeted CPG is no longer a fringe positioning bet, it's the dominant thesis driving growth across food and beverage (see: Olipop, Poppi, Gorgie, Bloom…). Luna invented this lane 26 years ago… it’d be borderline negligent not to try to reclaim it.

  • And re: the Jessica Alba of it all… she’s the perfect mix of millennial nostalgia and the current clean-CPG-founder archetype (her Honest Company era). Luna is demonstrating that it wants to be taken seriously as a wellness brand again rather than a relic of low-cal nutrition. The harder question is whether a refreshed berry bar can hold its own next to 20g-protein candy bars.

• Another. Celebrity. Wellness. Brand. Carrie Underwood, the iconic country music star, launched HiNote, a women’s wellness brand, with a debut nutrition drink mix featuring 20g protein, 5g fiber, and no added sugar or caffeine. Her fit52 app is also rebranding as HiNote Life.

  • HiNote joins an increasingly crowded roster: Kylie Jenner’s k20, Alex Cooper’s Unwell (which now comes in stick packs too), Amanda Kloots’ Proper, David Beckham’s IM8, and Ian Somerhalder and Nikki Reed’s The Absorption Company, just to name a few. And this doesn’t include the countless wellness brands (especially drink mixes) that are endorsed by celebrities and influencers. The pattern is the same every time: a recognizable face and the implicit promise that drinking this is part of becoming a certain kind of person, and gaining access to their lifestyle.

  • The HiNote product itself, though, does feel different than a lot of other nutritional drink mixes on the market: It’s merging multiple different products in one to be a true supplement to someones diet. It’s a protein drink, fiber supplement, greens powder, and collagen supplement all in one—but it (cleverly) isn’t positioned as a meal replacement. Assuming this doesn’t become another celebrity’s forgotten brand, this product might have legs.

• One in five energy drinks is now a Celsius Holdings product. Despite all the new players in energy, Celsius’ growth remains strong. Celsius Holdings reported $782.6 million in Q1 2026 revenue—up 138% year over year—after its $1.8 billion Alani Nu acquisition and Rockstar pickup from PepsiCo gave it ~20.9% dollar share of the US energy drink category.

  

  • We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: energy drinks are for the girls. Celsius and Alani Nu—now under one roof—are two of the most explicitly female-coded energy brands on shelf, with branding, flavor profiles, and influencer ecosystems built for the Pilates-and-pre-workout crowd. Together they’ve effectively built a parallel energy category that doesn’t look anything like the Monster/Red Bull aesthetic that defined the space for two decades.

  • The legacy energy playbook—extreme sports, neon, masculine bravado—missed an enormous portion of the population. Celsius read that white space early, leaned into a wellness positioning (the “burns body fat” claim, the cleaner ingredient deck), and rode the female-focused functional beverage wave that Poppi, Gorgie, and Bloom have all since validated. The Alani acquisition was essentially Celsius consolidating its own category.

• And while Celsius takes over the US, Monster takes over the world. Monster Beverage reported Q1 sales of $2.35 billion, up nearly 27%, with international revenue topping $1 billion—up 45%—now 45% of total sales, led by affordability brands Predator and Fury in emerging markets.

• Kid’s deserve fun new brands too! NoBiggie, a new kids’ sparkling drink brand from former Glossier CMO Ali Weiss and Vita Coco veteran Aytunc Atabek, launched with four flavors containing up to 5g of natural sugar and no artificial sweeteners or dyes.

  • The better-for-you kids beverage space is heating up fast. NoBiggie will compete with Wave Kids, Roxberry, Caliwater’s new kids electrolyte line, and Capri Sun Hydrate (which is, you guessed it, regular Capri Sun with electrolytes). And it’s not just beverages—the better-for-you kids category is exploding across supplements, milk, and snacks. The same upgrades adults have been getting for years are finally trickling down to the lunchbox.

  • What’s most interesting about NoBiggie specifically is the format. Sparkling drinks have historically been adult territory, but the cultural cachet of brands like Poppi has rewired how kids think about soda. When the cool older kids are wearing Poppi merch and drinking prebiotic soda at lunch, sparkling becomes aspirational for the under-12 set in a way it wasn’t a few years ago. NoBiggie is betting that the next generation of soda drinkers wants bubbles, fun branding, and parental sign-off—all in the same can.

• A sticker for your tummy troubles. Barrière is launching Dear Dairy (fantastic name), the world’s first lactose intolerance patch—$13 for 36 patches, using 2.5mg lactase enzyme delivered transdermally. It launches at Walmart and DTC, with the brand projecting ~$1 million in sales through end of 2026. Barriere already offers a line of transdermal stickers, from Vitamin D and Vitamin B12 patches to a “beauty” patch with biotin.

  

  • My prediction for the next supplement deliverable: Gummies are dead, patches are in. Patches are alllll the rage right now, with brands like Kind Patches and The Good Patch delivering supplement patches (particularly NAD+ patches—we’ll get into this buzzy supplement at another time…) and reminding consumers that transdermal delivery is an option—and one that feels, perhaps, more chic than swallowing a pill.

    • While putting a sticker on yourself was likely seen as an adult faux pas just a few years ago, the popularity of pimple patches has made it socially acceptable to show up to a function with a sticker on your face. After all, wellness is performative. No one can see you taking your pills or applying your creams, but your lifestyle aspirations can clearly be revealed with a simple sticker. - Jenna

• Cold-pressed goes public. Suja Life, the beverage company known for its organic, cold-pressed juices and functional wellness shots, raised $187 million in its IPO, selling 8.9 million shares at $21 each—toward the lower end of its target range.

  • Suja Life was founded in 2012, when wellness shots and juice cleanses were at their peak. The brand basically started the cold-pressed juice trend

  • Suja is now a house of brands, with Suja Organic (flagship juice; the #1 brand in cold-pressed juice category), Vive Organic (doctor-crafted wellness shots), and the revived Slice (prebiotic soda). All production was brought in-house, with an in-house innovation engine that allows them to go from concept → product quickly. When they bought the dormant Slice trademark, for instance, they were able to bring a better-for-you soda to market in just 9 months.

  • But the IPO reception was (clearly) rough. SUJA opened at $18—down 15% from its IPO price—and closed its first day at $17.85. Suja is unprofitable, posting a $23.3M net loss on $326.6M in revenue last year, and 76% of the proceeds ($141.3M) are earmarked for debt repayment rather than growth. This feels a little less “ready to be public” and more “PE owner needed a partial exit.”

  • That doesn’t mean CPG IPOs can’t work, though: Contrast that with Once Upon a Farm, which IPO’d three months ago and popped 17% on day one. Both companies were unprofitable at IPO, but Once Upon a Farm had narrowing losses, 66% sales growth and a path to profitability, and a clear founder-led story. Suja had widening losses, slower growth, and a balance-sheet cleanup framed as a growth story, and evidently, public investors noticed.

• From soda shop to can. Slice Soda (a Suja Life portfolio brand) launched its first ready-to-drink dirty soda—Dirty Orange and Dirty Strawberry—now at Target nationwide. The cans use coconut-derived MCT oil for creaminess instead of artificial cream flavoring other brands use, with 4 grams of sugar and a prebiotic/probiotic/postbiotic blend.

  

  • For those who don’t know: the dirty soda trend commercially started in the Mormon community with the chain Swig back in 2010 and quickly gained a fast following across the state. Sixteen years later, with help from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives popularizing the “dirty soda” trend and the subsequent explosion on TikTok, and Swig now operates across 16 states with plans for roughly 500 locations over the next five years.

    • Side note: Do we need to do a piece on how Mormon culture is shaping CPG? Between dirty soda and Ballerina Farms/Nara Smith, we’re seeing so many innovations revolving around this community.

      

  • Fast food chains have also hopped in on the trend. McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and even Dunkin’ all have their own versions of “dirty soda”—and Big CPG already saw this trend coming: PepsiCo was early to the game, launching the Dirty Mountain Dew line last month, Coca-Cola launched the Coca-Cola Cherry Float (technically just a vanilla flavor with no real cream/fat component), and CoffeeMate launched Dirty Soda Creamers (Coconut Lime made for Dr Pepper, and Orange Creme Pop made for Crush).

    

  • In the increasingly crowded modern soda category, Poppi, OLIPOP, Culture Pop, and more (preferably without “Pop” in their names…) are competing on the same prebiotic-functional-better-for-you axis. So instead of trying to out-functional the category leaders, Slice is leaning into the cultural moment with an entirely new line extension, featuring a quality layer (MCT oil instead of synthetic cream, low sugar, gut blend). It’s also a flex of Suja Life’s vertically integrated innovation engine—Suja has consistently gotten products from concept to shelf in under a year, a timeline most CPG brands physically can’t match.

eCommerce

• DK-beauty is taking over TikTok. TikTok Shop generated nearly $1 billion ($928.5 million to be exact) in U.S. beauty sales in Q1 2026, a 96% jump year-over-year, putting it on pace to exceed $4 billion annually. K-Beauty brands Dr. Melaxin ($46.3M) and Medicube ($44.3M) led the platform.

Retail

• Temu wants to be your…. butcher? Temu is expanding into food and grocery via U.S.-based sellers, adding 700+ categories including frozen steaks and pantry staples—a pivot away from its direct-from-China roots after the de minimis exemption was closed.

  • Temu’s entire value proposition was direct-from-China factory pricing made possible by the de minimis loophole (which let packages under $800 enter the US duty-free). When the Trump administration closed that loophole in 2025, Temu’s cost advantage essentially evaporated overnight. Around the time of the loophole closing, Temu also enabled Shopify merchants to sell their wares through Temu’s worldwide customer base.

  • Now, it seems to be attempting yet another strategy to stay afloat in the US… and a really strange one at that. “With the addition of local sellers, Temu’s marketplace now offers more than 700 categories, from footwear to furniture to food,” a Temu spokesperson said in a statement. “Food is one of the newer additions, and food sellers on the program are U.S.-based businesses fulfilling from U.S. inventory. We don’t break out category-level data publicly, but food has grown quickly since launch and includes everything from pantry staples to specialty and regional brands.”

Funding

• Grocers get their very own AI co-pilot. Vori, a company building the AI powered operating systems for grocery stores, has raised a $22 million Series B led by Cherryrock Capital, with Greylock Partners and The Factory also participating.

  • If you haven’t seen their launch video, we highly recommend it! It perfectly explains why this is such a huge opportunity and why it’s so needed in the world of grocery. Grocery is a $1.5 trillion market domestically—nearly every American interacts with it daily. It’s a massive category, and one that has stayed mostly analog.

  • Vori has processed $500M+ in payments across 55 cities since launching in January 2024, serving 1M+ consumers. Payments account for 60–70% of revenue—the model that’s worked for Toast in restaurants and Shopify in eComm: bundle software with payment processing, keep upfront costs low for operators, monetize on transaction volume.

  • Walmart and Amazon control about 25% of the US grocery market. Vori is going after the other 75%—the independent grocers, neighborhood markets, ethnic grocers, and specialty stores that have been completely underserved by tech. The pitch: bring AI to the operators who can’t afford to build their own engineering teams, and give them the tools that let Whole Foods and Kroger run circles around them on margin and inventory.

• Brain health gets its moment. MOSH, co-founded by the celeb mother-son duo Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, raised $13 million in Series A funding led by Main Street Advisors, with participation from Great Circle Ventures and Rogers Healy of Morrison Seger. The round is funding a nationwide Target rollout and the launch of MOSH High Protein—a new bar with 20g of protein, creatine, and its Signature Brain Blend. The brand now sits in over 2,000 retail doors, with its retail channel on track to triple in 2026.

  • This benefit list of protein, creatine, and a Signature Brain Blend feels destined for capital, because it sits at the intersection of every functional trend currently driving growth in CPG. Cognitive health is an especially interesting piece here—it’s the wellness frontier with the most demographic tailwind: aging millennials worried about Alzheimer’s, Gen Z worried about screen-induced brain fog, and everyone in between worried about “optimization.”

  • As we covered last week, “brain boosting” ingredients are having their moment in the beverage aisle. Brands like Neutonic even feature the same key ingredient as MOSH: Cognizin Citicoline, a branded, patented form of citicoline (CDP-Choline) designed to support brain health.

  • Andddd then there’s the Target rollout, which is likely the biggest inflection point for a brand that built itself on DTC and specialty retail.

• Speaking of brain food… Bel Group (brand beyond the iconic Babybel and GoGo squeeZ) acquired Ingenuity Foods, maker of Brainiac functional fruit snacks—which saw triple-digit sales growth last year. The purchase price was not disclosed.

  • This is yet another data point in the better-for-you kids gold rush. Brainiac plays directly into the same parental anxiety that’s driving every other launch in the space: parents who want shelf-stable, lunchbox-friendly snacks that don’t feel like a nutritional compromise. Triple-digit growth tells you the demand is real, and Bel is making a smart bet that adding a functional snack to a portfolio anchored by Babybel and GoGo squeeZ gives it a more complete play in the kids’ snack aisle.

  • Bel is worth watching more broadly. Earlier this year, the company announced a $200 million investment to double Babybel production capacity at its South Dakota plant, and partnered with food tech company Foodberry to develop a line of snacks using real fruit. For a legacy player, Bel is moving with surprising speed—building capacity, acquiring growth assets, and partnering on innovation all at once. That’s a meaningfully different approach than the wait-and-watch approach most BigCos take when an emerging category gets hot. 🤷‍♀️

• The “skinification” of hair. Crown Affair has raised a Series C led by Stride Consumer Partners—the firm’s first prestige hair investment—joining existing backers True Beauty Ventures who led a $5M Series A in 2022 and a $9M series B round in 2024. The round size was undisclosed.

  • We’ve been tracking a wave of investment in prestige hair care. Everist, the waterless hair brand, closed a Sandbridge Capital-led round in early 2025; KilgourMD secured a Series A led by Prelude Growth Partners in March 2026 for its dermatologist-founded scalp serum line; and Henkel agreed to acquire Olaplex for $1.4 billion while signing a separate deal to acquire Not Your Mother’s—which had around €190 million in 2025 sales—within weeks of each other.

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We’ve been curious about something lately: what are the coolest people in CPG actually shopping for themselves? So, we started a fun new series to find out (with the help of our incredible intern, Natalie!).

ICYMI, we’ve been going grocery shopping with some pretty cool folks recently—and this week, we had an especially fun guest take us through his weekly shop: the Tom First, Founder of Culture Pop (and former co-founder of Nantucket Nectars)!

We’ll be putting these out more regularly, so if you know someone in the NYC area whose grocery cart is worth a peek, email us at hello@expresscheckout.co!

P.S. We’d love to hear from YOU 🫵: if you have any feedback on our recent content, ideas for future content/events/activations, or just want to tell Nate he looks pretty in his most recent TikTok, please fill out this quick form!

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickups:

Nose Dive (aka one of my new favorite home fragrance brands)

There’s truly nothing better than finding the perfect home fragrance solutions that just work for you: candles, room sprays, diffusers…all of that jazz. And now, I have another one to add to my ongoing roster of fragrance brands that I love. On top of Nose Dive, I’m also a huge fan of Ranger Station, which I’ve talked about before, and Realm, which is more of a Febreze competitor. And now we have Nose Dive!

I actually first heard about Nose Dive from an event I attended. I got one of their candles as part of their gift bags. It turns out they work with a publicist friend of ours, Morgan Kilmer (she’s amazing)! She invited me to their launch event for their new room sprays where I got to test out the rest of their candle line up and all the room sprays that had just launched. I’m now a huge fan of the entire brand.

I currently am using the Nightcap candle and the Home sick and Soft Petrichor Room Mists in my home.

• Quick Facts: Nose Dive is a Minnesota-based fragrance brand that creates high-end candles and room mists designed to capture specific moods and nostalgic memories. Their scents focus on “sensory anchors” like the smell of a slow morning or a rainy afternoon.

• Reasons to love:

  • A scent for everyone. A lot of fragrance companies don’t have a really good variety of scents. Many of them may have one or two that smell really good, but not the entire line. Each of Nose Dive’s scents feels crafted in a thoughtful, unique way. It’s not the same scents as everyone else, they feel designed for the moment.

  • These sprays LAST. My god do these room sprays work so well. I feel that with some of these new, cleaner brands they don’t always perform as well as they should. The smells might not linger or they might leave oily stains on furniture and linens. This is one of the first room sprays I feel not only lasts a long time but smells great too. I learned why it works so well, it has alcohol in it. A lot of the new “cleaner” fragrance brands avoid that one ingredient. But it provides so much to the efficacy of the product! Alcohol is commonly used in fragrance dispersal, it’s not a bad ingredient. It helps ensures spray disperses and evaporates quickly without leaving a greasy residue and acts as a preservative to prevent microbial growth.

    • But the products are still vegan, paraben and sulfate free!

  • The perfect middle ground. Nose Dive sits in a perfect middle ground of brand and price. Many products are positioned either higher or lower, or more masculine or more feminine. These products occupy that same middle ground, making them accessible to a broad audience who want something that looks good, smells good, and doesn’t break the bank.

Where to buy: Online

Jenna’s Pickup:

Mary & Jane - Dreamy Melts

Over the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been having the same convo with different people on loop: everyone‘s struggling with falling asleep, staying asleep, or getting enough sleep more broadly. Whether you blame it on some astrological, inescapably moon-derived funk or (less likely) the blue light constantly pouring into our eyes, sleep feels trickier for many of us these days.

Personally, I’ve been struggling with the staying asleep thing—which is unfortunate as someone who needs 8+ hours of sleep for basic functioning, but also is literally afraid of melatonin (shoutout to my fellow melatonin-induced vivid nightmare girlies <3). Most sleep supplements either contain melatonin or kinda just… don’t work. Mary & Jane’s Dreamy Melts, though, are my new favorite exception to that rule.

I was first introduced by Mary & Jane last year, when we were working on a piece about THC. It was the first “microdosed” THC product I’d heard of, specifically positioning THC as a wellness/lifestyle product for an older population. I’ve loved following the brand since then, and was so thrilled to feature them in our IN SEASON event in the THC trend section!

• Quick Facts: Mary & Jane was founded by two moms and best friends who wanted to find a better way to incorporate cannabis into their lifestyle and wellness routines. Their Dreamy Melts are a calming blend of cannabinoids, botanicals, and minerals designed to help you unwind, fall asleep faster, and wake up refreshed—made without melatonin.

• Reasons to love:

  • The melt format. This is the first product I’ve tried in a “melt” format, which is a small tablet that melts in your mouth. It dissolves gently—a far more calming action than swallowing a hard pill—and has a light, lovely cherry flavor. And because melts absorb through the mucous membranes in your mouth, you don’t have to wait to digest them to feel the effects (unlike a gummy).

  • A thoughtful layering of ingredients. Dreamy was designed for the reality that sleep is complicated, so the ingredients address more than just one potential cause of sleep challenges. Made with CBN (cannabinol: a mildly psychoactive, sedative byproduct of aged THC) and a microdose of THC (just 1mg, it won’t get you high!), these were designed to support your endocannabinoid system and ease you into sleep. The addition of tart cherry and magnesium reduce inflammation and calm the nervous system, while reishi mushroom reduces stress.

