The gummy-ification of wellness

+ a sexy new allergy care brand, Amazon ditching Fresh, and more

Hello hello!

This week, we’re finally diving deeper into one of the hottest topics in CPG: the gummy supplement market.

Chances are, you’ve heard one of your favorite creators wax poetic about their favorite supplement—and chances are, you quickly added it to your cart. That’s a great ambassador program at work.

But the reality is, most affiliate and ambassador programs struggle for boring reasons: The wrong creators. Slow onboarding. No structure. No control. And no real proof it’s working.

But those programs that actually stick? The ones that can make YOUR brand the next add-to-cart? They…

• Find the right creators first, not the loudest ones. Start with signals and intent, not cold lists.

• Create structure as you scale, with clear tiers that show who actually drives impact.

• Stay in control as programs grow, without spreadsheets or inbox chaos.

• Prove ROI and pay with confidence, so budgets stay approved and creators stay engaged.

Endlss is how brands put structure, control, and trust behind their ambassador programs.

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News From the Week

Discovered a cool new supplement recently? We bet that someone’s already making a gummy version of it.

This week alone, we saw two more supplement gummy launches:

• Lucky Energy, one of the fastest-growing energy drink brands in the US (fresh off a $25M Series B), launchedcaffeinated gummies with 128mg of caffeine, 7g of fiber, and prebiotics per serving.

• Meanwhile, Kourtney Kardashian’s Lemme dropped yet another gummy—this time a collab with sister Kylie’s cosmetics line (gotta keep it in the fam). The Ulta-exclusive “Skin Glaze Gummies” feature pro-retinol, pro-collagen, and spermidine, promising skin radiance and hair shine.

And that’s just this week.

Walk down any supplement aisle and it’s clear: everything is a gummy now. Creatine, greens powder, collagen, caffeine—you name it, someone gummy-fied it.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global gummy supplements market hit $11.75 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $35.56 billion by 2034. But stats aside, we know everyone's been talking about the gummy supplement boom—Modern Retail literally declared 2025 "The Year of the Gummy Supplement."

We hardly doubt we're the first to draw your attention to the fact that the supplement aisle looks more like a candy store now. But today, we want to dig in a little more... how the heck did we get here?

Let’s back up to 2014, when a little brand called Olly changed the semantics of gummy supplements… and proceeded to change the supplement market forever. →

Founded in 2014 by Eric Ryan (co-founder of Method cleaning products) and Brad Harrington, Olly spotted a gap. Ryan noticed shoppers staring confused at vitamin bottles with clinical labels like “Biotin 10,000mcg” or “Melatonin 3mg.”

So, he decided to launch a brand that answered the age-old, biz-defining question: WIIFM (what’s in it for me?)

• Instead of “Melatonin,” Olly sold “Sleep.” Instead of “Biotin,” Olly sold “Beauty.” By focusing on benefits > ingredients, Olly did the pre-work for shoppers. Spoiler: consumers love when they don’t need to think critically to add-to-cart.

• Plus, Olly designed a brand to match. Instead of round, sterile, prescription-like pharmacy bottles, Olly designed square bottles with smiley faces and saturated, candy-like colors that immediately stood out on shelf.

Olly (like all trendy supplement brands) launched exclusively at Target in 2015. By 2018, Olly hit $100M+ in revenue—and by 2019, they were acquired by Unilever.

Olly may have set the stage for modern adult gummy vitamins—but it was brands like Goli Nutrition that “routineified” them and made them go viral. Goli launched in 2019 with one product: the world’s first Apple Cider Vinegar gummy.

ACV had been a wellness darling for years—the main character in morning routines as influencers choked down shots of the stuff. Goli transformed this wellness ick into a tasty treat, and quickly became one of the first gummy supplements to truly blow up on social media. By 2021, they were doing $438 million in sales, ranking them in the top 25 supplement brands in the US.

While Olly and Goli grew, a broader shift was happening in supplement and wellness space: the DTC wellness boom. This new wave of brands sold more than product—they sold lifestyles. Supplements were starting to feel aspirational and less clinical.

AG1 (Athletic Greens) led this boom. Founded in 2010, AG1 hit its stride in 2022, reaching a $1.2B+ valuation with only a single SKU: premium greens powder. With its all-in-one formula, sleek branding, and celebrity partnerships (see: every podcast host ever), AG1 proved consumers would pay premium prices for supplements that felt both aspirational and convenient.

