Hello hello!
If it seems like pumpkin spice season gets earlier every year... just imagine what’s happening to Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping!! ~80% of shoppers start BFCM shopping before Thanksgiving week. So if you’re not building your BFCM plan yet, you’re missing out on a LOT of potential business.
Tapcart’s FREE 2026 BFCM report surveyed 1,200+ shoppers to tell you how shoppers are actually behaving this year, answering the most critical questions like:
How are shoppers using AI to determine purchases?
Which cohorts plan to spend more (and which ones aren’t worth discounting for)?
What’s the biggest reason ready-to-buy shoppers abandon their carts at the last second?
Every answer includes a specific plan you can implement to make this your best BFCM yet, featuring in-depth insights from the top ecommerce experts. It’s so chock full of fantastic insights, we actually cannot believe it’s free.
ALSO! We’re hosting a private dinner on Tuesday at a stunning NYC restaurant, exclusively for growth marketers at $20M+ brands. We’ll be chatting about how to turn AI discovery into your next major growth channel! We have two spots left—reply to this email if you’re interested!
Now, let’s get into our picks of the week →
Nate’s Pickups:
Chocxo Dark Milk Chocolate Cookie Butter Cups
This might surprise many, but I’m not always the biggest chocolate fan all the time. When I do enjoy chocolate, I prefer either very dark chocolate or chocolate that’s richly flavored and filled, usually with peanut butter or caramel. But, I’m a candy person, so I try everything. And it’s my job but that’s besides the point.
Chocxo makes some of my favorite filled (and lower sugar) chocolate candies, and this is probably their best one. I mean, come on. Who doesn’t like taste cookie butter, speculoos, or a Biscoff cookie on a Delta flight? Mhmm?! You know you do. That’s exactly what it is, you take a Biscoff cookie and a jar of cookie butter and put it in a chocolate cup….but with a twist! 👀
Quick Facts: These are speculoos-inspired cups with a cookie butter center made from cashew butter blended with white chocolate, cinnamon, and molasses, all wrapped in 43% organic dark milk chocolate and finished with toasted graham cracker crumbs on top. Each cup has 5 grams of sugar, sweetened with organic cane sugar. They’re also USDA Organic, Non-GMO Project Verified, and certified gluten free.
Reasons to love:
Great flavor formulation. Shockingly, there are no speculoos or Biscoff cookies in the filling. It’s cashew butter blended with white chocolate, cinnamon, and molasses to achieve that speculoos flavor. Until I sat down to write this, I hadn’t realized that! That’s some impressive flavor science at work. The taste of a Biscoff cookie is so universally well-known, it’s a beloved thing, that the only way to make this product good is to do it 100%. It must taste exactly like the original, and it does.
Well-constructed. This is a well built piece of candy. The filling-to-chocolate ratio is perfect, for my taste at least. There’s enough filling that every bite delivers and enough chocolate that it still feels like candy and not a spoonful of just the spread. If I wanted that I’d buy some Oat Haus. And one thing I love about Chocxo’s chocolate cups is that they have a little texture on top. In this product it’s graham cracker bits, but almost all of their products have some added crunch and it just adds so much to the experience.
Low sugar that doesn’t taste like it. If sugar alternatives mess you up, this is the candy for you. Chocxo uses real cane sugar and no artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols in any of their products, so if other sweeteners upset your stomach or you simply dislike their taste, this option should work for you. You might wonder how it can be low sugar when it uses real cane sugar. Well, according to the brand, the way they source their cocoa and the quality of the beans make the chocolate naturally sweeter so less added sugar is needed to coverup anything.
Where to buy. Online and retailers nationwide
Jenna’s Pickup:
Tsubi Soup - Red Miso Soup with Spicy Mushrooms
It’s back-to-school season, AKA illness season, and last week, I humbly discovered that I have not outgrown it (perhaps because I still refer to weeknights as “school nights,” and essentially live on a college campus, but I digress). While I was down for the count, I was craving soup constantly—and felt like the luckiest girl in the world when a package of Tsubi Soup arrived at my door. I proceeded to have Tsubi nearly every day last week.
If you (like me) grew up on the delicacy that is Cup Noodles, this format won’t be too surprising to you. A just-add-hot-water freeze-dried soup situation, with real veggies magically sprinkled in. But Tsubi is a major flavor + nutritional upgrade from its styrofoamed predecessor, and I am so excited to have it as part of my Fall-Winter soup rotation.
Quick Facts: Premium, freeze-dried instant soup cubes (just add hot water), made in Japan.
Reasons to love:
You can taste the quality. Every ingredient in Tsubi is sourced from Japan, and the product was made in Japan in small batches—and it tastes like it. If I didn’t make it myself, I’d never know it came from a freeze-dried cube! As a mushroom enthusiast, I LOVE the Red Miso with Spicy Mushrooms. It includes four gourmet Japanese mushrooms—shiitake, enoki, maitake, and nameko—so you get full mushroom (and lots of variety, umami-style) in every bite.
SaaS (Soup as a Snack). I’m gonna be real with you: these are nowhere near hearty enough to have as a full meal. They’re mostly a rich miso broth with some mushrooms (other flavors have tofu, but it’s still a small portion), and come out to just 35-45 calories depending on the flavor. That is at MOST a small snack, but I actually love that reframe: a warm, flavor-packed snack you can slowly sip rather than mindlessly chow down in 2 minutes. It feels so luxurious—as a vegetarian, I imagine this is how the bone broth girlies feel.
Ridiculously convenient. Have you ever wanted to BYOSoup? Or literally throw soup in your bag and take it on-the-go? Now you can! I love that these come in small, super light packets you can fit in anything and take anywhere (take THAT Cup Noodles). These would be fabulous to stock at your desk as a office snack, bring along on travel days, or just keep in your bag as an emergency snack that isn’t another protein bar.
Where to buy: Online or in stores (Whole Foods North Atlantic)!
In case you missed it… 🎧
This week, we’re catching up on a bunch of launches from the past few weeks, from David Protein’s new ready-to-drink milkshakes (fresh off a $2.2B valuation), to the Liquid Death founder’s new canned bubbly brand, and Beyond Meat’s latest (bizarre) attempt to regain relevancy.
Plus, we’re getting into what “peak function” looks like now that Folgers is doing functional coffee, why “supplements for your supplements” might be the next big thing, and more.
Catch the full episode below 👇