    • CBN is the real powerhouse here. In human clinical trials, participants taking CBN experienced meaningfully fewer nighttime awakenings and less overall sleep disturbance compared to placebo, with no impact on how they felt the next day.

    • Side note: Because these only contain 1mg of THC, they’re legal for domestic travel!

  • They actually work. The promise of a better sleep and “no grogginess” is a big one—especially for those who have relied on melatonin or higher-dose THC products in the past. But for me, these actually uphold their claims. I take one melt ~30 minutes before bed, reliably sleep through the night, and wake up feeling incredibly well-rested and refreshed—sans the melatonin nightmares.

Where to buy: Mary & Jane’s website!

This week we sit down with Stacey Hartnett, SVP of Marketing at Chomps to talk about their biggest product launch yet: chicken sticks.

Then, we dive into the week’s biggest CPG news. The L-theanine and caffeine combo taking over the functional beverage space, colostrum soda, the booming luxury laundry detergent category, and more. Let’s get into it! →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

This week we sit down with Stacey Hartnett, SVP of Marketing at Chomps to talk about their biggest product launch yet: chicken sticks.

Then, we dive into the week’s biggest CPG news. The L-theanine and caffeine combo taking over the functional beverage space, colostrum soda, the booming luxury laundry detergent category, and more. Let’s get into it!

Share feedback on the pod!

Check out our deep dive on L-theanine:

https://www.expresscheckout.co/p/everyone-needs-to-calm-down

The breakdown:
0:00 Interview with Stacey Hartnett, SVP
of Marketing at Chomps
12:43 Feedback & podcast updates from our offsite
13:19 The L-theanine + caffeine trend
27:01 Armra's colostrum soda
30:43 Popwtr: Lemon Perfect founder's new sparkling water bet
37:27 Luxury laundry
45:08 Thayers' creator-led product launch and what brands should learn from it
51:04 Wrap up

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Last week, we spent a few days on our company offsite in Austin, planning out the future of Express Checkout. We’ve got a lot of exciting things in the works, and can’t wait to share with you!

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from YOU 🫵: if you have feedback on our recent content, it would mean SO much to us if you could take two minutes to respond to this short survey with your thoughts!

Dump your ideas!!!

The new wave of caffeination is calm.

Or, at least, that’s the new messaging adopted by both BigCos and emerging brands alike: This week, Pure Leaf—Pepsi’s famed iced tea brand—launched its first functional sparkling line, “Mental Focus” packing in ~70mg caffeine and added L-theanine. In the same week, the creator-founded beverage brand Neutonic raised $6M at a $60M valuation on the back of a caffeine + L-theanine stack.

Both followed a string of recent L-theanine moments: Neuro (the energy gum + mints brand built on the same combo) returned to Shark Tank in March, becoming the first company in show history to come back after rejecting a deal and secure investment on a second appearance. And just last week, LAM Beverages launched a line of L-theanine coffee syrups marketed for “crash-free” focus for the at-home barista.

Wherever there’s a new energy product, it seems, L-theanine will make its way to the label. So let’s back up: what is it, and where did this cult combo come from?

• L-theanine is a non-protein amino acid found almost exclusively in the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. Discovered in 1949 and isolated from gyokuro tea leaves (a shade-grown tea, similar to matcha) in 1950, researchers spent the following decades documenting what tea drinkers had long described anecdotally: that green tea produced a different kind of alertness than coffee.

• Studies in the 80s and 90s linked L-theanine to alpha brain wave activity (the relaxed-but-awake state) and showed it counteracted some of caffeine’s stimulant edge.

• The problem was, extracting L-theanine from tea directly was inefficient and prohibitively expensive. So in the late 90s, Japanese ingredient supplier Taiyo International developed Suntheanine, a patented enzymatic process that mimics how the tea plant produces L-theanine naturally.

  • Suntheanine made L-theanine commercially viable as a standalone ingredient for the first time and—fun fact!!—is still the dominant form on most labels today.

L-theanine supplementation isn’t all that new. By the late 2000s, L-theanine was the functional darling that was supposed to define the next generation of energy drinks—Big Beverage placed real bets, and press covered it as a sure thing. From a 2009 article in the Cape Cod Times, aptly titled “New beverages with L-theanine come into focus” (disclaimer: it didn’t age well…):

Certain formulations of SoBe Lifewater and Vitamin Water contain L-theanine, as does a new beverage called ViB. And Gatorade recently introduced a drink with the amino acid as well. That product—Tiger—was named for and marketed by golfer Tiger Woods.

“Focus and concentration is the next generation of the energy drink,” said Scott Smith, vice president of Taiyo International (editor’s note: same Taiyo as above!).

The ingredient was ready… but the market was not. Spoiler: None of the bevs pictured above exist today. The concept flopped (we’ll only partly blame the celeb partnership…), and brands momentarily ditched the concept of “calm energy,” quietly retiring L-theanine to the back of the sleep aisle, where it spent the next decade buried in nighttime stack labels alongside magnesium and GABA. “Wind down” gummies and “sleep tonic” tinctures became the primary homes for L-theanine—functional, but exclusively after dark.

• The pivot to sleep made sense at the time. Selling L-theanine as a daytime focus ingredient required consumers to recognize a sensation they didn’t yet have a reference point for. “Calm energy” was an abstraction without anything to map it to.

• But selling it as a relaxation aid slotted neatly into an existing category consumers already understood: things that help you sleep. Magnesium, melatonin, chamomile, GABA. L-theanine just needed to clear the much lower bar of “this helps me wind down,” and the marketing wrote itself.

Once a supplement is relegated to the sleep aisle, shifting association back to sleep’s opposite—energy—reads as a near-impossible feat.

Flash forward to 2026, though, and our girl L-theanine is back, front-of-label and paired with caffeine under banners like “calm focus” and “calm energy.” How has this ingredient managed such a drastic 180?

One word: matcha. Matcha, which naturally contains high levels of L-theanine and caffeine, has skyrocketed in popularity over the past two years.

• In a wildly short time, matcha has gone from niche, Japanese tea ritual to mainstream beverage. Within just two years, matcha has gone from a specialty café drink to an expected menu item at QSRs like Dunkin, Starbucks, and even Jack in the Box (that one was not on our Bingo card). The global market hit $4.17 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $4.61 billion in 2026 at a 10.6% CAGR, with North America the fastest-growing region.

• With its rise, matcha gave consumers a vocabulary for a feeling they didn’t previously have language for. Coffee = wired, decaf = nothing, but matcha = alert but not anxious or jittery.

• The reason matcha feels different, of course, is L-theanine, but consumers learned the sensation before they learned the ingredient. Now, brands are reverse-engineering the sensation into formats matcha can’t reach.

• The behavioral data backs this up. Today, Gen Z consumes more tea-based beverages than coffee, drinking significantly less coffee than Millennials, Gen X, or Boomers. Matcha taught a generation that energy could feel different, and once people felt the difference, they stopped wanting the alternative.

The result is a generational reset on what energy is supposed to feel like. Consumers still want the boost, just with mindfulness baked in. And now, beverage brands are racing to deliver that feeling without requiring anyone to pick up a bamboo whisk:

• Pure Leaf “Mental Focus”: While PepsiCo may have bombed its Gatorade x L-theanine attempt circa 2009, it’s ready to give the ingredient another shot. This time, through its Pure Leaf brand—and PepsiCo is pulling out every stop to communicate the “focused energy” message. The new functional tea launched in a three-way partnership with Olympic gold medalist Jordan Chiles (the face of athletic performance) and Brick (the viral phone-locking device that’s become shorthand for digital focus)—energy and attention, packaged together.

• Neutonic: Two influencers, James Smith and Chris Williamson, launched this L-theanine, caffeine, and citicoline beverage as a “Productivity Drink”— selling 7.5M+ cans since its 2023 launch.

• Spacetime Energy: an L-theanine energy drink marketed as “energy for your mind” that just launched into retail at Hy-Vee last month.

  

• LAM just launched new L-theanine based coffee syrups, which bring the combo into the at-home barista category.

Which gets at the real lesson here: An ingredient can be too early. L-theanine in 2009 was a science story without a sensory hook—consumers had no reference point for what “smooth caffeine” was supposed to feel like, so the marketing had nothing to anchor to. Not even Tiger Woods could sell a feeling no one had felt yet (🙃).

What changed is that matcha gave consumers the experience before brands had to explain the mechanism. Once people had felt L-theanine working (without knowing they were feeling L-theanine), the ingredient finally had a story consumers could place themselves inside.

Functional ingredients don’t break through on clinical claims alone, they break through when consumers can map them to a sensation they already trust. Shoutout matcha for paving the way.

Stay on the lookout: we predict a whole lot more front-of-pack L-theanine and “calm energy” claims in the next few months.

Side (but related) note: We’ve also been seeing a lot of “adderall alternative” positioning, and I (Jenna) am currently working on a longer report exploring this phenomenon!

If you know anyone building in the drug-free ADHD support space, email me at jenna@expresscheckout.co

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Feels like we’re just vibe coding sodas now. ARMRA launched a colostrum soda—yes, you read that right—in four flavors (Huckleberry, Spicy Lime, Pear Ginger, Pomelo Basil). Each 12 oz can apparently delivers the same colostrum dose as one scoop of the brand’s powder supplement.

  • ARMRA essentially created the consumer colostrum category, popularizing the idea that a single bovine-derived powder—a substance critical to calf development—could double as a cure-all for everything from gut health to skin barrier function in adult humans.

  • Founded in 2020 by Dr. Sarah Rahal, the brand reportedly hit ~$150M in annual revenue by early 2024 on the back of a heavy DTC and influencer playbook, and expanded into national retail at Sprouts in late 2024. A soda SKU is the natural next move—broader format, broader audience, broader use occasion.

  • It also slots ARMRA into a now-familiar pattern: every supplement that breaks through gets a soda treatment. Fiber sodas (obviously), then protein sodas, then creatine sodas, now colostrum. Modern soda is becoming the gummy supplement of beverage—a sticky, crave-able vehicle that makes daily supplementation feel like a treat instead of a chore. The format is the moat.

• Kids need protein too! Nurri, a protein ready-to-drink beverage launched Nurri Kids, a protein drink for children with 10g of protein, 140 calories, and nine vitamins and minerals in an 8oz carton, available now at Sam’s Club in a 12-pack.

  • Once protein became the main character of CPG 🙄, expansion into the kids’ aisle was inevitable—and kids’ nutrition has historically been the late-but-lucrative chapter of every wellness trend, from organic to clean-label to gut health.

• Expect much much more of this. Simple Mills launched two regenerative organic certified oat flour baking mixes—a cinnamon swirl muffin and cake mix and a pancake and waffle mix—available at Whole Foods, Amazon, and Thrive Market.

  • Regenerative has been bubbling at the brand level for a few years—Lotus Foods, Alec’s Ice Cream, General Mills’ regenerative oats commitment—and the Simple Mills launch signals that established better-for-you brands now see it as a meaningful badge worth putting on-pack.

  • The open question is consumer pull. Regenerative still carries less recognition than “organic” or “non-GMO,” and most shoppers can’t articulate the difference between regenerative and sustainable. For now, this looks like a supply-side story—brands and retailers betting the category will eventually earn its premium—rather than evidence that consumers are actively seeking the certification at shelf.

• Frozen food continue to rip. Ripi, the restaurant-quality frozen pasta brand, launched in over 1,100 Targets nationwide. They also launched a target exclusive flavor, Basil Pesto Raviloli!

• Creatine is booming, baby! Clean Simple Eats launched a Creatine + Glutamine supplement powders with 5g creatine monohydrate and 5g glutamine, available in three flavors: Pink Burst, Frosted Lemonade, and Unflavored.

  • We told you the other week, people want creatine.

• The next-gen can. Re:Lid USA and L.A. Libations launched a resealable aluminum canned water—closable up to 14 times—now available at Gelson’s Markets in Southern California.

  • L.A. Libations is a beverage incubator, accelerator, and brand builder based out in Califonria started in 2009 by former Coke executives Danny Stepper, Dino Sarti, and Pat Bolden. They also have an investment arm, Taste Tomorrow Ventures, launched a $30M fund in 2025. They’ve worked with brands such as Plezi, Bero, Happy, Juni, Once Upon a Coconut, Cann, Odyssey, Zoa energy, Pretty Tasty.

• If it tastes like soda, is it soda? Yanni Hufnagel, former founder of Lemon Perfect, is launching POPWTR, a sparkling water brand bridging modern soda (flavor) and electrolyte-infused water—zero sugar, seven essential vitamins, four flavors. It’s his second act after a turbulent year at Lemon Perfect.

  

  • Lemon Perfect was a darling of the enhanced water category for years—Beyoncé-backed, $42M+ raised at a $100M+ valuation, and on track to surpass $100M in retail sales in 2024. But then… the wheels have come off. In October 2024, Hufnagel stepped back from CEO into an Executive Chairman role, handing the reins to former Vita Coco president Jeff Popkin. Then in January 2026, an investor-driven restructuring cut staff to fewer than 25 people, parted ways with Popkin and the CMO, and moved Hufnagel out of operations entirely as sales fell well short of projections.

  • POPWTR is, on paper, a sharper bet for this moment. Lemon Perfect competed in flavored water—a category increasingly squeezed between cheap private label (Aldi, Walmart) and the modern soda boom (Olipop, Poppi, Culture Pop). POPWTR is going at the modern soda category head-on, but with a hydration positioning that hasn’t been fully claimed yet. Whether the lessons Yanni learned scaling Lemon Perfect translate to a more crowded, more functional-obsessed category is the open question.

  • Back in January 2025 Liquid Death followed suit launching a “Soda-Flavored Sparkling” sub-line — Killer Cola, Doctor Death (a Dr. Pepper riff), and Rootbeer Wrath, lightly sweetened with agave and stevia, 2g of sugar per can. They’ve since added Killbert Grape, Sinister Ginger, and MTN Don’t. The marketing literally reads “you won’t believe it’s not soda.”

• The tobacco playbook, for snacks. Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, and 10 other major food companies have been named in a $1 billion consumer lawsuit alleging ultraprocessed foods are scientifically engineered to be addictive. This is the second such case after San Francisco’s government suit back in December 2025.

  • The complaint named 12 Big Food cos, including Kraft Heinz, Mondelēz International, Post Holdings, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle, Kellanova, Kellogg, Mars, Conagra, and Unilever.

  • Honestly, none of this is shocking. The cultural groundwork has been laid for years—Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People sitting on bestseller lists, MAHA rhetoric putting Big Food squarely in the crosshairs, and a constant slew of social content casting legacy CPG as the villain of the modern American diet.

  • What’s notable is that consumer lawsuits—not just regulatory action—are now the vehicle. The “tobacco playbook” comparison in the complaint is doing real work: it reframes UPFs from a personal-responsibility issue into a manufacturer-liability one. Whether or not these cases win, the discovery process alone could surface internal documents that reshape the conversation, the same way it did for cigs.

• Body care continues to get the facial treatment. Ex-Kenvue and Church & Dwight execs Kathy Widmer and Barry Bruno launched Dewsy, a masstige body care brand using proprietary mini-molecule technology. The line debuts with a $19.99 lotion and $35.99 serum.

  • Dewsy isn’t alone in treating body skin like face skin. Jones Road Beauty launched a five-product ceramide-enriched Body Collection in January 2026; Amika expanded from hair into body care at Sephora earlier this year; NYX Professional Makeup launched a body care line in April 2026; and Tower 28 has also been expanding beyond facial products into body care with its SOS Rescue + Relief Body Wash.

• Luxe laundry heats up. Lindsey Boyd, founder of The Laundress (acquired by Unilever in 2019), is back in the luxury laundry game. She just launched Lindry Lab, a self-funded luxe laundry brand with 17 SKUs—including six detergents at $45 for 32 ounces, oh my—built around clean ingredients, functional fragrance (a term we are hearing a lot more of), and sustainable packaging.

  • The movement in the laundry care space is nothing short of impressive. Laundry Sauce just hit 300 Target stores in March, their first national retail break after years of success on DTC. Mozi Wash has built a whole brand on TikTok with cologne-inspired scents and metal bottles. DedCool became Sephora’s first-ever laundry SKU back in 2022 and is still the only standalone laundry brand on those shelves. Snif has a full laundry collection translating its fine fragrances into detergents and scent boosters.

    

  • And there are so many converging trends fueling this: fragrance is booming, affordable luxury, skincare-level ingredient scrutiny, and the home as self-expression. We’ll do a full deep dive on this soon.

• Speaking of functional fragrance. Maesa, a beauty incubator, has launched String Theory, a new functional fragrance brand built around Phero-Mimetic™ Technology—a pheromone-mimicking formula designed to “enhance confidence and attraction.”

  • The Nue Co. has been working this exact territory for years—its Functional Fragrance line includes Us Pheromone+, which leans on the same pheromone-mimicking premise alongside other “sensory supplement” SKUs marketed for stress, focus, and mood. String Theory is entering a category Nue Co. effectively built.

  • It’s also the natural extension of a broader pattern: every consumer category eventually gets the functional treatment. Soda did it, snacks did it, beauty did it… fragrance was always next, and pheromones—an ingredient story with built-in mythology and zero on-pack dose-checking—are an especially clean fit for the playbook.

• TikTok made them do it. Thayers launched a Hydrating Milky Mist after creators Nina Pool and Shelby Ann Bell went viral DIY-ing a sprayable version of the brand’s existing milky toner. The product quickly became Amazon’s No. 1 new beauty release within 24 hours of its product page going live.

  

  • Trend-spotting is one thing, but what was really cool here was how Thayers handled the creators behind the trend. Instead of just formulating the spray on its own, Thayers brought the two creators on as brand consultants, flew them in to the brand’s lab, and shot the campaign content with them. Crediting and compensating creators for their IP is rare, and a smart (and ethical!!) differentiator.

  • This is also a reminder: the most useful product research is happening in public!! Creators DIY-ing solutions to gaps in your line are essentially running free focus groups; the brands paying attention can compress R&D cycles dramatically. The Hydrating Milky Mist went from a viral DIY to Amazon’s No. 1 new beauty release—that’s not a product development timeline most legacy beauty brands could match without this kind of input.

• Acne care has never looked this good. Experiment launched Continuum, a daily multi-clarifying breakout treatment formulated with dermatologist Angelo Landriscina, MD, FAAD, featuring encapsulated salicylic acid and azelaic acid.

eCommerce

• Live shopping just got serious. Whatnot, the livestream shopping app, launched a direct Shopify integration, letting merchants sync products, inventory, and orders automatically to its platform. Beta users—around 30 businesses—generated more than $10 million in sales across nearly 20 categories in the past year.

  • With this partnership, live shopping is showing no signs of slowing down. It’s already reached an estimated $22 billion in sales across North America and Europe, with Whatnot alone commanding nearly 60% of that market share. On Whatnot alone sellers drove $8 billion in live sales (globally) in 2025 2x from the year prior.