By the early 2020s, all the pieces were in place for the gummy gold rush we see before us.

• Benefit-driven > ingredient-driven (Olly’s marketing innovation)

• Social media-worthy (Goli’s playbook)

• Premium and aspirational (AG1’s positioning)

And then, the floodgates opened. Brands across every supplement category started asking the same question: what if we made this... a gummy?

• Lemme (Kourtney Kardashian’s brand) launched with functional gummies for sleep, focus, and libido.

• Create Wellness launched creatine gummies, targeting a supplement category that had always been dominated by chalky powders.

Then came Grüns in August 2023: Eight green gummy bears per pack, 60+ ingredients, 20+ vitamins and minerals—all in a portable sachet that tastes (and in this case, looks) just like candy.

Grüns took AG1’s premium, all-in-one promise and combined it with everything that made gummies work: Olly’s format, Goli’s social playbook (we’d bet a lot of money you’ve seen a Grüns ad in the past 90 days), and the convenience consumers actually wanted (started DTC and subscription-based, moved to become more accessible at retailers like Target).

As a result, the brand’s growth has been staggering:

• Raised $62M+ total funding

• Reached a $500M valuation in under 2 years

• Ships 4 million gummies daily to 250,000+ members

• Hitting nine-figure annual recurring revenue as of 2025

And the gummy success stories and launches kept piling up:

• Create Wellness has grown 5x annually since 2022, projecting 3X-4X growth in 2025 alone, now in Sprouts, The Vitamin Shoppe, and Target nationwide

• Bloom Nutrition expanded from its viral greens powder into creatine gummies (August 2025)

• BelliWelli, the fiber brand that earned its fame from “Belli Bombing” (pouring its fiber powder into people’s drinks on social media), expanded into gummies.

• Lemme became a gummy factory, pumping out new SKUs constantly

At the end of the day, the consumer behavior fueling the rise of gummy supplements is pretty simple: It feels like a reward. Consumers want a little ~something sweet~ (it’s biological! we’re only human!), but we also want to feel like we’re doing something good for our bodies.

The catch? We genuinely don’t know if most of these work. The ingredients may be “backed by thousands of studies,” but we lack robust data on the gummy supplements themselves—their bioavailability, stability, or whether that 60+ ingredient gummy actually delivers what’s on the label (thanks, FDA, for leaving supplements largely unchecked).

• Plus, most gummies contain 2-8 grams of sugar per serving. Take multiple gummy supplements daily and that adds up fast.

But for now, consumers don’t seem to care. The gummy supplement market is booming because it solved something more important than efficacy: adherence. People actually take their gummy vitamins. They look forward to them. They build habits around them.

These companies will be the first to remind you that building healthy habits its key to individual wellness. But the quieter truth? Habitual products—healthy or not—are key to scaling a profitable business.

As our girl Mary Poppins (and later, Olly’s co-founder) put it: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

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CPG & Consumer Goods

• Allergy care, but make it sexy. Wizard Wellness launched as a new “drug-free” allergy care brand, founded by beauty veteran Lorne Lucree. The brand reframes allergy care as a wellness category (rather than medicinal) by incorporating microbiome science and skincare ingredients like licorice root extract into allergy products, like nasal spray and sinus rinse.

  • Wizard markets itself as “cleanical”—AKA clinical (”science-backed”), but “clean.” As Lorne states on Wizard’s site, “Wizard treats your nose the way you treat your skin or gut: we rebalance, restore and address the root cause.”

  • This is a fascinating middle ground between supplements and OTC drugs. It’s drug-free, relies on ritual, and claims “clean” ingredients only—but it also was developed by allergists, and apparently offers “immediate relief,” which is more similar to a traditional nasal spray. We’re interested to see other brands start to play in this space… and even more interested to see if they actually work. 👀

• Dry January? More like high January (yes, we know it’s Feb now 🤷). The United Center, the largest live entertainment venue in the US (in Chicago), partnered with Señorita and RYTHM to offer their hemp-derived THC drinks at events—the first major arena to do so.

