Big Chocolate has a trust problem.

+ Why creatine is winning, Kylie's functional hydration line, and much more

Hello hello!

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!

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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.

this LI job title is truly wild

• 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.

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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.

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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 →

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