Retail

• Ulta and Sephora are on notice. Because Walmart is expanding its dedicated “Beauty Expert” store associate role to 425 U.S. locations by year-end, paired with a Beauty 2.0 redesign that moves the category to the front of the store.

  • This is yet another signal that Walmart is taking the store experience more seriously—and appealing to more than just the “budget-conscious” shopper.

  • The retailer is staying toe-to-toe with its mass competitor, Target, which recently announced its own deeper focus on beauty with an in-store “Beauty Studio” featuring prestige beauty brands.

Funding news

• The Casamigos boys are back, this time sober. Crazy Mountain, a non-alcoholic beer brand co-founded by George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman, raised $15 million in a Series Seed led by CAVU Consumer Partners, with participation from Coatue and Discovery Land Company.

  • With this fresh powder, alongside the team that built and sold Casamigos, and the former CEO of New Belgium, Steve Fechheimer, running the whole operation, this brand is poised for some significant growth over the coming years. And CAVU knows how to scale consumer brands—they backed Poppi, Bai, ONE Brands, and Vital Proteins, among many others.

  • But the competition is very real and coming from every direction.

    • Athletic Brewing built this category (and still owns it), it’s currently the best-selling NA craft beer brand in the U.S. with 52% market share and wide national distribution.

    • Celebrity brands are multiplying: Tom Holland’s BERO just secured PE backing at a valuation over $100 million. Easy Does It, co-founded by Erik Ellington—an influential skateboarder—just launched a Mexican lager. Charlie Sheen launched Wild AF Brewing in early 2026, and John Mulaney owns Years NA Beer as of October ‘25.

    • And the legacy brewers aren’t sitting out either: Coors just launched its first NA beer, and Guinness, Blue Moon, Heineken, Peroni, Stella Artois, Samuel Adams, and Corona all have NA options on shelf.

• A 76er bets on clear protein + hydration. Wet Hydration raised $10M with NBA star Paul George joining as investor and brand partner, bringing total funding to $18M. The brand sells protein waters and electrolyte waters in slim cans, currently at Vitamin Shoppe and Walgreens.

  • (Side note: Absolutely wild that there are two brands in the hydration space called Wet Hydration and DryWater…)

• Celebrity tequila will never die. Sazerac invested in Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila for an undisclosed sum, becoming the brand’s exclusive US sales and distribution partner.

  • They’re not the only celebrity tequila brand making moves. Dos Hombres just launched tequila and also raised $15M, Kevin Hart’s Gran Coramino Tequila is one of the fastest growing tequila brands selling 3.6 million bottles and generated $85 million in total sales in 2025, and the Rock’s Teremana Tequila is still seeing continued growth.

  • Tequila in general is also still growing, albeit slower than in previous years. While overall spirits sales are down, Tequila keeps rising. US spirit volumes fell to 1.4% to just under 60.4 million cases in 2025, with sales down 2.8% at $13.21 billion. Meanwhile, tequila volumes grew 2.2% leading to a 0.2% increase in sales to $2.51 billion.

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With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickups:

So this week I don’t have anything specific to share…because I’m currently at my friend’s bachelor party just outside of Austin!!

But, of course, I couldn’t come empty handed. I am the snack guy after all. I decided to test out a new service called Onbrand (*not sponsored*)

Basically Onbrand is a two-sided platform that matches hosts with brands. Hosting a bachelor party, a baby shower, a run club, a corporate offsite, a sorority rush, a hotel pop-up? All you do is build a profile and apply to the brands you want and products will ship right to you. This is especially a great opportunity for brands. You get product into real-life moments with target customers. And you can get some incredible UGC content that feels organic, because it is.

For 15 guys eating and drinking through four days on the lake, I think we landed a pretty perfect lineup:

• Grüns for some semblance of nutrition between beers

• Ryse (Frosted Lemonade and Root Beer) for the morning fuel

• Dude Wipes, need i say more??

• Taste Salud (fruit punch Jarritos collab) so we can actually make it to day four

• Slate Milk (Vanilla Ultra Protein Shake and Classic Chocolate shake) to keep us satiated and our muscles strong

Other things we got that brands didn’t send

• Garage Beer Lime: I had to see what Jason and Travis Kelce were up to. (The boys liked it a lot)

  • FUN BRAND FACT: Garage Beer is currently Ohio’s largest craft brewery by volume and ranked the 12th largest nationwide!!

    

• A metric ton of Diet Coke: nothing like a fridge cig!!

• Lots of snacks: Kettle chips from HEB, Doritos, Hint of Lime tortilla chips, Like Air popcorn (Cinnamon roll), pretzels, a big ass bag of popcorn

• Candy! Jolly rancher chews (the best candy ever) and a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids.

• Tteok Bokki from bibigo. AN INCREDIBLE LATE NIGHT SNACK

• Nowadays bottle (10mg), because not everything can be beer.

• And like +/- 10 cases of beer….sorry mom

  

Jenna’s Pickup:

Esprizio - Tangerine Chocolate

Editor’s note: Please mentally prepare for a stark transition from bachelor party shenanigans to a boujee bev described haughtily :) - J

There has been SO much innovation in the ready-to-drink coffee space lately, and I am so here for it. Newer brands have kicked off a wave of craft, culturally-inspired coffee bevs in RTD formats—like Sang Coffee and Nguyen Coffee (Vietnamese), Cafe Bustelo (Latin American), and Yeri Coffee (Indian). These brands are spanning beyond coffee origin, introducing entirely new flavors and mouthfeels, whether that’s a creamy rich deliverable (Sang and Nguyen) or a fruity, light flavor (Yeri’s Coffee Shandy), or even Nate’s recent Weekly Pickup, Esspo’s espresso soda. Are we officially in the fifth wave of coffee yet?

This week, I tried a brand-new ready-to-drink coffee innovation that got me extra excited about this category. It blends Italian flavors and rituals (espresso in the morning, spritzes in the afternoon) into a gorgeous ready-to-drink that will easily earn a spot in my summer coffee rotation.

• Quick Facts: Sparkling espresso spritz made with organic ingredients, real fruit, and fair-trade coffee.

• Reasons to love:

  • Tastes like vacation. I often find myself craving an afternoon “treat” coffee, something a little sweet with a kick of caffeine. But my go-to sweet, creamy latte just doesn’t quite suit a warm afternoon; it feels too heavy, too rich for a sunny day. Esprizio offers a new, incredibly refreshing way to drink coffee that still feels like a treat. The tangerine chocolate flavor blends rich espresso with subtle notes of smooth chocolate and pronounced, zippy tangerine—all emphasized with light carbonation for that summery, Italian-inspired “spritz” effect. It’s such a perfect summer bev, I swear it tastes like vacation.

  • Barista-quality. Other ready-to-drink coffees or at-home coffee options often feel like a second-best option, a budget replacement for the better, barista-made alternative. But Esprizio feels luxurious—from its classy, gorgeous packaging to the thoughtful ingredients.

Where to buy: Online

Because we spent the week on our ~ offsite ~ in Austin, we paused on recording The Curious Consumer for a week! Excited to come back next week re-energized with a fun interview. In the meantime, enjoy our last episode.

We sat down with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of Suri (short for Sustainable Rituals)—the UK-based electric toothbrush brand that caught Gwyneth Paltrow’s eye organically before landing in Erewhon, and now Target stores nationwide. (Check out our piece on UK brands entering the US!)

We also covered the week’s biggest CPG news—new updates to the THC regulatory saga, Beyond Meat’s pivot into beverage, Gatorade’s biggest refresh in 60 years, and the Finnish Long Drink’s $325M acquisition by the makers of White Claw. Let’s get into it! Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

Reporting live from a hot and humid day in Austin, Texas! 🤠 YEEHAW.

We’re so excited to have our (cowboy) boots on the ground for a few days in one of the coolest CPG cities. While we’re here, we’ll be hosting an event with our Austin community (in partnership with our friends at JPMorgan!) and spending some dedicated time planning the future of Express Checkout.

Yea, you read that right: we’re on a ~ company offsite ~ right now, which we’re not entirely sure you’re allowed to say as a two-person team, but we’re leaning in nonetheless.

As we dig into our larger strategy, we’d love to hear from YOU 🫵: if you have any feedback on our recent content (this newsletter, our socials, or The Curious Consumer podcast), ideas for future content/events/activations, or just want to tell Nate he looks pretty in his most recent TikTok, reply directly to this email.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• BTS, the K-Pop legends and CPG collaborators? Apparently so! Korean F&B conglomerates Paldo and hy launched ARIH, a Western-Korean fusion F&B brand developed “inspired by” boy band BTS, exclusively at Walmart US. The line includes stir-fried noodles in 7 flavors, called “Modern Noodles” and “postbiotic” energy drinks and “dual biotic” sodas (what a bizarre combination of products?!)

  • And there so many SKUs. The noodles are launching in a total of 7 flavors and 14 SKUs (7 pouch types and 7 cup types), the postbiotic energy drinks comes in 7 flavors, and the “Dual Biotic Soda” also comes in 7 flavors.

  • There’s such a disconnect here. If the brand is supposed to be “inspired by BTS,” why does it feel like a soulless private-label attempt at staying relevant in the growing—and wildly separate—modern soda + instant noodle categories? Beyond Korean-inspired flavors, there is absolutely zero connection between BTS and these product categories—let alone technical-sounding, wellnessy callouts like “dual biotic.”

  • We’ve seen many celebrity-backed brands succeed, but there’s a common thread: the celebrity’s personal brand needs to match the ethos of the products. Otherwise, it reads as glorified merch (see our additional thoughts on building the perfect celebrity bran from a few months ago).

• Pickles will never die. Because Grillo’s, the king of pickle collabs, partnered with Burt’s Bees to launch a limited-edition lip balm called Fresh Cucumber Dill in Walmarts nationwide.

  

  • Add this to the list of “collabs that don’t need to exist.” While we love a fun, gimmicky collab positioned for virality, it often feels like just that—an attempt to get people talking, not to create a genuinely innovative, usable product. We’ve especially seen this kind of clickbait collaboration (do I coin that?!) come from bigger brands like Velveeta, or in this case, Burt’s Bees. It’s cool to see that the BigCo brands are realizing they can’t create their own clout—it needs to come from a buzzy emerging brand—but at what point are brands just pushing out products for the sake of relevancy, and not true innovation? - Jenna

  • I, however, love pickles. KEEP EM COMING, BABY. - Nate

• Hydrate or diedrate, friends. Capri Sun launched Hydrate, an electrolyte drink made specifically for kids, with 50% less sugar than leading sports drinks and no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives, rolling out to Walmart, Target, and Amazon.

  • They’re not the only ones moving into kids functional hydration. Hiya Health and Cure Hydration launched kids electrolyte drink mixes in 2025. And Kinderlyte has been in the kids oral electrolyte solution space since 2019, founded on the argument that existing OES products were packed with artificial sweeteners and dyes. We covered the broader kids wellness wave—from snacks to supplements to beverages—in our February newsletter.

• THC what?! Stir The Pot, a new cannabis brand, launched a hemp-derived THC-infused coffee syrup in 10 mg sachets, co-founded by former Jones Soda COO Eric Chastain and Grammy winner Kevin Smith, with initial rollout in Texas, Illinois, and Florida.

  • The cannabis market, despite some potential tumultuous headwinds (which we talked about last week), is truly blossoming. We’re seeing brands move beyond the seltzer can and into occasion-specific formats designed to attach to existing daily rituals. BRĒZ launched a cannabis and mushroom-infused spirit built for mixing and social occasions; Cann moved upmarket with a aperitif format; and Clebby’s launched hemp-derived cannabis baking mixes.

  • But what’s most interesting about this launch is how nonchalantly it communicates the new positioning of THC—it’s now a wellness ingredient, intended to be part of consumer’s everyday routine (in this case, coffee). While THC coffee syrup may sound insane at first blush, it’s a strategy that we’ve seen before: Stir The Pot isn’t asking consumers to adopt a new consumption habit, it’s asking them to include THC in an existing routine—similar to how companies like Ryze and Everyday Dose popularized adaptogenic mushrooms in coffee. It all feels part of a larger wellness trend of “calm focus” (see: rise of L-theanine, nootropics, “adderall alternatives,” etc).

eCommerce

• Beauty goes agentic, on Google’s turf. Ulta Beauty announced a partnership with Google to make its assortment shoppable inside AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app via Universal Commerce Protocol, while also launching Ulta AI, a Gemini-powered on-site shopping assistant built on Gemini Enterprise.

  • While other retailers go for ChatGPT, Ulta is not like the other girls. Makes sense, especially after Sephora launched an app within ChatGPT. But what’s especially smart about going for Gemini—though it may not be as popular of a chatbot as ChatGPT—is that Gemini also feeds the answers for “AI Mode” on Google Search. So if a shopper googles “best moisturizer,” the AI Mode will likely populate with a pick from Ulta.

Retail

• The OG home shopping experience is coming to an end. QVC Group has announced a prepackaged Chapter 11 restructuring that will cut its debt from $6.6 billion to $1.3 billion. Revenue fell 8% to $8.3 billion in 2025 as net losses topped $2.1 billion.

  • This was a long-time coming. When your core channel is cable, 2026 is a tough time to stay relevant. Add in ecomm and algorithm-driven discovery platforms, and you have a brutal recipe for a platform that refuses to adapt its long-form segments.

  • While “home shopping” may be over, live shopping is just getting started. As of January, the live shopping market reached an estimated $22 billion across North America and Europe, driven largely by platforms like WhatNot.

• Clean-label pressure reaches the discount aisle. ALDI announced it will eliminate 44 more ingredients from its private label assortment by December 2027, expanding its restricted list from 13 to 57 (!!!)—including BHA, BHT, and titanium dioxide.

  • Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have long promoted their long lists of “banned” ingredients in private-label products, and it’s interesting to see mass-market and budget retailers mimic this strategy. This is part of a much larger movement we’ve been seeing from affordable retailers as they try to meet broader demand for “clean” ingredients and have their private label products compete with better-for-you emerging brands.

    • At the end of last year, Walmart announced its new move to eliminate synthetic dyes and an additional 30 ingredients (certain preservatives, artificial sweeteners and fat substitutes) from its private brand food products.

  • The question that should arise from these announcements is: what are they replacing these ingredients with? Many now-banned ingredients, though they may be harmful in large quantities and certainly sound harmful, have been heavily tested in specific quantities for food products. When manufacturers go to replace them, they may be doing so with ingredients that haven’t been as studied. Just look at what happened when “BPA-free” went viral and brands all started replacing BPA with substitutes that were often *worse.*

• The three musketeers: private-label, protein, and fiber. Meijer, Midwest-based retailer with over 500 supercenters, is launching 300+ new private-label products targeting fiber and protein trends.

  

  • Shocker! Meijer is joining retailers like Kroger, which rolled out 80+ products in its Simple Truth Protein line last September, and ShopRite (Wakefern), which launched a “GLP-1 Wellness Starter Kit” in February.

  • While Meijer’s new products don’t explicitly name GLP-1 shoppers, at this point, the broader “fiber + protein trend” is essentially code for “GLP-1 friendly.”

• Never! Fast! Enough!!!! Sam’s Club launched an enhanced Express delivery tier, promising checkout-to-doorstep in an hour or less across 600+ clubs—no minimum purchase, same in-club pricing. Since the April 2 rollout, ~65,000 orders have been fulfilled at an average of 55 minutes.

  • It seems like every retailer is finding ways to get product → hands ever-faster. Whether its Walmart scaling drone delivery or Uber Direct bringing one-hour local delivery to Shopify merchants, it seems that the only way to stay competitive as a retailer or ecomm storefront is to deliver products near-instantly.

Funding news

• The anti-Gatorade just got funded. Leisure Hydration closed an oversubscribed Series A led by Midnight Venture Partners, with Asahi Group and Nutrabolt CEO Doss Cunningham among backers. The functional hydration brand—up 1,300% in revenue over two years— expanding to Target, Whole Foods, and HEB in 2026.

  • Leisure was wayyyyy ahead of the game. Last week, Gatorade announced its biggest brand refresh in 60 years—explicitly pivoting toward non-athletes. Leisure has been building for that consumer since its founding in 2022.

  • We wrote about the electrolyte category more broadly last summer, but the big takeaway is that plenty of other brands have been ahead of this shift, too:

    • Flerish Hydration, backed by Ja’Marr Chase as an equity partner, leads with l-theanine, B vitamins, and zinc rather than a sports formula; Pricklee rebranded from cactus water to “natural hydration drink” and raised $2M earlier in 2026; Coco5, backed by Devin Booker and Charles Barkley, closed $10M led by Loop Capital to push into wellness and hospitality channels beyond sports retail.

    • Meanwhile, DryWater, the real-fruit electrolyte powder brand founded in 2023, is already pushing $100M in annual sales and is sold across 22,000 doors nationwide including at Walmart—one of the fastest ramp ups the category has seen. Liquid IV, now under Unilever, still dominates the packet format. Cure has built a base around oral rehydration science. And Cadence, a UK-born electrolyte brand, just launched at both Walmart and Target with RTD drinks and sachets.

    • And there are so many more emerging hydration brands out there: Buoy, Corpse Reviver, DripDrop, Waterboy, Promix, Taste Salud…deep breath…Instant Hydration, Magna, Saps, LMNT, Prime, HY.Q, GoodOnya, Sparklinuts, Farmwell, Unwell, Rally (pickle juice shots) all the different coconut water brands, and even Plant People has an electrolyte gummy.

  • All this to say, plain water is dead fam.

• Cold. hard. ice cream cash. Frozen One raised a $2 million seed round led by Supernatural Ventures and The Angel Group, with Tonic Ventures and Lucinda Capital also participating. The Austin-based high-protein, low-sugar ice cream brand will use the funding for retail expansion and manufacturing scale.

  

  • If you have eyes, you know protein ice creams are everywhere. Swoop launched at Target nationwide earlier this year with a protein-first, low-calorie pint; Protein Pints closed a $2M debt round and landed in 2,150 Kroger stores; and brands like Sweet Gains, Smearcase, Natty, and Rivo have all been building in the same lane and seeing varying levels of success. And, according to a literal truck sighting at Expo West, soon, we’ll see David Protein launch its own high-protein ice cream to join the club.

  • The difference between these protein ice creams and the OG “diet ice cream” trend (see: Halo Top)? This new wave of brands is actually nailing flavor and texture. And instead of focusing on super-low-calorie or dairy-free formulations, these brands are mostly emphasizing what they’re adding (protein).

• Laird Superfood is on a superfoods shopping spree. Laird Superfood acquired Terrasoul Superfoods for $48M cash—the third acquisition in its Nexus-backed platform build. Terrasoul posted ~$65.8M in net sales in 2025, with a vertically integrated supply chain and strong e-commerce positioning.

  • Jason Vieth, CEO of Laird Superfood, said this is “a significant step forward in our mission to build the premier platform in superfoods and functional nutrition.” Key word: platform. Superfoods/adaptogens as a product’s core selling point has largely been fazed out—but Laird is making a bet on the superfood supply chain as a whole.