  • Arenas are quickly becoming the new battleground for beverage brands. Liquid Death famously built its early cult following by dominating music venues and festivals—proving that live events are where you capture cultural attention, not just shelf space.

  • Combined with recent major retail placement at Sprouts, Circle K, and Target, this significant food service distribution will reinforce consumer confidence and create a positive feedback loop getting more and more consumers into the category.

  • We spoke with Rick Schepp, GM of Beverage at GTI (owner of Señorita and RYTHM), who told us:

“[This launch is] a strong signal that THC beverages can responsibly exist alongside other adult beverage options in mainstream entertainment spaces. Moments like this help normalize the category, build consumer trust, and demonstrate what thoughtful, well-executed distribution can look like at scale. We wouldn’t be surprised to see THC drinks showing up at more concerts, arenas, and live events sooner rather than later.”

• Even UNFI is going in on private-label. The wholesaler is launching nearly 50 new private label products across snacking, value, and health categories under brands like Essential Everyday and Woodstock, targeting the ever growing nearly $300 billion store brand market.

  • Did you think UNFI was just a distributor? Yea, same. UNFI is the largest distributor of natural, organic, and specialty foods in the U.S., supplying tens of thousands of grocery stores—from independents to Whole Foods. But UNFI also runs a sneaky $1B+ private-label business, owning and managing brands that it sells to retailers as ready-made store brands or white-labels for their own private labels.

• Say it with us, folks: More! Protein! Even the BigCo brands are getting in on the protein soda trend: Keurig Dr Pepper rebranded its protein soda brand, DON’T QUIT®, to “SkyPop”, launching as a protein soda nationwide at Target, Walmart, Kroger, and other major retailers. Each can contains 10g whey protein, zero sugar, and 45 calories.

  • While Keurig Dr Pepper is positioning SkyPop as the “first brand to bring protein to the modern soda market,” it certainly doesn’t look that way from our POV 🤷‍♀️. We’ve already seen a few other protein sodas and clear sparkling protein beverages disrupt the category, like Clean Simple Eats, Proda (pre launch), Barebells, Koia, Protein Pop, Waay, Joyburst.

  

• Zing Bars founder David Ingalls re-acquired the plant-based protein bar brand from the American Licorice Company, which had originally acquired a majority stake in 2021. Supported by Dunedain Ventures, Ingalls aims to accelerate innovation and digital growth as an independent, founder-led company.

  • This follows a similar path to Aloha, which transitioned to a founder-led “reincarnation” and employee-ownership model to reclaim its brand identity and scale independently after the brand nearly went under in 2017.

Retail

• Sprouting up everywhere. Sprouts Farmers Market opened its first New York location in Long Island, and Connecticut might be next.

  • Sprouts has been a champion of emerging brands—there’s rarely a week without a new brand’s Sprouts launch. Seeing the retailer expand its footprint is great news for CPG startups looking to scale!

• Kinda small for a big guy. BJ’s Wholesale Club opened its second small-format BJ’s Market in Delray Beach, Florida. The 55,000-square-foot store is about half the size of a standard BJ’s club . The first BJ’s Market opened in Warwick, Rhode Island, in 2022.

  • For context: BJ’s is a membership-based warehouse club (think Costco or Sam’s Club) known for bulk buying and massive stores that average 100,000+ square feet. While 55,000 square feet is still huge by regular grocery standards (your average Trader Joe’s is like 10,000-15,000 square feet), it’s tiny for a warehouse club.

  • What’s interesting here is that despite being “small format,” BJ’s Market still offers the same pack sizes and pricing as regular BJ’s clubs—meaning you’re still buying bulk paper goods, multipacks of pantry staples, and cleaning products, just in a more convenient location. The difference? They also added smaller individual options like half-gallons of milk and single salad kits for quick grocery runs. So yes, it’s still very much big-box bulk buying, just in a slightly less overwhelming footprint. BJ’s is calling it an “innovation lab” to test whether members want Costco-style bulk savings without needing to hike through a football-field-sized warehouse.

• Fees on fees on fees. Instacart quietly rolled out a new $5.99 fee for New York City orders this week, blaming the charge on the city’s new grocery delivery worker protections that took effect end of January 2026 (which we think is a good thing). The fee applies to orders ranging from $35 to over $180.