• The new wave of makeup brands is here. Westman Atelier, a luxury makeup brand launched by celeb makeup artist Gucci Westman, raised $15 million from existing backers Prelude Growth Partners and Imaginary Ventures—bringing total funding to ~$52 million—as the ~$100M-revenue brand, ranked third-fastest-growing makeup brand by creator impact, positions itself for a likely strategic exit.

  • Prelude and Imaginary have both been deploying aggressively across beauty. Imaginary recently backed Alix Earle’s Reale Actives, Mikayla Nogueira’s POV Beauty, Sweet Chemistry, and Lore (which raised $5.5 million in 2025). Prelude led KilgourMD’s Series A in March 2026, put $20 million into OneSkin last year, and closed its third fund at $600 million in 2025, more than double its $250 million second fund.

  • Both firms are doubling down on Westman Atelier at a moment when the makeup M&A market is gridlocked. And that the exit queue is long and slow-moving: according to Beauty Independent, Makeup by Mario, Merit, Saie, Rare Beauty, Fenty Beauty, Kosas, Victoria Beckham Beauty, and One/Size by Patrick Starrr have all been tracked as potential deals.

  • More broadly, there’s been some big moves in beauty M&A. Henkel agreed to acquire Olaplex for $1.4 billion in March 2026 (55% premium to its trading price) and Estée Lauder and Puig confirmed they are in merger talks for a combined entity valued at more than $40 billion. And last year, e.l.f. Beauty acquires Rhode (Hailey Bieber’s brand) for ~$1 billion.

• David Dobrik’s chips go global. WAVERS BY DOUGHBRIK’S, the chip brand co-founded by YouTuber David Dobrik and Veggie Straws creator Jerry Bello, announced a strategic partnership with Capital Q® Ventures to fund global expansion. It also reformulated to non-GMO, gluten-free ingredients and avocado oil, like every other chip brand in 2026.

  • Though he’s a sometimes controversial figure, David Dobrik has maintained his relevance as an influencer, recently named Creator of the Year at the 2026 Snapchat Awards. Makes sense that Capital Q Ventures would see the potential for global scale, but it feels a smidge ambitious for a brand that has yet to gain brand recognition at a national scale.

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We celebrated 4/20 (IYKYK) with an ode to some of our favorite CPG trends right now: the *budding* hemp-derived THC category, dates in everything, and the new age of flavor-packed sauces + dips.

It was insane to fill a room—the gorgeous Air office, that is (shoutout Air)—with ~100 CPG founders, investors, industry partners + friends from our amazing NYC community.

Thank you immensely to our partners Glimpse for making this possible, and NOWADAYS for being our featured beverage partner (and introducing its brand-new low-THC drinks line), and to the iconic list of brands who all shared their innovative, delicious, occasionally ~functional 🍃~ products for the occasion:

• THC Trend: Dad Grass, Cann, Mary & Jane, The High Confectionary, Clebby’s

• Dates Trend: Harken Sweets, Gato Dates, datefix

• Dips & Sauces Trend: Cotto, BEZI, Little Sesame, Tursh, BESTO®, Maazah

• …and all of the brands that we enjoyed alongside our trends: Freestyle Snacks, Gotcha Focaccia, S'NOODS, Posana, , Zesty Z - Fiber Pita Chips, Ancient Crunch, Goldilocks, Curious Elixirs, Bjorn Qorn

Perhaps most importantly, there was the brain behind the whole aesthetic experience (AKA our fabulous event planner): Erica Bonelli, founder of Philo Studios! Philo is a full service event planning, design and production studio that creates beautiful and meaningful activations for CPG & tech businesses. She is an absolute creative genius, and we cannot wait to work with her again on our quarterly event series!

We cannot wait to turn this into a quarterly event, featuring our favorite CPG trends of each season. If you want to partner on the next one, feel free to reach out!

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Good Greed Candy

I’ve said this many many many times before. I LOVE CANDY. I honestly might have candy almost everyday. Please don’t tell my dentist. And guess what? It makes me happy, and happy people are healthy. So there’s some quick maths for you. But other than loving candy, I love discovering new candy brands. And my god are there so many new ones. One of those new entrants to the space is Good Greed. Yes they are another low sugar better-for-you candy brand, but they have a little trick up their sleeve that I love. Let’s get into it 😉

• Quick Facts: A better-for-you candy brand specializing in gut-friendly, low-sugar gummies. Founded by university friends Alana, Carolyn, and Sabrina, Good Greed was developed alongside a registered dietitian.

• Reasons to love:

  • My stomach is NOT in knots. Good Greed skips the ingredients that typically mess with your gut— think sugar alcohols like erythritol, allulose, IMO, and the massive doses of prebiotic fiber most “healthy” candies lean on to hit a low-sugar callout.

  • A well-rounded candy. Flavor-wise, they’re having fun here. Peach is the more conventional pick, but cherry is where it gets interesting. I really think that not enough brands are leaning into cherry, and that’s a shame—it’s tart, sweet, and sour all at once. Each gummy is also made with real cherry or peach purée, so the flavors actually taste like the fruit they’re named after. And because the sugar load is lower, you skip the blood sugar spike-and-crash that comes with a bag of conventional gummies.

  • Built with an actual expert. There are a lot of brands out there claiming to be better-for-you, or at the very least just a better and “healthier” product. But you don’t often see one actually go out of its way to verify that, to formulate the product from the start with experts to make it better. Good Greed partnered with Abbey Sharp, one of North America’s top dietitians, to formulate the product—specifically to avoid the “gut wreck” most better-for-you candies cause. If you’re going to slap health claims on a package, might as well actually bring in the experts. More brands should really be doing this, especially as consumers increasingly want to know the claims they’re seeing are coming from a legit place.

Where to buy: Available Online and at select stores in NYC

Jenna’s Pickup:

Posana Mango Coconut Turmeric Protein Bar

🚨New (actually good) protein bar alert!🚨

I don’t need to be the one to tell you: There are SO many protein bars out there. By numbers alone, the category appears saturated—but the reality is, there’s still a lot of room for innovation. If you’ve been trying to sneak more protein into your diet (how unique and novel!), you know: a lot of protein bars kind of suck. They either A) taste like a candy bar but are hiiiighly processed and full of tummy-disrupting ingredients, or B) are “natural,” but dry, chalky, loaded with sugar, and/or taste like cardboard smattered with dusty chocolate chips.

But Posana, which was one of the many wonderful brands that sampled at our IN SEASON event, has presented a new protein bar that fits into the very exclusive Category C (one that Samsara Nutrition, an Expo West fave, also belongs to).

• Quick Facts: Plant-based protein bar featuring 20g protein, 9g fiber, and 0g sugar in a delightfully fruit-forward flavor. Posana is the brainchild of Adi, a current Nutrition student at UC Berkeley who’s passionate about flavor and nutrition in equal parts (and it shows).

• Reasons to love:

  • The FLAVOR. I’m so tired of seeing a protein bar aisle filled with “cookie dough” and “peanut butter chocolate.” In 2026, most other grocery store aisles feature a breadth of flavors… while protein bars have stayed relatively uninventive on the flavor front. A tropical, fruity flavor might seem blasphemous next to artificial “birthday cake” flavoring—but it is utterly delicious. The Mango Coconut flavor is bright, summery, and tastes like real food (because it is), and the almond butter base and hint of vanilla offer a satisfying pastry-like sweetness.

  • Super simple ingredients. The base is Posana’s plant-based protein blend—made of pea, rice, and almond protein powders—almond butter and chicory root fiber. It’s sweetened with allulose and stevia leaf extract, and flavored with real mango powder, shredded coconut, vanilla, and turmeric!

  • Texture is spot on. While other protein bars unnaturally mimic candy bars or require a jaw workout to chew, these are soft and chewy, almost like a soft-baked cookie. Plus, they’re dotted with pea protein crisps and real shredded coconut for textural variety.

Where to buy: eatposana.com

This week, we sat down with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of Suri (short for Sustainable Rituals)—the UK-based electric toothbrush brand that caught Gwyneth Paltrow’s eye organically before landing in Erewhon, and now Target stores nationwide. (Check out our piece on UK brands entering the US!)

We also covered the week’s biggest CPG news—new updates to the THC regulatory saga, Beyond Meat’s pivot into beverage, Gatorade’s biggest refresh in 60 years, and the Finnish Long Drink’s $325M acquisition by the makers of White Claw. Let’s get into it! Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

We also cover the week's biggest CPG news—new updates to the THC regulatory saga, Beyond Meat's pivot into beverage, Gatorade's biggest refresh in 60 years, and the Finnish Long Drink's $325M acquisition by the makers of White Claw. Let's get into it!

The breakdown:

0:00 Interview with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of SURI
14:30 Recap on our 4/20 event!
18:01 Updates on the THC ban + new proposed regulation
28:03 Beyond Meat’s pivot into… protein soda?
32:20 Gatorade’s newest brand refresh
35:40 Why White Claw owners are betting on The Finnish Long Drink

Check out our full interview with Long Drink co-founder Evan Burns here:

https://www.expresscheckout.co/p/the-best-drink-youve-never-heard

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It’s 4/20 🍃, and for those who partake, this 4/20 looks a whole lot different than those of Aprils past. Instead of securing the (literal) bag(gie) from a shady smoke shop or sketchy neighbor, THC enjoyers can grab their luxe, wellness-coded hemp-derived goods from entirely legitimate and legal sites and brick-and-mortar stores—from Target (all locations in Minnesota) to Total Wine and even Edibles.com’s new flagship THC retail store in Atlanta.

Evidently, there’s been a lot of movement in the THC space over the past few years—it’s now a $28 billion industry with over 300,000 jobs. The industry has grown up a lot in the past few years. And this was all (largely) possible thanks to something called the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized “hemp” defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight.

• Important caveat: the law was designed to support hemp farming, not to create a market for products that get you high. But (conveniently), it only specified delta-9 THC and measured concentration by dry weight rather than by serving, which meant a 12-ounce beverage could legally contain around 10mg of delta-9 THC—a fully psychoactive dose—and still qualify as “hemp.” The perfect gray zone for an entire market to blossom.

But, as of this 4/20, hemp-derived cannabis is seven months away from being federally illegal.

Wait… what’s going on? Last November, Trump signed a spending bill to end the government shutdown—and it included a sneaky provision effectively banning most hemp-derived THC products.

• This new law caps products at 0.4mg of total THC per entire container (for context: a 1mg single gummy is considered a “microdose”). It’s set to go into effect this November, and if it does, it would eliminate roughly 95% of existing hemp products.

• To be clear, it wasn’t standalone legislation—it was a rider on a must-pass funding bill. And it was championed by Mitch McConnell, the same senator who authored the 2018 Farm Bill (and apparently regrets it… 🙃).

  For the past five months, the industry has been operating business as usual in hopes that this legislation will somehow… disappear. New brands are still launching, existing brands are expanding distribution, and retailers are leaning in despite legislative uncertainty. Why? Because the consumer data says they should:

• Nearly 40% of current alcohol drinkers also consume cannabis, CBD, or THC, and over 60% say it directly impacts how often they drink. Meanwhile, alcohol sales declined across every category in 2025: beer and cider down 3.3%, spirits down 4.1%, wine down 6.1%.

• Target’s THC pilot in Minnesota came after several quarters of flat or declining same-store sales—THC gives them a way to drive foot traffic in a category growing double digits while alcohol shrinks.

• Total Wine is stocking THC seltzers at over 100 locations across nine states, and the THC beverage market exceeded $1 billion in national sales last year.

After months of turning a blind eye to the legislative reality, there’s suddenly a beacon of hope. Last week, there Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Joni Ernst (R-IA) introduced the Hemp Safety Enforcement Act Marijuana Moment—a bipartisan bill that lets states opt out of the federal ban as long as they enforce age limits and ban synthetic cannabinoids. The strategy is to attach it to the 2026 Farm Bill.

For brands, it’s a lifeline… but a complicated one. Ben Starmer, founder of Dad Grass, sees both the opportunity and the operational reality:

“It’s encouraging to see movement toward a more defined regulatory path for hemp-derived products. Giving states flexibility is an important step and reflects how much this category has already evolved.

At the same time, the system needs to work in practice. The fastest-growing channels for us—grocery, convenience, and liquor—rely on national infrastructure like banking, payments, and multi-state distribution. Even if a state allows these products, the ancillary systems that make modern retail work—banking and payment processing—operate at a national level and tend to follow federal rules. Large retailers depend on those systems, so when they don’t align, it becomes much harder to actually sell and scale the product, even where it’s legal.”

• That’s the real challenge. A state-by-state patchwork doesn’t just mean 50 different compliance environments—it means the infrastructure that enables modern retail operates under federal rules that could make these products effectively unsellable, even where they’re legal.

Looking ahead: Whether the shelves at Target and Total Wine stay stocked past November comes down to what happens in Congress over the next seven months. What’s already clear is that consumer demand is real, retail validation is real, and the cultural shift from “weed” to wellness is probably irreversible—regardless of what the law says.

As Starmer puts it: “Net-net, this is progress, and progress over perfection. We’re optimistic about where things are heading—but unlocking the full potential of the category will require better alignment between state-level frameworks and the broader systems that enable scale.”

Happy 4/20. We’re celebrating tonight at In Season, Express Checkout’s new quarterly event spotlighting three trends shaping CPG (spoiler: THC is one of them for Spring—and we’ll be featuring brands like Dad Grass, The High Confectionary, Clebby’s, Mary & Jane, and more).

Celebrate responsibly 🫡

CPG & Consumer Goods

• The blue box is sweating. Kraft Mac & Cheese is rolling out its new “Restaurant Edition,” a supposed elevatedline featuring three flavors: Parmesan Pesto, Romano Cacio e Pepe, and Monterey Jack Caramelized Onion.

  • Kraft is starting to lose the boxed mac and cheese game it invented back in 1937. According to the WSJ, buzzy upstarts like Goodles and supermarket private-label knockoffs are eating into Kraft’s market share. When Goodles first hit shelves in 2022, Kraft wasn’t especially worried. Now, Goodles controls 6% of the mac and cheese market, is driving 79% of the category’s total growth, and sells 3 boxes every second. With this new premium line and Kraft’s introduction of a protein line, PowerMac, the other week, it looks like Kraft is desperately attempting to differentiate and reclaim market share.

• From fake burgers to fizzy protein water. Beyond Meat, now rebranded as simply Beyond, officially launched its new line of sparkling plant protein drinks, Beyond Immerse, into NYC retail through a distribution deal with Big Geyser. Three flavors (cherry-berry, peach-mango, strawberry-lemonade) are hitting 26,000+ outlets this summer, packing 10–20g of protein and 7g of fiber per can.

  • Just last month, the company dropped “Meat” from its name entirely, rebranding to Beyond The Plant Protein Co—its response to US retail sales of plant-based meat plummeting 26% over the last two years. Beyond’s revenue dropped 14% in the first nine months of 2025, its stock has been trading well below $1, and it had to publicly deny bankruptcy rumors after getting a Nasdaq delisting warning. CEO Ethan Brown is betting that if consumers won’t eat the burgers, maybe they’ll at least drink the protein, riding the GLP-1 and “fibermaxxing” trends. A protein bar is also set to come this summer.

  • I had a chance to try this at Expo West…these were sadly not good at all 😳 - Nate

• Gatorade without the Gatorade colors? PepsiCo is giving Gatorade its biggest refresh in 60 years…removing artificial dyes from its top flavors (Fruit Punch, Lemon Lime, Orange), launching a new “Advanced Hydration System” portfolio, and rolling out its highest-electrolyte RTD offering yet called Gatorlyte Longer Lasting. The brand is also expanding beyond sports into everyday hydration occasions.

  

  • Gatorade’s neon colors are iconic. In many ways, they are the brand, so swapping to fruit and vegetable-derived colors while trying to keep that bold look is a tightrope walk and we’re curious to see how consumers react. But the bigger story should sound familiar. Just like Kraft in mac and cheese, Gatorade has been slowly losing market share and share of voice to upstarts that market themselves as more hydrating, more effective, and healthier. DryWater, for example, launched in early 2024 and is already pushing $100M in sales, sold nationally in Walmart. Brands like Prime, Liquid IV, and LMNT have reshaped what consumers expect from hydration. And in the every day hydration space, startups like Leisure are beginning to command market share.

• David is back in the news. David Protein is ramping up production of its alt-fat ingredient EPG by five times, aiming for $300 million in revenue by 2026. As the brand, which passed $100M in gross revenue last year, expands into national distro in Walmart and Target in Q1, this figure doesn’t feel too far off.

  • For context: Last May, David acquired Epogee, the foodtech startup that produces the patented ingredient EPG (looks and functions like fat, but doesn’t get digested). Post-acquisition, David cut off EPG supply to Epogee’s other customers, which then led to a monopoly lawsuit.

  • We’re still waiting for the brand’s official ice cream launch, which was teased at Expo West via truck ads.

• Pickle collabs are everywhere. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Grillo’s Pickles are shaking things up with a limited-edition pickle beer launching May 4th at retailers nationwide, blending the classic lager’s maltiness with Grillo’s dill-forward flavor (hmmm….).

  • Grillo’s has made a name for itself in collaborations. Grillo’s VP of Branding (and the brand’s first employee) Eddie Andre has played a big role in that: with a background as a musician and artist, he knew a thing or two about collaborations, and went all-in on them early.

  • From pickle bouquets for Valentine’s Day to a literal pickle toothpaste made in collaboration with Boka and a Pop-Up Bagels collab for the ages, this brand is so much more than a pickle company—at this point, it’s a lifestyle brand.

• Now entering: Cold brew szn. happy®, the brand co-founded by entrepreneur Craig Dubitsky (hello, eos, method products) and Robert Downey Jr, is making its debut in the refrigerated coffee category with a new 48oz Cold Brew, available first at Kroger stores.

  

  • happy’s existing portfolio includes ready-to-drink lattes and cold brews. But as consumers increasingly bring the barista experience to their homes, brands like happy have been responding by shaping innovations for at-home occasions.

  • In the crowded coffee space, happy stands out with its distinctive packaging. Love these bottles:

• Women’s hormone health is all the rage. And Amulet, a new hormonal wellness brand backed by Maria Sharapova and Gabriela Hearst, is responding with the launch of its flagship product, Daily Cycle Support gummies. This supplement, formulated with “bio-identical lactoferrin” and creatine, aims to sync with women’s hormonal rhythms.

  • Lactoferrin = a iron-binding protein found in milk and colostrum (which is found naturally in human breast milk or bovine milk) that supports the immune system.

  • Its interesting to see these ingredients promoted specifically for women’s hormone health. Colostrum (and lactoferrin) has had its moment as a gut health and immune booster, and creatine (as we covered last week) has only recently been promoted for women’s health—and not just a supplement for bodybuilders.

eCommerce

• The anti-algorithm play. ShopMy is launching Noir, an SMS-based personal shopping concierge that pairs its highest-spending shoppers with real human curators. Shoppers text in what they’re looking for, answer a few questions (budget, preferences, vibe), and get matched with a creator who hand-picks product recommendations from across ShopMy’s catalog.

  • Tiffany Lopinsky, co-founder of ShopMy, told Express Checkout that they discovered that some of its most successful creators have as few as 2,000 followers yet drive tens of thousands/month in sales by essentially operating as personal shoppers and stylists. Noir productizes the product-discovery piece of that relationship at scale— a lighter-touch version focused specifically on finding the right products—rolling out first to gold and black tier members across fashion, home, CPG, beauty, and gifts.

Retail

• The gentrification of Walmart. Walmart is refreshing its Great Value brand for the first time in over a decade, enhancing packaging across nearly 10,000 items (that is WILD) with a more “modern visual identity and improved shoppability.”

  

  • According to the brand, Great Value products can be found in nine out of 10 U.S. households and save an average family 35% per year.

  • And Walmart chose the right agency to complete this task. They leveraged Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), who recently did their corporate rebrand, to bring Great Value up to par with their other and newer private label brand Bettergoods.

  • This is clearly part of a bigger play. When Walmart launched Bettergoods in 2024—a premium, trend-forward private label line with clean ingredients and elevated packaging—we said it: they’re coming for Target. And now, with Great Value getting the full rebrand, the strategy is undeniable. Walmart is clearly repositioning their entire private label portfolio to compete with the private label juggernaut that is Target (think Good & Gather, Favorite Day, Dealworthy). Pair that with their growing assortment of non-store-brand products that skew younger and more premium, and it’s clear Walmart is gunning for a newer, potentially more affluent consumer—one who might’ve previously defaulted to a Target run.

Funding news

• The new White Claw is here. Mark Anthony Group—owner of White Claw—acquired The Finnish Long Drink, aiming to scale the ready-to-drink brand across North America. The Finnish Long Drink, co-founded by celebrities like Miles Teller, is essentially a canned cocktail inspired by Finland’s national drink, launched in the US in 2018 but with roots in the 1952 Olympics.

  • We interviewed Evan Burns, CEO and co-founder of The Finnish Long Drink, and Long Drink’s “biggest fan,” DJ Waldow, for The Curious Consumer to learn more about how Evan built this new RTD behemoth, why it’s so beloved (by people of all legal ages, as DJ emphasized), and what the future of Long Drink looks like. Check out the episode here!

Express Checkout

The best drink you've never heard of

This week, we're sharing the second episode of our interview series, Brand’s Biggest Fan—featuring Evan Burns, CEO and Co-founder of The Finnish Long Drink—and Long Drink's biggest fan, DJ…

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a month ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Express Checkout

• Give me the formuoli! Ripi, a chef-crafted frozen stuffed pasta brand, secured $2.4 million in funding to prepare for a national launch at Target, backed by the founder of Freshly.

• Body care is booming… and L’Oréal is taking notice. L’Oréal’s BOLD Venture Fund invested in body care brand Hanni, which offers a streamlined, sensorial product line.

  • Launched in May 2021, Hanni aims to simplify body care while delivering effective results—its hero products include a water-activated moisturizer and an eco-friendly razor. Less than a year after its introduction, Hanni became the first razor partner in Sephora U.S.

  • Hanni has gone viral for its beloved water-activated in-shower moisturizer (perfect for the “everything shower” trend). And other brands are taking notice: Just last week, we pointed out that Dollar Shave Club’s new women’s grooming line looks like a near copy-paste of Hanni’s products.

• The future of senior nutrition is here. Iris Ventures led a multimillion-dollar investment in Lucille, the new brand creating high-protein, high-fiber shakes aimed at older adults. The shakes are now available DTC and via assisted living facilities.

  • We wrote about Lucille in a past newsletter, talked about it on The Curious Consumer, and shared a grocery haul with founder Jess Haghani over on our IG! If you’re not yet familiar with the brand, you’re about to become as passionate about it as we are :)

• Clean x science prevails. AAVRANI, the Ayurvedic beauty and haircare brand, has been acquired by Nivora Group, a consumer private equity firm. With over $15 million raised and a launch in Sephora U.S. and Canada, AAVRANI’s founders will exit post-acquisition as Nivora plans to scale distribution in the U.S. and internationally.

  • AAVRANI built its business on a premise we’ve been talking about a lot: that consumers are looking for a combination of “clean,” natural positioning and science-backed, clinically-proven ingredients in the beauty world. In this case, AAVRANI combined Ayurvedic ingredients with modern formulation standards and supported by scientific testing.

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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Express Checkout is heading to Austin in T-10 days! We’re throwing a big ol’ CPG party (as we do) on April 28th. If you’re a brand in Austin, we’d love to have you there! And if you’re a company interested in partnering on the event, please reply to this email.

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Goldilocks Canned Cocktails

Last week I had the pleasure of demo-ing Goldilocks with founder Erin Barrett at one of the liquor stores she sells at….and I had a FREAKING BLAST. I actually helped Erin sell over 3 cases of her better-for-you canned cocktails! Getting to see the power of sampling firsthand was truly eye-opening. Watching people put down a very well-known brand to spend nearly 2x on something new—something they just tried—was what I can only describe as magical. Now I see why sampling is a business in and of itself. Erin was there for 3 hours putting herself out there, and that’s no easy feat. Add on more locations, spread nationwide, and that’s some genuinely hard work.

It was very fun to berate strangers into trying something tasty 🤷

• Quick Facts: A NYC-based canned cocktail brand crafting drinks for mindful consumption, featuring 5% ABV, only 84 calories, and less than 3g of sugar per can. They round out the formula with functional ingredients like magnesium, sodium, inulin, and prickly pear for a smoother, more balanced sip. Currently available in two flavors: Blackberry Spritz and Coffee Tini.

• Reasons to love:

  • Not sugar bombs. One of the biggest issues with popular canned cocktails is that they’re loaded with added sugar, and way more than they need. And thanks to current regulations, they don’t have to disclose it on the can. Here’s what blew my mind that Erin told me: 10 cans of Goldilocks’ Coffee Tini have less sugar than a single can of Cutwater’s espresso martini (one of the leading canned cocktails in America). For the Spritz, compared to Aperol—roughly 6 cans of Goldilocks contain less sugar than one Aperol Spritz. And Aperol doesn’t even currently report their sugar or ingredients. Most brands bury their nutrition facts deep on their websites because they don’t have to show them.

  • Flavor forward. Both of these cans nail their respective flavors. The Blackberry Spritz blends juicy blackberries, lemon, and a hint of basil and tastes like a premium cocktail you’d order on a rooftop bar or by the beach. It’s light, refreshing, and definitely the fan favorite from the people I sampled to. But my personal pick? The Coffee Tini. I’m a coffee guy—coffee ice cream (the Trader Joe’s one in particular) is my favorite flavor of ice cream, and I always gravitate toward a coffee-forward product in general. This one really delivers. It’s like a boozy cold brew with a kick of cinnamon to finish it off. And the other thing is these do NOT taste boozy. A big issue I have with a lot of canned cocktails is they taste like liquor, bottom-shelf liquor at that. Thank god it’s not the case here.

  • Cocktails, upgraded. Something Goldilocks does differently is what they add beyond the base cocktail to round out the experience. Sodium and magnesium ease up the mouthfeel, making each sip feel balanced and smooth. Inulin (naturally found in chicory root) adds a touch of creaminess and subtle sweetness without piling on more sugar. And prickly pear (a yummy cactus) contributes a little extra sweetness while rounding out the flavor profile. I haven’t seen many boozy drinks be this thoughtful in their formulation.

    • Also if you want the best prickly pear based drink (non-alc), try Pricklee!!

Where to buy: Available Online (ships to 45 states) and at select liquor stores in NYC

Jenna’s Pickup:

Things I like to pair with cabbage. (Dumpling Daughter Spicy Sweet Soy + Soom Tahini)

Sometimes, I go to write my Weekly Pickups and feel like a fraud. While I always love the items I end up picking, I often find myself wanting to pour my heart out over something boring and extremely unbranded, like frozen broccoli or purple sweet potatoes or, as of late, cabbage.

Like every Instagram user with a feed full of seasonal cooking content, I have been on something of a cabbage bender lately. My boyfriend and I have been cooking cabbage incessantly, experimenting with cabbage “steaks,” the shredded + slow-cooked variety, and something a vegan creator brilliantly named “Cabbagio e Pepe”—a recipe that consisted of an abundance of nutritional yeast and, in fact, no pepper (don’t fear: we added the pepper for authenticity’s sake).

But this is a CPG newsletter, and cabbage is not a packaged good (this is a good thing. please protect cabbage’s peace). So instead, today I will be sharing two of my favorite products to have with cabbage, which also just happen to be two of my favorite condiments, period.

Dumpling Daughter Spicy Sweet Soy

• Quick Facts: Per the name, a sweet + spicy soy sauce made for pairing with dumplings, but a truly versatile sauce for all cooking.

• Reasons to love:

  • Hits every flavor note. Sweet, spicy, and umami. Made with just brown sugar, ground red pepper, soy sauce, vegetable oil (yes, a seed oil—how scandalous!), and spices, this simple sauce delights with its underrated flavor complexity.

  • The packaging! Like another oil company we all know and love, this sauce comes in an easy-to-use squeeze bottle. It makes this product a no-brainer to reach for when cooking cabbage steaks—once the steaks are seared on one side, I drizzle this easily over the exposed side before flipping.

  • Sugar = caramelization. This sauce has a special superpower: caramelization. Because it contains brown sugar, it beautifully caramelizes whatever you put it on. And trust me, you want your cabbage caramelized.

Where to buy: Online or in a store near you.

Soom Tahini

• Quick Facts: Really, really good tahini (roasted sesame seeds ground into a luxe, drippy paste).

• Reasons to love:

  • Truly premium. I’ve had a lot of tahini in my days, and I must tell you: not all tahini is created equally. Some tahini is a bit bitter (almost burnt tasting?) and some tahini is cakey and dry. Soom is consistent—the flavor is always smooth, the texture is always creamy and drizzly, and it blends/whisks/mixes perfectly into anything.

  • My go-to ingredient for at-home sauces and dressings. When I’m out of tahini, I am genuinely distraught. I use this tahini in nearly every sauce and dressing I make, especially when it comes to cabbage. There’s something about the creamy, deeply rich nuttiness of tahini paired with the fresh, vegetal bite of cabbage—a real dream team.

    • My favorite combo at the moment is tahini, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and gochujang (measure with your heart), drizzled atop a gorgeous roasted cabbage steak.

Where to buy: In most stores and soomfoods.com

This week, we're sharing the second episode of our interview series, Brand’s Biggest Fan—featuring Evan Burns, CEO and Co-founder of The Finnish Long Drink—and Long Drink's biggest fan, DJ!

This week, Long Drink was acquired by the Mark Anthony Group of Companies, the company behind category-defining beverages including White Claw and Mike's Hard Lemonade. So, we decided it was time to share some of the behind-the-scenes of who built this company... and who's been evangelizing it. Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

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Last week, we covered Mars Men’s wiiiild $27M raise. This week, we’re diving back into Create Wellness’s recent $20M raise. What both of these have in common?

They’re both Wayflyer customers who closed big funding rounds within days of each other. So… how did they get there?

Wayflyer-funded brands are writing the playbook on how to raise SMALL. The playbook makes sense: self-fund or raise a small seed, use debt financing to cover inventory and marketing through high-growth phases, then raise equity once you have the ARR to demand a valuation worth taking.

Wayflyer covered their working capital needs while they scaled aggressively… with relatively little equity sold. CPG darling Wild ran the same playbook, and was acquired by Unilever for £230 million.

If you're building a high-potential brand with a big exit in mind, this is a funding strategy worth thinking about early.

Chat with growth capital specialists

News from the week

Everyone’s talking about Grüns this week, for good reason—a $1.2B Unilever acquisition of a brand that’s been on shelves for under three years is a genuine outlier, and plenty of really smart folks have already broken down the how and why… so we’re not going to pile on.

We’re more stuck on a story from last week that—in our opinions—everyone moved past too quickly: another gummy supplement raised $20M. Create Wellness, the modern creatine brand.

It doesn’t compare to Grüns in headline dollars, but if you zoom out, it’s a really, really impressive story. Not that long ago, creatine was a sleeper supplement only bodybuilders were taking—and now everyone and their mother is looking for a creatine product to add to their stack. And Create Wellness was brilliantly early to that game.

A few cultural shifts had to converge to get us here:

• The science went mainstream. Creatine has been one of the most-studied supplements in sports nutrition for decades, but it lived in fitness magazines and message boards. Then Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, and the broader podcast-doctor class started talking about creatine for cognition, mood, and longevity—not just muscle. The research wasn’t new necessarily, but the audience was.

• Women got brought into the conversation. For years, creatine was coded male, coded bulky, and (per Create co-CEO Dan McCormick) culturally tangled up with steroids—”Turns out that everyone in the MLB that was taking steroids was also taking creatine, and so in the hearts and minds of the American consumer, creatine was, therefore, a steroid.”

  
  Then, seemingly all at once, female wellness creators dismantled the “lifting makes you bulky” myth (thank goodness), GLP-1 culture sparked an equal and opposite “strong > skinny” reaction (doubly thank goodness), and a new wave of research connected creatine to menopause symptoms, bone density, and brain health (shoutout modern clinical research for including women, for a change). The numbers caught up fast: women now make up 30% of creatine purchases at The Vitamin Shoppe, up from 18% in 2020.

• And consumers got skeptical of supplements generally—which actually helped creatine. 63% of supplement shoppers now say they “always” or “often” research ingredients, brand reviews, or scientific studies before buying. The #1 must-have, per a Thorne survey, is products backed by clinical research.

  • After years of Poppi-style functionwashing, ashwagandha drinks dosed at homeopathic levels, and influencer-led “wellness” cycles that didn’t deliver, consumers are demanding receipts. Creatine—boring, decades-old, hundreds of peer-reviewed studies—is exactly what that consumer wants.

Enter: Create. The story is genuinely wild in its timing. Dan McCormick, a former Away and Parade operator (read: DTC legend), had personally taken creatine for over a decade and was annoyed by the powder format—it’s gritty, it’s a hassle, it doesn’t travel. He started Create with his wife Sienna in December 2022, well before “creatine gummy” was a category anyone was searching for. Twenty-five gummy manufacturers told him the specs were impossible before he found one willing to take it on as an R&D project.

• He also got the science partnerships right early. Create’s scientific advisory board includes two of the leading creatine researchers in the world, with one advisor particularly known for her work on creatine in women. That credibility shows up everywhere—NSF for Sport Certified, Creapure-sourced creatine, third-party testing…

  • …and this was, critically, all credibility that couldn’t be claimed by competitors as they sloppily entered the scene: a 2025 SuppCo report found 4 of the 6 bestselling creatine gummies on Amazon contained low or no actual creatine per serving. Create came out clean—their gummies contained slightly more than advertised.

• The market arrived. Create scaled from $0 to $4.5M profitably in year one, Unilever Ventures led a $5M Series A in 2024, and late last year, Create rolled out nationally at Target, The Vitamin Shoppe, and Sprouts, adding to existing GNC, Wegmans, and Amazon distribution.

• It’s been the #1 selling creatine gummy at Target since launch. The team scaled from 5 to 25, including former AG1 brand leadership and ex-Vital Proteins commercial muscle. And two weeks ago, the Series B—$20M led by Alliance Consumer Growth and Mike Repole’s Impact Capital, with Unilever Ventures following on—plus the launch of Creatine + Electrolytes, exclusive to Target.

Bloom has a creatine gummy now… and so does Lemme, Force Factor, Legion, Bear Balanced, and a growing list of European entrants. Clearly, the category is officially commoditizing. But Create has the early-mover position, the science-backed credibility, the omnichannel distribution, and the Unilever Ventures relationship. The global creatine supplements market was estimated at $1.37B in 2025 and is projected to hit $8.68B by 2033. Whoever owns the consumer’s first creatine purchase—and critically, secures their trust—is going to compound for a long time.

Which brings us back to Grüns. We’d bet money Grüns rolls out a dedicated creatine SKU within the year, slotting it neatly alongside Nütrops (cognitive support) and Jüced (energy) in the same playbook they’ve already run: take a once-niche, once-intimidating supplement category, scrub off the bro-y or clinical coding, deliver it in a format the wellness-curious consumer will actually take daily, and ride the cultural permission shift into a category-leading position.

They did it with greens (a category AG1 made aspirational). They’re doing it with nootropics and adaptogens. Creatine is the obvious next one.

The bigger pattern worth watching: the supplement aisle is being systematically rebuilt for a consumer who didn’t exist five years ago. She’s skeptical of marketing, seeking out clinical research for validation points, and willing to pay a premium for products that meet her where she is (likely, on-the-go).

Create saw her first in creatine. Grüns saw her first in greens. Whoever sees her next—in something nobody’s coded for her yet—is the next billion-dollar exit.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Speaking of creatine... Four Sigmatic, the #1 functional coffee brands according to SPINS data, launched a Creatine Coffee in collaboration with Sony Pictures for the launch of the final season of The Boys. The coffee combined Arabica coffee, lion’s mane, and 5g of creatine. It is available on Four Sigmatic’s website and Amazon for a limited time.

  • This is such a fun collaboration. Of course ~the boys~ want creatine in their coffee—who doesn’t? (see our deep dive 👆, lol). A note here: you’re not going to want to turn this into cold brew, or use an overnight drip situation—once creatine sits for hours in liquid, it can break down into creatinine (one of the reasons that basically every creatine ready-to-drink is functionwashing… fun fact 🤷‍♀️).

  • What’s interesting here is seeing Four Sigmatic lean into such a conventional, science-backed ingredient. Four Sigmatic’s whole shtick is pushing back against caffeine with lower-caffeine products and a boost of nootropics/adaptogens. Creatine has proven its place in both conventional, bro-y supplements and the bro-adjacent, woo-woo alternatives.

• The next Good Culture? We might have the next big cottage cheese brand on our hands here, folks. Mulu is a new cottage cheese brand from Dairy Farmers of America that is launching at Walmart with 18g of complete protein per serving (most cottage cheese is closer to 14g per serving), a proprietary whey-and-casein formula, and a focus on taste, texture, and “performance-driven” nutrition.

  

• The next generation of RTD coffee goes national. Espresso soda startup Esspo is launching at Whole Foods nationwide as it looks to bring its espresso soda into brick-and-mortar shelves. The brand is positioning the drink as a refreshing, moderately caffeinated alternative for people looking for a new afternoon pick-me-up.

• Making mushy moves. MUSH, the ready-to-eat overnight oats brand, is expanding into most Starbucks locations and 7-eleven stores along with bringing its new protein products to more national locations like Target.

  • And the brand is well-positioned for success here. It’s operating in a consumer environment increasingly demanding high-protein, high-fiber, and convenient products made from real ingredients. This ticks all these boxes. Plus it’s a well known brand already having sold 200 million plus cups and are sold in 36,000+ stores nationwide.

  • We’ve loved watching Starbucks slowly but surely update its CPG set. Recently, Khloud Popcorn launched at Starbucks locations, and now MUSH is hopping on board. Clearly, the chain is prioritizing protein (like everyone else…).

• Getting hot in the grill. Hot Ones™, the spicy brand born from First We Feast’s hit YouTube series, is launching four new BBQ sauces, including Original Hot BBQ and Hot Honey BBQ, at major retailers this spring and summer. Developed in partnership with HEATONIST, the line expands the brand beyond its iconic hot sauce into BBQ.

  • We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: we are officially in the new age of condiments. The people want new sauces and dips, and brands are delivering. Excited to see how the Hot Ones brand promotes these new sauces!

• A new tequila, in this economy?! Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are expanding Dos Hombres beyond Mezcal into tequila with a Blanco ($39) and Reposado ($49), debuting May 1 and July 1 respectively. An añejo is also planned for early 2027.

  • The launch comes at a turbulent time for the tequila category. According to IWSR’s preliminary 2025 data, global beverage alcohol volume declined 2% across 22 key markets, with spirits the worst-performing major category—down 4% in volume and 9% in value. The U.S. market specifically fell 5% in volume and 4% in value as inflation, political uncertainty, and cost-conscious consumers pulled back on discretionary spending.

  • Tequila has been hit especially hard. Diageo reported that U.S. tequila sales plunged 23% in H2 2025, with Don Julio sales down over 20%—prompting the company to downgrade its 2026 outlook. Meanwhile, Becle (Jose Cuervo’s parent) saw Q4 net profit fall 12.8% on a 14.1% revenue drop, with the flagship Jose Cuervo brand posting a 15.1% sales decline. Becle is calling 2026 a “transition year” and doesn’t expect U.S. growth to return until 2027.

  • So Dos Hombres is clearly betting on brand equity and a celebrity pull in a category where even the biggest players are struggling. Their relatively accessible price points ($39–$49) could be a smart play given the consumer shift away from ultra-premium bottles—but the headwinds are real, so we will see.

• For the ladies. Dollar Shave Club (which is somehow still around) is making a move into the women’s grooming category, offering razors and shaving aids priced between $5 and $10 on their site and Amazon.

  • Dollar Shave Club is majority-owned by the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management, LP, which acquired a 65% stake in the company from Unilever in late 2023. Unilever previously acquired DSC for approximately $1 billion in 2016. And think about that timeline, a little late to launch a women’s category. Feels like a last hurrah for a once iconic brand that has seriously lost its luster.

  • Oh boy, does this look like viral bodycare brand, Hanni 👀, from the product set itself, all the way down to the colors…

• The US sexual wellness market is booming. Sense, founded by Venezuelan entrepreneurs, is debuting its FDA-approved products at select Target locations. With the market projected to exceed $20 billion by 2030, Sense aims to redefine intimacy as an essential component of health.

• The collagen ready-to-drink space is expanding. Nestle-owned Vital Proteins, known for its collagen powder supplements, is launching a collagen-infused sparkling water in two flavors.

  • Coming off last week’s news about Kylie’s k2o, a hydration-beauty stick-pack supplement, and the previous week’s news of Freaks of Nature launching UV-protecting electrolytes, this almost feels like deja vu. Brands are clearly betting on the hydration x “ingestible skincare” angle.

Retail

• Hemp drinks future might hang in the balance, but retailers are still placing bets.

  • Edibles.com is opening its first flagship store just a year after launching in Atlanta’s Inman Park, marking a new chapter in hemp retail. The store aims to provide a more structured shopping experience for hemp-derived THC products, emphasizing education and, of course, compliance.

    • Edibles was originally launched in 2025 by Atlanta-based Edible Brands (yes, the fruit basket company). The timing is especially noteworthy—the hemp-derived THC beverage market is experiencing explosive growth in the US, with THC beverage sales exceeding $1 billion in 2024 and projected to grow to nearly $6 billion by 2035.

    • BUT, this growth is assuming all the looming regulatory changes don’t go through. The current administration is actively reassessing hemp-derived THC regulation, making this a pivotal moment for companies trying to establish compliant, and more importantly, scalable retail models.

    • Here’s what’s happening: An agriculture spending package passed last year as part of a government reopening deal removed products with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC from the federal definition of hemp—a change set to take effect this November that would effectively wipe out the entire hemp-derived THC beverage and edibles market as we know it. There are plenty of people lobbying for change, but we will see what will happen.

  • And in other THC distro news: after a successful 10‑store trial, Target is expanding hemp‑derived THC beverage sales in Minnesota by securing 72 one‑year licenses, making it one of the largest mainstream retailers betting on the category and potentially helping the space navigate looming regulatory hurdles.

Funding

• Looks like tequila is coming back? Pronghorn, a spirits incubator founded in 2021 with a focus on funding and supporting Black-owned spirits brands, has invested in Humano Tequila, which offers four varieties sold across 11 states.

• Betting on meat sticks. Bullish, the NYC consumer investment firm behind Peloton and Warby Parker, just invested in Singing Pastures—a female-founded meat stick brand using pasture-raised beef, bone broth, and collagen. The brand is already in 800+ stores and growing fast.

  • The meat stick market is nothing to laugh at. Chomps alone holds ~10% of the entire meat snack market and is valued at $1.5B doing around $600M last year alone. Meanwhile, meat snacks have emerged as the clear winner of America’s GLP-1 consumption shift, as high-protein, low-carb options continue to gain share over traditional snacks.

• The kids snack aisle is getting a makeover. The recently launched kids’ snack brand cadootz! secured over $3M in seed funding led by Selva Ventures to expand its reach, aiming for a nationwide debut in June 2026. Known for its savory crackers in Cheddar, Sea Salt, and Ranch flavors, the brand saw its first launch sell out in under two hours!

  • We had the pleasure of having co-founder (and lifestyle influencer) on our podcast to talk about building cadootz! Check it out here.

This week on The Curious Consumer, we sit down with Daniel Solomons, CEO of Update—the caffeine-free energy drink that caught Kim Kardashian’s eye organically before she became a full creative partner. We also cover every Kardashian-Jenner in CPG this week (yes, all of them), the Hershey reformulation saga, McCormick’s $45B acquisition of Unilever’s food business, and more. Check it out here →

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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What a week in CPG. Unilever acquired Grüns for a reported $1.2 billion—less than 3 years after its first sale! We’ll be breaking that down and catching you up on everything else you missed this week in Monday’s edition, so make sure you’re subscribed (and pass it along to a friend who needs to be).

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Very excited to share that Express Checkout is partnering yet again with The Lead Summit this year—one of the only events built specifically for brands!

• It takes place in NYC, May 20-21st, and features over 3,000 attendees, 150+ speakers from brands like Columbia, Rhone, Harry's, Coterie, Goop, and L'Oreal.

• The agenda covers everything from building brand identity in a trend-driven world to adapting to agentic AI to driving growth across new channels.

Brand and retail friends of Express Checkout can attend for FREE—just drop our name in the “how did you hear about us” field when you register. (Not a brand or retailer? Use this link for 25% off.)

P.S. Express Checkout is heading to Austin at the end of the month!! We’re planning on throwing a big ol’ CPG party (as we do) on April 28th. If you’re in Austin and want to meet up, or are interested in partnering on the event, reply to this email!

And with that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Zac’s Sweet Shop (Specifically the new Dirty-O)

I have the biggest sweet tooth known to man. I know my candy. I know my sweet treats. If I could I’d have my way I’d live in the Willy Wonka Factory. Chocolate, candy, and cookies for breakfast lunch and dinner. I mean, in college I literally had a candy drawer. Who needs a sock drawer when you can have one filled with Starbursts? 🤷

And in today’s landscape, sweet treats—real sweet treats—can feel like a dying breed. Everything is low sugar, no sugar, high protein, adaptogenic…you name the function and there’s someone building for it. So it’s refreshing as hell to find a brand that’s unapologetically a decadent sweet treat, no asterisks.

And Zac, real life Willy Wonka, is doing just that with Zac’s Sweet Shop. I’ve got a few ride-or-die favorites from him–cake batter crunch puppy chow, the peanut butter chocolate covered oreos, and the s’mores bark. But my new obsession is his latest drop, The Dirty O, a modern, grab-and-go take on the pudding dirt cup we all inhaled (and often assembled ourselves) as kids.

• Quick Facts: A Black-owned gourmet dessert brand founded by Zac Coughlin, handmade in small batches in LA. Zac’s whole thing is “reinventing the box of chocolates” with bite-sized, nostalgia-forward confections made with high-quality, fair-trade ingredients.

• Reasons to love:

  • Just a sweet treat. I believe there will always be a place for low-sugar, better-for-you sweets, but sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants—and the heart wants the real thing. That’s what Zac’s is serving up to us. It’s just elevated and genuinely crafted with real ingredients and real care. These are decadent delights that even Brad Reese would be proud of (see our deep dive on the Reese’s debacle).

  • Personality baked in. One of my favorite things about this brand is how much of Zac himself is in the product. You can taste it, you can see it in the packaging, you can feel it in the whole vibe. I think when you’re selling nostalgia, and especially when you’re selling a sweet treat, that personal touch is everything. Without it, decadent products like these just feel hollow. And these should be a freaking blast, everything from the wrapper to what’s inside. And Zac nails it.

Where to buy: Online at zacssweetshop.com

Jenna’s Pickup:

POCA - Vanilla Syrup

I, unfortunately, am the very special breed of Gen Z girlie who is addicted to coffee, but cannot, under any circumstances, drink it black. It is entirely possible that I am more addicted to caffeinated, flavored milk (business idea?) than actual coffee, though I will swear up and down that I can taste the “notes of chocolate and cherry” in some overpriced brew just to justify the spend.

I’ve been cursed with the undying need for some sweetness and flavor in my daily coffee. And because I try not to have too much added sugar, I’ve become somewhat of a stevia fiend (cue: half of you scrunching your noses in disgust) and often opt for that one sugar-free syrup at cafes that’s made with god-knows-what. There just hasn’t been a better option… until now.

Two former executives from the wellness behemoth Hims just launched a new way to sweeten your coffee, with flavor and without sugar. Meet POCA.

• Quick facts: POCA is a zero-calorie squeeze-packet flavored syrup made with allulose, monk fruit, and inulin (a chicory root fiber), delivering 3g of fiber per serving.

• Reasons to love:

  • The format. I love when a brand’s packaging is the pitch. A squeeze packet that lives in your bag is wholly a different product than a pump bottle that lives on your counter. It’s so handy to have this on-hand for coffee runs (so you don’t accidentally cave and order the flavored latte with 20g sugar…), and I can totally see POCA living next to sweetener packets on cafe condiment stations. These also are large sachets, and I can get at least two servings out of one—great for sharing with your coffee date :)

  • Entirely plant-based, nothing artificial. Though I personally am cool with a dose of sucralose, I know that isn’t everyone’s jam. And I also know that manyyy possess the “stevia ick.” POCA is made with only organic allulose, water, chicory root fiber, and monk fruit extract—not stevia—and no preservatives, so anyone with a sweet tooth can enjoy.

  • It doesn’t feel like a try-hard wellness brand. POCA’s whole thing is that sweetness should feel fun again—not like a supplement, not like a reward you have to earn. Though it offers fiber, it doesn’t aggressively boast the fiber content, and instead focuses on flavor and vibe. Isn’t that how fun flavored bevs should be?

Caveat: I’m going to be extra honest here: I see a ton of potential in this brand, and I’m genuinely so into the premise, but I’m not 100% sold on the taste of every flavor just yet. Because it’s still so new, I have a lot of faith in its evolution, and I’m excited to see future iterations!

Where to buy: Online at pickpoca.com

This week on The Curious Consumer, we sit down with Daniel Solomons, CEO of Update—the caffeine-free energy drink that caught Kim Kardashian’s eye organically before she became a full creative partner. We also cover every Kardashian-Jenner in CPG this week (yes, all of them), the Hershey reformulation saga, McCormick’s $45B acquisition of Unilever’s food business, and more. Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

We also cover every Kardashian-Jenner in CPG this week (yes, all of them)—Kylie’s pivot from vodka soda to beauty hydration powder K2O, Khloe’s new Khloud protein tortilla chips, and Lemme finally launching a multivitamin after 17 other SKUs. Plus: the Hershey reformulation saga, McCormick’s $45B acquisition of Unilever’s food business, goPuff’s surprisingly successful private label expansion, and Mars Men—an 18-month-old testosterone supplement brand already at $100M run rate. Let’s get into it!

The Breakdown

00:00 Intro

0:05 Interview with Daniel Solomons (Update Energy)

20:28 Kylie's K2O Beauty Hydration Powder

27:20 Khloud Protein Chips

30:39 Lemme Launches a Multivitamin (Finally)

32:50 The Hershey/Reese's Reformulation Drama

44:43 McCormick Buys Unilever's Food Business ($45B)

47:50 goPuff's Private Label Expansion

50:10 Mars Men: $100M Testosterone Supplement Brand

58:26 Wrap-up

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We’ve got a packed newsletter this week, so we’ll keep things short with a quick shoutout to our friends at Ever Ledger—our (new!!!) full-service accounting and finance partner that specializes in high-growth CPG.

As a startup ourselves, we needed a finance team that could actually keep up (you do not want to know what our taxes look like…). Ever Ledger is handling our books, tax, and financial planning under one roof—so we’re not stitching together three different vendors and chasing down our own numbers.

They typically work with CPG brands, helping them build investor-ready financials, prep for fundraising, plan retail expansion. If your books are messy (zero judgment here), your accountant is slow (some judgment, given #taxseason…), or you’re gearing up for a raise, check them out!

News from the week

This week, Hershey announced it’s reverting select Reese’s and Hershey’s products back to classic milk and dark chocolate recipes by 2027—a move revealed at Hershey’s Investor Day (it’s a fun watch) after weeks of escalating public backlash.

The catalyst of said backlash? Brad Reese, grandson of H.B. Reese (who invented the Peanut Butter Cup in 1928), posting an open letter on LinkedIn on Valentine’s Day (cruel timing) calling out Hershey for quietly swapping real chocolate for compound coatings and peanut butter for “peanut butter crèmes” across parts of the Reese’s line.

• Apparently, Brad tried a bag of Reese’s Mini Hearts and couldn’t finish them (we have never experienced such a devastating fate). The letter where he detailed this experience went viral. He appeared on Good Morning America, Colbert, and alongside MrBeast in a video that pulled nearly 14 million views.

• Hershey responded by releasing a statement from 50+ members of the Reese family distancing themselves from Brad, and CEO Kirk Tanner insisted the recipe reversion was already in the works before Brad went public. Brad’s take: “They changed the REESE’S product. They got caught. And now they’re trying to manage perception instead of fixing the problem.”

Of course, there’s some context Hershey would rather you focus on: the changes affect less than 3% of Reese’s products. The core Peanut Butter Cups were never reformulated, apart from—as Jason Liebig points out—some minor ingredient changes over the years (mostly, as Whims co-founder Jesse Barruch explains in that post’s comments, due to supply chain constraints).

• Plus, there was a real business reason for the swap in the first place—cocoa prices surged above $12,000 per ton in late 2024 amid severe West African crop shortages, and compound coatings gave a publicly traded company some margin relief.

• AND they legally did nothing wrong: Under FDA rules, “milk chocolate” is a legal designation with specific composition requirements—labels like “chocolate candy,” “chocolatey,” or “chocolate coating” signal the product doesn’t meet that standard.

• Hershey was technically compliant. But “technically compliant” and “transparent” are very different things, and consumers are making clear which one they actually value.

All true—and all completely irrelevant to why this blew up. Hate to break it to ya, but this was never really about the Reese’s Mini Hearts.

Let’s be real: Most consumers weren’t buying this brand for its family story—they were buying on recognition, price, and distribution. But the moment a 70-year-old grandson appeared on national television claiming a threat to his family’s legacy, he became a symbol of everything consumers fear about Big Food: that the brands they trust are quietly degrading their products behind label language most people will never scrutinize.

Brad Reese didn’t create the distrust—he just gave people someone to rally behind. Brad landed at exactly the right moment: nearly 1 in 2 consumers globally purchased more fresh, unprocessed foods over the past year, Gen Z and Millennials are willing to pay 20–30% more for clean label products, and 77% of consumers called simple ingredients “essential” or “nice to have.”

Ingredient transparency isn’t a niche concern anymore—it’s the baseline expectation. And the old playbook of maintaining price and perceived quality while hoping nobody looks too closely... is kinda dead.

The reality is, these products have been made this way for years... and the outrage only just arrived. We’re in an era where social media “experts” declare ingredients unacceptable without nuance, and those takes cascade through posts until they become conventional wisdom.

• The gap between demanding “better” ingredients and understanding what that actually means is enormous—and it’s widening, because the information ecosystem rewards conviction over context.

• Plenty of the Hershey backlash reflects genuine concern. Plenty of it is performative. Whether every consumer who piled on could explain the difference between cocoa butter and palm oil isn’t really the point—the pressure is real either way, and brands are being held to a standard that’s partly informed by science and partly by vibes.

• Whether every consumer who piled on could explain the difference between cocoa butter and palm oil isn’t really the point. The pressure is real either way, and it’s not going away.

What we hope comes from it: food that’s actually sourced better, made better, labeled more honestly. Many emerging brands are already delivering on that expectation (likely why startups are doing such a great job of capturing market share… and why so many BigCos are scooping them up). The strategics are trying—Hershey’s announcement comes packaged with a 25% R&D increase and a commitment to remove artificial colors by 2027. Whether that’s a genuine pivot or a PR response dressed up in an investor deck, we’ll see.

But the era of quiet cost-cutting is over.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Kylie pivots from vodka soda to drinkable skincare. Kylie Jenner’s Sprinter brand (vodka soda) just launched k2o by Sprinter—a functional hydration line featuring drink sticks formulated with electrolytes, hyaluronic acid, and Verisol® Bioactive Collagen peptides. It’ll debut at Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila Outpost at Coachella. Yes, a celebrity vodka soda brand is selling beauty-hydration powder at a tequila activation.

  • We know what you’re thinking: a celebrity-founded vodka soda brand is coming out with… a beauty-hydration drink mix? To be launched at sister-celebrity’s other alcohol brand’s Coachella activation? Sounds like a parody of celebrity CPG. But in 2026, it actually kinda tracks.

    • Brands like Vital Proteins, Moon Juice, ARMRA, and Ritual spent years dismantling the wall between supplements and skincare—making ingestible beauty merchandisable, habitual, and clinically credible. Beauty retailers codified the shift: Ulta now stocks colostrum supplements alongside mascara. k2o is launching into a world where the category boundary has already been erased.

  • To its credit, the brand is at least taking the formulation seriously—boasting clinically studied ingredients, including Verisol® collagen peptides (which do have published research behind skin elasticity and hydration). Whether the doses are meaningful is another question, and the functionwashing risk is worth watching.

  • The bigger signal: beauty is becoming a function that any category can borrow. A vodka brand can sell collagen powder, a sunscreen brand can sell UV-protecting electrolyte powder, and neither reads as a stretch anymore.

• The Big Food breakup era continues. Unilever is combining its food business with McCormick in a $44.8 billion deal, creating a $20 billion-revenue condiments and flavor powerhouse that will house Hellmann’s, Knorr, Frank’s RedHot, Cholula, and French’s under one roof. McCormick will pay $15.7 billion in cash and $29.1 billion in shares, with the combined company targeting $600 million in annual cost savings by year three. Completion is expected by mid-2027.

  • This is the latest—and arguably most decisive—move in Unilever’s multi-year portfolio teardown. The company already spun off its ice cream business last year as Magnum Ice Cream Co. Now, shedding food turns Unilever into a pure-play beauty, personal care, and home care company. The message is clear: food was slowing them down.

  • And this isn’t just a Unilever story. We’ve been tracking this trend all year: Ferrero acquired WK Kellogg for $3.1B, Mars acquired Kellanova for ~$35B, Kraft Heinz explored a $20B separation, Kimberly-Clark acquired Kenvue, General Mills offloaded its yogurt business. The throughline is the same every time—get focused or get left behind. The conglomerate model that built Big CPG is actively being dismantled.

  • The deeper question: does combining two mature portfolios actually produce innovation, or just produce savings? McCormick is projecting 3–5% organic sales growth post-merger, but the history of Big Food mega-mergers (see: Kraft Heinz, stock down 60%+ since its 2015 merger) suggests cost synergies don’t fix the underlying problem—which is that consumers increasingly want differentiation, not scale.

• You were not Regina George’d. The viral lawsuit alleging that David protein bars misrepresented calorie and fat content has been dropped. The company faced claims of the bars containing 400% more fat and 80% more calories than advertised, leading to social media comparisons to the Kaltein bars from “Mean Girls.”

  • If you want to learn more about what the plaintiffs were alleging and why David Protein was in the right, you can read our newsletter from the other week.

• Private label boom continues. Gopuff is expanding its private label offerings with the launch of Crave Shoppe, a brand focused on indulgent baked goods and snacks, featuring unique flavors like Dill Pickle Cotton Candy and S’mores Marshmallow-Filled Donuts.

  • For context: GoPuff launched its first private label line, Basically, in early 2022, starting with bottled water and expanding into snacks, batteries, paper products, and household essentials. That portfolio saw 30% growth in 2025, with Basically consistently ranking among Gopuff’s most-ordered items.

  • They’ve since tiered the brand—launching Basically Premium in 2024 with products like gluten-free beef sticks, coconut water, and freeze-dried candy Gopuff—plus a health and wellness line called Goodnow, covering OTC medications, sleep aids, allergy remedies, and electrolyte drinks. Nearly 20% of Gopuff orders include at least one private label product.

  • Private label ballooned to a record $282.8 Billion in sales in 2025 so it’s no surprise that Gopuff is looking to expand their private label offering. What is interesting though is how they’re leaning hard into sweet treats and indulgent options. Despite the massive rise of better-for-you alternatives consumers, (and especially consumers on an app that can deliver in 15 minutes when you have a special hankering), still want a sweet treat.

  • Something that stood out to us in this press release was that their edible cookie dough products were developed in collaboration with edible cookie dough brand Woah Dough.

• Breakfast made easier. Egglife, the brand known for its egg white wraps, is launching ready-to-eat “Grab & Go” breakfast tacos and expanding distribution this spring to retailers such as Sheetz, Target, and H‑E‑B.

  • This feels part of a larger trend of better-for-you, ready-to-heat/-eat breakfast brands coming onto the market. Just look at Broncos Bagels or Evergreen Waffles! What’s exciting about this particular launch is that it’s refrigerated, not frozen—making it a great high-protein breakfast option that isn’t just another sad Starbucks egg cup. 🤷‍♀️

• We might have a new classic inflight snack on our hands. Delta is adding MadeGood®’s delicious, allergen-free Chocolate Chip Chewy Granola Bars to it’s complimentary snack lineup on domestic flights.

  • We’ve gotten quite nerdy about in-flight snacks ever since Nate attended United Airlines’ Elevate conference a few weeks back and learned more about snack flight selection. We think this is a fascinating distro channel, but were recently chatting with a friend who thinks that discovering a brand in-flight dilutes the brand value, and makes her less likely to seek the product out in retail. Curious how others perceive this!

• Khloe wants you to eat protein chips. Khloud, Khloé Kardashian’s snack brand known for its protein popcorn, is expanding its snack lineup with high protein chips, featuring 7g of protein per serving in Sweet Heat, Nacho, and Buffalo flavors.

  • Cool to see this brand expand into other snacks, but I’ve got a bone to pick with this one. In leaning into the “no seed oil” claims, it perhaps leaned too hard. The first ingredient of these chips isn’t corn… it’s avocado oil. The anti-seed-oil rhetoric and “Good, Stuff, Zero Fluff” tagline (SO ChatGPT-coded, btw) makes it sound like this is a brand that prioritizes moving towards “real food.” But when the first ingredient isn’t the whole food that’s supposed to be the base of the product, and is in fact an oil (be it avocado oil or otherwise) I fear we’ve lost the plot entirely. - Jenna

• Bringing bevs overseas. Hiya is officially launching in the UK with a line of zero-sugar children’s vitamins, including a daily multivitamin, greens powder, and digestive support formula.

  • We’re seeing a growing wave of transatlantic CPG expansion in both directions. Poppi just launched in the UK at Tesco and Pret, marking its first move outside the US—and on the flip side, UK brands like TRIP, SURI, Barebells, DIRTEA, and Misfits have been making serious inroads stateside (we wrote about how they’re succeeding in the US here).

• We’ve come full circle in supplements. Lemme, Kourtney Kardashian’s supplement brand, is launching it’s first ever multi-vitamin gummy, the Lemme Multi Women’s Daily Gummies. Shocking right? They have 17 different gummies and chews and no multi-vitamin, until today!

  • The gummy vitamin space really started with OG multivitamins (see: Flinstone’s gummies) and then transformed into these hyper-specific SKUs for every problem under the sun (see: Lemme’s Belly Fat Burning Gummies, which are different from its Debloat Gummies, which are different from its Body Toning Gummies…) and now we are back to Multivitamins and calling it innovation. What a week for the Kardashian-Jenners, ladies and gentlemen.

• More teen skincare enters Ulta. The Austin-based skin care brand Erly is making its retail debut rolling out in 750 Ulta stores and online. Founded by a dermatologist and a marketing expert, Erly offers fragrance-free, hypoallergenic products aimed at Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers.

  • We’ve seen an explosion of skincare brands built for Gen Z and, more increasingly, Gen Alpha consumers. With brands like Bubble, Starface, Ever Eden, JB Skrub gaining traction. Plus tween/teen-founded brands like Sincerely Yours and Yes Day.

eCommerce

• Shipping is about to get pricey. Amazon is set to implement a 3.5% surcharge on fulfillment services starting April 17, as rising fuel costs—thanks to ongoing conflict in the Middle East—continue to strain supply chains. The company aims to recoup some of the elevated operational costs it has absorbed until now.

Retail

• They will be everywhere soon enough. ALDI US launched a redesigned website and app powered by Instacart’s Storefront Pro and fulfillment, making Instacart ALDI’s exclusive fulfillment partner as they are gunning for significant market expansion here.

• Even the retailers are on Ozempic. CVS opened its second small-format pharmacy-only store in Chicago, part of a planned 20 stores for 2026. These compact shops, averaging 3,000 square feet, aim to enhance access to pharmacy care, featuring full-service pharmacies and OTC products. More locations are set to follow in cities like Houston and Detroit.

  • They’re not the only ones shrinking. BJ’s Wholesale opened its second small-format BJ’s Market in Florida (half its usual warehouse), Family Dollar is piloting an “extra-small box” format for dense urban markets in 2026, Whole Foods is expanding its Daily Shop mini stores, and Macy’s has been rolling out locations 1/5 the size of its flagships.

Funding

• Creatine goes mainstream. Create Wellness raised $20M led by Alliance Consumer Growth (with Unilever Ventures back for more), bringing total funding to $27.3M. The creatine gummy brand also dropped a new Creatine + Electrolyte mix and is doubling its Target assortment.

  • The raise makes sense when you look at where creatine is right now. Among the 200 most popular dietary supplements in the US, it’s the fastest-growing—rising 17.1 percentage points last year, driving nearly $100M in incremental retail growth, and seeing unit sales jump 58% YoY. Online interest surged 78.6% in 2025. This isn’t a niche fitness ingredient anymore; it’s a mass-market wellness play.

  • And the consumer base is shifting fast. Women now account for 30% of creatine purchases at GNC—up 18% since 2020, according to Bloomberg—driven by growing interest in strength training, recovery, bone support, and energy. Pair that with emerging research linking creatine to cognitive function, hormonal health, stress reduction, and even anti-aging benefits, and you’ve got an ingredient with runway far beyond the gym-bro aisle. Think: women’s wellness, GLP-1 support, longevity formulations.

  • Create’s edge is that it built the category’s trust at a time when most competitors haven’t earned it. A 2025 SuppCo report found that four of the six bestselling creatine gummies on Amazon contained low creatine levels per serving—and two had none at all. Create’s gummies luckily came out unscathed, containing slightly more than advertised. In a supplement category plagued by label accuracy issues, that matters.

  • Competition is heating up, though. Kourtney Kardashian’s Lemme and Bloom Nutrition both recently entered the creatine gummy space, and—especially as Create validates this category with funding and distro—other supplement brands are likely to follow.

• Nostalgia for the win! VMG Partners invested in Vacation Inc., the nostalgia-driven sun care brand, reportedly investing $70M at a $210M valuation, largely as secondary proceeds. Sources peg 2025 revenue at $54M–$70M, with single-digit EBITDA margins. VMG previously backed Sun Bum early and exited favorably when SC Johnson acquired Sun Bum in June 2019 for $400M, about 5.7x its sales at the time.

• Dupes as a brand strategy. American Pacific Group acquired a majority stake in Dossier, a brand thriving on duping popular fragrances. What started as a DTC brand Dossier is now Walmart’s #1 fragrance brand where it launched in 2022 and #3 at Target where it launched in 2025. The brand generated roughly $60 million in annual sales last year and saw 120% YoY sales growth as of February 2026.

• Betting on… testosterone? Mars Men, a fast growing men’s wellness brand that hit $100 million run rate in under 18 months since launch, secured $27.5 million in Series A funding led by L Catterton. The brand plans to expand its product line and address more men’s health issues.

  • This brand “uses a proprietary combination of 100% drug-free, natural ingredients to help men feel like themselves again,” (AKA, boost testosterone). The brand copy is pretty unashamed, offering a 90-day guarantee for higher testosterone—“reclaim your masculinity” or get your money back. It all feels very manopshere-esq to me, which is probably why it’s working so well in 2026. - Jenna

  • The global testosterone booster market was valued at $4.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $10.37 billion by 2034, and Mars Men is positioning itself at the center of a broader cultural shift: men—especially younger men—are becoming more proactive about their health and actively seeking natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. The global men’s health and wellness market was valued at an estimated $1.42 trillion in 2024 and is projected to more than double to $2.88 trillion by 2030

• Caffeine gummies get a boost. The Neighborhood Beverage Company, the parent company of Once Upon A Coconut, has acquired Punch’d Energy, the a patented natural caffeine gummy brand founded in 2015. This move aims to enhance NBC’s healthier product portfolio, leveraging Punch’d’s patented formula and customizable energy options across various retail formats.

• The Gatorade of our times? Throne SPORT COFFEE brought on Chicago Cubs All-Star Alex Bregman as its latest high-profile athlete investor and partner. He joins a growing roster that includes lead investor Patrick Mahomes and Breanna Stewart.

Last week on The Curious Consumer, we dive into Danone’s $1.15B acquisition of Huel—and what it says about the future of meal replacement, GLP-1 consumers, and food as pure function. We also cover some celeb product launches, the future of senior nutrition, a new category of alcohol, and more. Check it out here →

We recently got some great data from our friends at Faire highlighting the dichotomy of “clean” vs. science-forward positioning for beauty and wellness brands. Check it out here →

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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This week, we sludged our way through the slew of April Fools fake product launches that somehow get wackier (read: more disturbing) every year. But this year came with some actual surprises—brands that earnestly launched their funkiest products of the year on April 1st to double-trick consumers. Our friend Gabi at Modern Retail covered the fake-fake (AKA, real) launches this year, including one of our faves, the Olipop x Goodwipes collab.

Curious what you think of April Fools real launches. Good timing, or poor joke?

P.S. Express Checkout is heading to Austin at the end of April!! We’re planning on throwing a big ol’ CPG party (as we do) on April 27th. If you’re in Austin and want to meet up, or are interested in partnering on the event, reply to this email!

And with that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Caltein Protein Shortbread Cookies

Yes, the name is a play on the Kälteen bars from Mean Girls, and yes, I absolutely love it. We first came across this brand at their booth at Fancy Faire in San Diego, and these things are not only delicious but also incredibly filling—which was nice when I had them for lunch this week. Don't tell my mother. I do need to eat better. But hey, they have 20g of protein per bag! Not too shabby if you ask me.

• Quick Facts: High-protein butter cookies packed with 20g of protein per bag. Made with 6–7 simple ingredients, shelf stable, and baked in small batches in NYC. The protein is derived from wheat, which the brand chose specifically to avoid the chalky texture of milk-based proteins or the “earthy” taste of plant-based alternatives. They currently come in four flavors: Chocolate Chip, Lemon Shortbread, Salted Peanut, and Cinnamon Roll.

• Reasons to love:

  • You wouldn’t know it was a protein cookie. You really wouldn’t. Let’s be honest here, most high-protein baked goods aren’t very good. Or at least, you know what you’re eating is a high-protein baked good or sweet treat. They have weird artificial flavors, they’re grainy, or they’re the densest thing known to man. Seriously some of these high-protein snacks are thicc. Caltein dodged all of that. When I say these taste like great shortbread cookies, I mean it—they’re freaking delicious.

  • Stupid simple ingredients. Normally, I’m not one to really care about ingredient counts—I’m really not picky at all—I’ll have the Legendary cinnamon rolls, energy drinks that taste like Swedish Fish, actual Swedish Fish, David bars. I don’t buy the rhetoric of “less is more” and fake ingredient claims all the time. But baked goods are different, they more often than not need real ingredients, and you just know when you taste it. You can feel the difference. And I think the short ingredient list is exactly why these taste so good. Real butter, cane sugar, wheat protein—no fillers, no gums, no artificial anything trying to mask the taste of everything else. Literally 6 ingredients and that’s all.

    • If you want another great high protein baked good that I love (that doesn’t have simple ingredients) checkout Drummroll snacks! Their new muffins are great.

Where to buy: caltein.com or if you’re in NYC @ Happier Grocery and The Shelf

Jenna’s Pickup:

NuTrail Nut Granola - Vanilla Strawberry

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear (see: past Weekly Pickups), I love me some granola. And because I try so much granola, that also means that I’m not easily wowed by just any granola. The classic, oat-filled, homogenous, maple syrupy stuff with a sprinkling of almonds just doesn’t cut it anymore.

I want my granola to be a true textural adventure—a playground of layered flavors and crunch levels and consistencies. I’m pleased to report that NuTrail delivers.

• Quick Facts: Grain-free, oat-free, no-sugar-added, nut- and seed-based granola that happens to be keto certified and utterly sweet and delicious.

• Reasons to love:

  • Unique ingredients = actually innovative product. Unlike your standard granola that’s 90% oats and 10% random nuts + raisins for textural variety, this granola is fully oat-free… which means its contents are actually innovative. Made with sunflower + pumpkin seeds, coconut shreds, full almonds + hazelnuts, dried strawberries (no sad raisins here), and butter (not oil), this granola tastes completely different from any other granola I’ve tried. The flavors are perfectly balanced (salty, sweet, nutty, bright) and the butter adds this lovely richness—almost cookie-like with the vanilla flavoring. The combo of crunchy hazelnuts and soft dried strawberries is especially unique IMO, and I’m officially obsessed with this flavor pairing.

  • No sugar added. The best tasting granolas are almost always hiding a sneaky secret: a whole lot of sugar. Granola feels like a health food, but too often, the nutrition label reads a lot closer to a deconstructed cookie. NuTrail, though, sweetens its granolas with erythritol and monkfruit—safe from a post-breakfast blood sugar spike or subsequent crash. With only 2g natural sugar per serving (from the strawberries), this would still satisfy any sweet tooth.

  • Recent rebrand! I’ve seen NuTrail in store before, but admittedly wasn’t running towards it. Its packaging was mostly white, pretty sterile, and the actual product photography didn’t do it any justice. The new branding is bright, playful, eye-catching, and most importantly, the new photography really lets the texture shine. It’s a true representation of what’s inside the bag, and that makes for one hell of a successful rebrand.

Where to buy: Amazon or in stores near you!

This week on The Curious Consumer, we dive into Danone’s $1.15B acquisition of Huel—and what it says about the future of meal replacement, GLP-1 consumers, and food as pure function. We also cover some celeb product launches, the future of senior nutrition, a new category of alcohol, and more. Check it out here →

We also recently got some great data from our friends at Faire highlighting the dichotomy of “clean” vs. science-forward positioning for beauty and wellness brands. Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

We also cover Alix Earle’s skincare launch (Reale Actives), Cardi B’s surprisingly well-aligned haircare line, Olaplex’s acquisition by Henkel after losing 95% of its market cap, the rise of hard sodas, and Lucille—a long-overdue dignity-first nutrition brand for older adults. Let’s get into it!

We recently wrote a report with data from our friends at Faire highlighting the dichotomy of “clean” vs. science-forward positioning for beauty and wellness brands. Check it out here.

https://www.expresscheckout.co/p/the-state-of-beauty-and-wellness

The Breakdown

00:00 Intro
03:13 Danone bets on Huel
18:07 Alix Earle launches a brand
24:22 Cardi B's new haircare brand
26:07 Olaplex gets acquired
27:29 The "hard soda" trend
32:49 The future of senior nutrition
35:44 Wrap-up

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Securing retail distribution is a huge win, but driving velocity is the real challenge. minisocial helps you bridge the gap between digital awareness and in-store sales. They’re already trusted by retail favorites like Bero, MadeGood, Halfday Iced Tea, Ayoh!, and many more.

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News from the week

Last week, Danone announced it’s acquiring Huel for a reported $1.15 billion.

If you’re not familiar with Huel, the brand makes powders, RTD shakes, hot meal packs, and more—all plant-based, all formulated to deliver complete nutrition in a single serving. It’s a big number for a brand that is still gaining recognition beyond nutrition-forward consumers. So what exactly did Danone just buy—and why now?

Huel (literally named for Human + Fuel) was founded in the UK in 2014 by Julian Hearn on a simple premise: most of the food people reach for when they’re busy is nutritionally lacking, and there needed to be a faster, more affordable, plant-based alternative.

• If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is—Huel emerged from the same cultural moment as Soylent, the Silicon Valley meal replacement brand that became a punchline for tech-bro anti-food sentiment in the mid-2010s.

• The pitch was basically identical: food is inefficient, nutrition is the point… here’s a powder. The difference was execution and positioning: Soylent embraced the robot-food aesthetic and wore its contempt for mealtimes openly. Huel softened the edges—better ingredients, a sustainability story, a broader target audience—and called it food instead of fuel. But the underlying cultural proposition didn’t change much: convenience above all, efficiency over experience, the meal as a problem to be solved.

That repackaging built a real business. By 2024, Huel surpassed $284 million in revenue, tripling its profit year-over-year. The brand achieved B Corp certification, built a fiercely loyal DTC subscriber base across 80+ countries, and expanded its product line without losing its nutritional North Star. It also moved aggressively into retail—store distribution more than doubled to over 25,000 locations globally, landing at Target, Sprouts, and Life Time Fitness in the US, and GNC.

What Danone is betting on. On the surface, this looks like a large food conglomerate scooping up a buzzy brand. But there’s some more at play here:

1. A cultural bet: the shift away from meals as experiences and toward meals as logistics. That a growing number of people don’t want to cook, don’t want to think about it, and don’t want to sit down. They want complete, efficient nutrition that fits into the margins of their day—tingle-serve, hyper-individual, optimized. Social meals were a nice idea that fewer and fewer people have time for.

2. The GLP-1 angle (of course). Danone has been deliberate and clear in its adaptations to consumers’ increased use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs—and Huel fits neatly into this narrative.

   • Last August, Danone launched Oikos Fusion—a drinkable yogurt specifically formulated and advertised for GLP-1 users, designed to help consumers build and retain muscle mass during weight loss. Danone has even built a dedicated nutrition hub for GLP-1 users on its North American website, featuring product recommendations across its entire portfolio.

   • Huel extends this strategy into a full meal solution. Consumers on GLP-1s have suppressed appetites but still need complete nutrients—and a nutritionally complete RTD or powder, maximum nutrition in minimum volume, is almost perfectly calibrated for that use case in a way a drinkable yogurt isn’t.

3. Danone has been quietly building out a functional nutrition portfolio, and Huel slots in as the consumer-facing anchor. The Huel announcement follows Danone acquiring a majority stake in Kate Farms to enhance its medical nutrition portfolio, and the prior acquisition of The Akkermansia Company, a specialist in biotic science focusing on metabolic health.

   • The group is applying a benefit-led approach to its entire portfolio—moving away from formats to purpose-driven nutrition. Huel, with its complete-nutrition positioning and loyal subscriber base, is the piece that makes the whole picture legible to a mass consumer.

4. Danone had already tried to build this itself. Danone entered the meal replacement category with Alpro Meal To Go, released in Europe—a plant-based drink positioned as a “nutritionally complete, ready-to-drink meal.” But Danone had effectively formulated a Huel alternative without Huel’s brand affinity. Scaling that into a real competitor would have required years of marketing investment that Huel had already spent. Buying Huel was faster, and probably cheaper, than closing the gap organically.

What this acquisition really confirms? The food-as-fuel proposition has gone fully mainstream. Soylent was a curiosity for people who openly didn’t care about food. Huel made the same bet more palatable—literally and figuratively—and built it into a $1 billion asset.

As the maker of Activia yogurt, coffee creamer International Delight, and plant-based brand Silk, Danone already has a strong hold on conventional dairy and mass-market plant-based alternatives. Huel built its brand on a basis of resistance against conventional food—emphasizing sustainability and complete nutrition above all else. It’ll be interesting to see how the brand maintains that messaging and ethos under a conglomerate like Danone.

But either way, the deal is a signal: convenient, all-in-one nutrition is no longer a niche proposition for tech bros who hate food. It’s where the food industry is going.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Influencer brand done right. Alix Earle, a social media personality and podcast host with nearly 14M followers across platforms, now has a new moniker: CPG founder. This week, she launched her skincare brand, Reale Actives, after two years in stealth mode. The brand was born from her years-long battle with cystic acne, built with real dermatologists, and led by CEO Andrea Blieden, an ecommerce and beauty veteran with past roles at Kiehl’s and the Body Shop.

  • For a creator who built her brand on “Get Ready With Me” TikToks, where she opened up about her struggles with acne, this makes perfect sense—it feels like a natural extension of her personal brand, and a ripe opportunity to capitalize on her built trust. But the brand’s launch feels diminished within the context of a flood of recent skincare brand launches… especially those touted by influencers.

  • Alix is no stranger to the world of CPG—she’s an influencer after all. She has a long list of brand partnerships with companies like Hero Cosmetics and Benefit Cosmetics. More recently, she’s gone even deeper by becoming an investor in Poppi and a strategic investor and partner in two other drink brands: canned margarita brand Sip Margs and the energy drink brand Gorgie. Increasingly, we’re seeing influencers start and invest in brands.

One of the most important things a brand can do today is build media attention. Creators have become some of the most valuable investors because they control that attention.For creators, promoting businesses through paid posts moves the needle. However, increasingly, they want more than cash compensation. They want ownership in the businesses they help grow, aligning incentives on both sides. This works especially well at the earliest stages where founders can’t afford creator rates, and creators don’t always have access to the next hot emerging brand. - Brett Perlmutter founder of Bulletpitch

• Could this save chocolate?? California Cultured is gearing up to launch its cell-based cocoa powder, having secured self-affirmed GRAS status and raised $15.9 million to date. Targeting baked goods and beverages and with around $15.9M in funding to date, the startup aims for a late 2026 debut, riding the wave of interest from major chocolate players amid real fears about the future of cocoa supply.

  • California Cultured grows cocoa plant cells in bioreactors to produce a cocoa powder with roughly 20x the flavanol content of conventional cocoa (the compound that makes chocolate so heart healthy)—at a price point competitive with supermarket chocolate, thanks to the relatively low input costs of plant cell culture compared to cultivated meat or precision fermentation.

  • For context: West Africa supplies roughly 70% of the world’s cocoa, and the past two years brought a near-perfect storm—extreme weather, widespread crop disease, and aging farming infrastructure all hit at once, sending cocoa prices up nearly 300%. Prices have come down from their peak but remain structurally elevated, and nobody expects a full return to the old normal.

  • The pressure is already reshaping brand behavior. Some companies are quietly reformulating to reduce cocoa content; others are pivoting away from chocolate altogether. Mid-Day Squares—known for their refrigerated functional chocolate bars—launched their first-ever non-chocolate product, the No Bread PB&J bar, explicitly citing cacao prices as the catalyst. When a brand built entirely on chocolate starts diversifying, that tells you something.

• The only thing better than perfect? Perfect Bar, known for their iconic refrigerated simple-ingredient peanut butter bars, is launching new Protein + Prebiotics refrigerated bars, offering 20 grams of protein and no artificial additives. Available in Peanut Butter Chocolate Crunch and Chocolate Mint Crunch, these bars are set to hit Whole Foods Market later this year.

  • We know, we know…another protein bar? But if anyone is going to make a cleaner protein bar that also tastes great (and isn’t made with meat byproduct) it’s Perfect Bar. They’re one of the OGs in clean snacking!

• Soda on hard mode. Beverage legend Ben Weiss, who built Bai and sold it to Dr Pepper for nearly $2B, is back with Crooked Pop, a zero-sugar hard soda made from fermented ancient grains (quinoa, amaranth, millet, cassava) with 4% ABV and 80 calories. Weiss calls it “organic super dry alcohol,” a category he’s betting will sit just beyond hard seltzer.

  

  • This is not the only hard soda launching. Owl’s Brew, a female-founded brand specializing in “clean” boozy beverages and mixers, is launching its own line of hard soda in a range of flavors, including cherry cola and Dr Pepper.

  • This is the Olipop/Poppi effect for you. We’ve seen a litany of brands launch better for you sodas over the past few years riding on the success and category creation from Olipop and Poppi so it’s not surprising to see this come into the hard RTD market. Consumers are bored of malt-based hard seltzers and brands are betting hard sodas are the next big thing.

• THERE’S NO STOPPING PROTEIN. Marzetti, a brand of refrigerated dressing and dips, launched a line of protein ranch dressing and dips with 3-4g per serving. It’s great brands want to jump into these trends, but this feels like a stretch here.

  • However, Marzetti is not the first to market with “protein-ified” dressings and dips. We have She’s The Sauce, Protein Basics™ protein condiments, Sturdy protein tomato sauce, Build the Body protein ranch seasoning, Devious protein seasoning shakers, Bon Cuisine Protein rubs and seasonings, Buffy chicken protein dips, and Benji’s cottage cheese sauce. And we are sure there are countless more being built as we speak.

  

• Seniors deserve better than Ensure. Lucille Health just launched a line of high-protein, high-calorie whole-food shakes for older adults, AKA a modern-day, better-for-you Ensure. The direct-to-consumer brand is targeting the $6.2B senior nutrition market—a market that, despite representing our collective future as consumers, is often an afterthought—long dominated by overly processed, clinical products. Backed by New Fare Capital, Lucille is bringing real, “clean” ingredients, actually fun and delightful branding, and—most importantly— dignity to a long neglected category of consumers.

  • The incredible founder behind Lucille (and granddaughter to a real Lucille), Jess Haghani, was the first guest in our new Grocery Run series on IG (more to come)! Check out her go-to Whole Foods picks—and cross your fingers for Lucille’s one-day WF launch!!

eCommerce

• “Sephora, help me find new moisturizer” Sephora is embedding its app within ChatGPT—allowing users to receive personalized beauty recommendations and shop directly through the interface. This move taps into the growing trend of AI-driven consumer experiences, with plans for future integrated payment options.

  • They’re joined by Target, Etsy, Walmart, and Instacart who all launched a shopping experience within ChatGPT itself.

  • The move feels strategic beyond the novelty—Sephora built its brand in brick-and-mortar on education and experience, with product-trained floor staff as its core differentiator. As consumers increasingly turn to social media and AI for that same guidance, the retailer needs a new home for its authority. The timing is pointed: Ulta has been leaning hard into social commerce through its TikTok Shop partnership, chipping away at Sephora’s turf. A ChatGPT presence won’t win back market share on its own, but it’s a smart signal that Sephora knows where the beauty education conversation is moving—and it intends to be in it.

Funding news

• It pays to smell this good. Private equity firm Advent International acquired premium body care brand Salt & Stone, known for its clean formulations and iconic scents. The brand reportedly sells one deodorant every five seconds (40% of their sales come from DTC). The deal will close in April, promising to further global expansion for the brand. Salt & Stone reached $165M in revenue in 2025, surpassing its predictions.

• NA shows no signs of slowing. Constellation Brands is set to acquire HOPWTR—a premium non-alcoholic beverage brand known for its hop-infused, calorie-free sparkling water. The deal, expected to close in early April 2026, follows a 22% growth in the non-alcoholic segment in 2025, further expanding Constellation’s moderation-focused portfolio.

• Bets on consumer continue. Forward Consumer Partners closed its Fund II at a hard cap of $500 million, significantly oversubscribed since launching in December 2025. The firm plans to make equity investments between $25-250 million in well-positioned consumer brands.

• Another wellness bev… Bansk Group is set to acquire a majority stake in wellness shots brand So Good So You, which recently launched sparkling energy drinks with Target. The brand has seen over fivefold sales growth in four years.

• The growing market of hair growth. KilgourMD secured Series A funding—led by Prelude Growth Partners—to boost its R&D in scalp health and hair regrowth. Founded by dermatologist Dr. James Kilgour, the brand’s two-step serum system has sold a bottle every 20 seconds since its debut.

• And speaking of haircare… Henkel is set to acquire Olaplex for $1.4 billion—offering $2.06 per share, a 55% premium over its recent stock price. This deal, approved by Olaplex’s board, aims to enhance Henkel’s hair care portfolio and will likely close in the second half of 2026, leading to Olaplex’s delisting from Nasdaq.

• We told you, this is the next 100-year brand. Chobani is investing $567 million in expanding its La Colombe plant in Norton Shores, adding over 200,000 square feet and nearly 340 jobs. This growth reflects rising demand for ready-to-drink lattes, while also boosting local milk purchases from Michigan farmers—up to 615 million pounds annually.

• The people want better pretzels! Stellar Snacks, a woman-owned premium pretzel company, is securing a strategic minority investment from Main Post Partners, aiming to expand its distribution and production capabilities.

  • The brand built its name through airline partnerships with Southwest and Alaska—a smart, captive-audience play that got the product in front of millions of travelers before it ever had to fight for shelf space at retail.

  • What makes Stellar interesting is that it doesn’t lead with the “better-for-you” angle even though it’s there; the focus has always been on flavor first, with clean ingredients as a bonus rather than the pitch.

  • Started in 2019 a mother-daugther duo, and co-founder (mother) Elisabeth Galvin is no rookie—she founded Delyse Inc. 25 years ago, so the better-for-you snack space is essentially her career. This investment is about scaling what’s already working.

• Diverse beauty for the win. Nopalera, a “modern Mexican lifestyle brand made for the modern beauty explorer,” secured $4 million in funding led by Morgan Stanley’s Next Level Fund, co-led by L’ATTITUDE Ventures (the largest Latino-focused early-stage venture capital fund). The cash infusion aims to expand its retail presence and product offerings, reinforcing its mission to redefine Latino culture in beauty.

This week on The Curious Consumer, we sat down with Chimene Ross, CEO of Killer Brownie, for a discussion on the power of branding in bakery, running a family business, and moving from private-label to a branded product.

We also dive into the convergence of beauty + wellness (ft. hydration powder with UV protection…), why owning manufacturing is the new CPG moat, and Little Spoon’s entrance into infant formula →

We recently got some great data from our friends at Faire highlighting the dichotomy of “clean” vs. science-forward positioning for beauty and wellness brands. Check it out here →

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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Glimpse just announced their $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing their total funding to $52M (!!!). Though they got their name in retail deductions, they’ve got some big things on the horizon—they’re about to become the AI automation solution for CPG finance teams’ back office workflows.

It’s been so exciting to see Glimpse continue to grow, but what’s especially cool is what this raise says about CPG more broadly: Tech investors are seeing major value in building out CPG infrastructure. We’ve been seeing so much innovation at the product level in CPG, but the backend of so many brand operations remains deeply antiquated. Companies like Glimpse and Jampack (operations automation) are combatting this with truly brilliant solutions, and investors are paying attention.

Excited for the future of CPG infrastructure, and grateful get to celebrate with these awesome teams along the way.

And with that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Lasso Protein & Fiber Gelatin Cups

Look, I adore Jell-O. I adore it so much that one time in college I may have eaten a tray of Jell-O shots because I wanted the Jell-O more than anything. Was it a bad idea? Sure. Was I happy to have the Jell-O? Very much so. I wouldn’t have changed a thing!

I’m also the guy who is very much NOT done with the protein craze. I love the innovation, the evolution, and the crazy ideas people have. So when I learned that my friend Clarke was launching protein gelatin cups—essentially combining two of my greatest loves—you could say I was more than excited. And they did not disappoint.

• Quick Facts: A high-protein, fiber-rich alternative to traditional gelatin snacks. Each cup packs 10g of protein and 5g of prebiotic plant fiber with just 4g of sugar and no added refined sugars. The protein comes from a blend of grass-fed bovine collagen, grass-fed bovine gelatin, and grass-fed whey protein. Currently has three flavors: Orange Cream, Crisp Apple, and Watermelon Lime.

• Reasons to love:

  • Actually tastes like the real thing. The mixture of protein sources lends itself so well to not tasting like a protein product. So many better-for-you and, more specifically, high-protein treats give you something almost in the uncanny valley of food. It’s not off enough from taste parity but not close enough either, and you notice it. But here, each flavor tastes like what it says on the front of pack and feels like a Jell-O pack. If I had to pick one to go with though, the Crisp Apple is just perfectly crisp and perfectly apple-y. When you eat it, you genuinely wouldn’t know this is a high-protein alternative to the traditional stuff. (I would like to request a straight-up lime flavor soon though, please and thank you Clarke.)

  • Ready when the craving hits. Consumers these days want convenience more than anything, especially when the product is loaded with something like protein. They don’t want to mix a powder, they don’t want to blend a shake, they don’t want to wait for something to set in the fridge—they want that sweet treat ready the second the desire. I know I do. One of the coolest things to me that they did though, was make these shelf-stable. That’s hard to do. So the fact you can simply toss one in your bag, keep a few in your desk drawer, grab one after dinner when the sweet tooth kicks in is amazing.

  • Filling nutritional gaps. Most gelatin snacks are essentially chemical water, which doesn’t stop me, but doesn’t mean I don’t want something not relying on mystery gums, low-grade gelatin, and packed with sugars and dyes. So instead of a science experiment they’re using grass-fed bovine gelatin, collagen, and whey, giving a complete protein source with all nine essential amino acids your body needs for muscle synthesis and repair. Plus this pack is filled with agave inulin and cassava root fiber to support digestive health. Not too shabby for a wiggly little treat if you ask me!

Where to buy: eatlasso.com

Jenna’s Pickup:

Spring & Mulberry - Sea Salt Date-Sweetened Chocolate

This isn’t anything too novel… and perhaps that’s why it’s been the thing I keep reaching for in my sea of trendy new CPG samples (I say, with deep gratitude). Spring & Mulberry has been a trusted go-to for quality chocolate, and I was so excited to see them come out with their new flavor, sea salt. Again, nothing you haven’t seen before—they just do it right.

• Quick Facts: Date-sweetened dark chocolate with a perfect hit of sea salt.

• Reasons to love:

  • Incredible quality. This is the kind of chocolate that puts other chocolate to shame. Made with single-origin West African cacao—from an estate that uses organic and regenerative farming practices—this bar is utterly rich, melty, and luscious. It’s smoother than any other dark chocolate I’ve tried.

  • Date-sweetened! Dates add this natural sweetness, but also a subtly jammy, caramel flavor to this bar. With zero refined sugar (ingredients are literally just cacao beans, dates, cacao butter, and sea salt), this bar is a true, decadent treat. If standard dark chocolate is too bitter for you, but you appreciate the richness, this is a perfect in-between—just enough to balance the bitterness of rich cocoa without being overpoweringly sweet. While I love the brand’s other flavors as well, the additional dusting of sea salt only emphasizes the bright, creamy base and brings out the sweetness more.

Where to buy: The Spring & Mulberry site! It’s 20% off right now for orders over $100 for the brand’s birthday. 🎉

This week on The Curious Consumer, we sat down with Chimene Ross, CEO of Killer Brownie, for a discussion on the power of branding in bakery, running a family business, and moving from private-label to a branded product.

We also dive into the convergence of beauty + wellness (ft. hydration powder with UV protection…), why owning manufacturing is the new CPG moat, and Little Spoon’s entrance into infant formula →

We recently got some great data from our friends at Faire highlighting the dichotomy of “clean” vs. science-forward positioning for beauty and wellness brands. Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

We also dive into the convergence of beauty + wellness (ft. hydration powder with UV protection…), why owning manufacturing is the new CPG moat, and Little Spoon’s entrance into infant formula. Let’s get into it!

Check out NECTAR’s Taste of the Industry sensory analysis on dairy-free products here.

The Breakdown

0:00 Intro and Nate’s United Airlines adventure

1:24 Interview with Chimene Ross, CEO of Killer Brownie

16:07 Habiza Hummus and the new CPG moat

20:03 The beauty and food convergence

27:19 Kraft’s new protein Mac

32:00 Dairy-free taste parity report

36:00 Little Spoon enters baby formula

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