  • This new law comes from the Mamdani administration, which has aggressively enforced worker protections since taking office. In the first month alone, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and DCWP Commissioner Sam Levine secured over $5 million in restitution and penalties from Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda for violating the minimum pay rate, impacting nearly 49,000 workers.

• Say bye bye to Amazon Fresh. Amazon announced that it will be closing all of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores. A select number of these stores will be converted into new Whole Foods Market locations as they double down on the grocer they spent nearly $14 billion on in 2017. The company will also focus on expanding its online grocery delivery services, including Same-Day Delivery of perishables. This strategic shift makes sense given the strong momentum in online grocery—U.S. online grocery sales grew 32% in December 2025 to a record $12.7 billion.

  • Amazon’s grocery strategy has evolved significantly since the first Amazon Fresh store opened in August 2020. While Fresh and Go struggled to gain traction with consumers, Amazon has found success with new initiatives: Whole Foods Market Daily Shop locations (smaller format stores now in five locations with five more planned by end of 2026), ultra-fast Amazon Now delivery (30 minutes or less in select cities), and Same-Day Delivery of perishables which has seen 40x growth. Amazon also appointed Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel as VP of Amazon Worldwide Grocery Stores, signaling their commitment to building a unified grocery strategy.

• A beauty aisle refresh. Target is launching its largest-ever beauty assortment with nearly 3,000 new beauty products from over 60 brands, with over 90% priced under $20. This comes shortly after ending its partnership with Ulta.

  • Target is clearly trying to revamp their image and get more shoppers, especially trend-savvy shoppers looking for affordable luxury. We talked about this more in our recent newsletter, “All roads lead to Target.”

Funding

• Oats Overnight scores big. The “spoon free” (AKA drinkable) overnight oat brand just secured a hefty $45 million investment from Astō Consumer Partners. This investment follows the brand’s explosive growth in 2025, projecting over $200 million in revenue—nearly doubling its 2024 figures—and achieving 536% revenue growth from 2022-2024

  • The company previously raised $35 million in a Series B funding round in August 2024 to invest in its supply chain. Earlier, the company raised $20 million in a Series A funding round to build its Arizona facility—because yes, this company owns its manufacturing. The new funding is now intended to support marketing, build retail distribution and automate existing facilities as the brand continues to grow.

  • Oats Overnight is an impressive brand that was timed perfectly with consumer trends. Known for a high-protein, ultra convenient format, this brand scaled from a primarily online DTC and Amazon business to an omnichannel brand, now crushing it at Target, Walmart and club. The brand currently has over 300,000 active DTC subscribers. And because they own their manufacturing (now two facilities), they control formulation—so they can iterate quickly in response to customer demand (in other words: have a ton of fun new flavors that keep the brand exciting for its loyalists).

• Good Bacteria cashes in. Gut health startup Good Bacteria secured $3.2 million in seed funding to ramp up its probiotic supplement business.

  • There are a lot of probiotic supplements and probiotic food brands out there right now. What makes Good Bacteria different is its “Rotating Synbiotic,” which introduces a new formulation of probiotic strains each week of the month. The brand describes its system as designed to “promote microbiome diversity and support gut barrier health.”

• More cash for consumer. Encore Consumer Capital closed its oversubscribed Fund V at $350 million. The San Francisco-based private equity firm focuses on consumer staples companies with $10–150 million in annual revenues and has invested in brands such as tarte cosmetics, Supergoop, and Love Wellness.

• Frozen pizza anyone? Brynwood Partners sold Great Kitchens Food Company to Rich Products. Great Kitchens, formed in 2020, manufactures private label and branded take-and-bake pizzas and flatbreads.

  • This makes sense—Rich’s has the scale to take Great Kitchens’ high-velocity pizza lines and plug them into their massive global distribution network, which spans over 100 countries with annual sales exceeding $5.8 billion.

• Culturally relevant brands win. Live Tinted, a color cosmetics brand founded by Deepica Mutyala that focuses on shade-inclusive complexion products, secured funding from Curate Capital Fund 2 and L’Oréal’s BOLD, marking the first co-investment by BOLD and Unilever Ventures in a U.S. beauty brand.

  • Live Tinted is now one of Ulta Beauty’s fastest-growing prestige cosmetics brands, selling 1M+ products in 2025 alone!

• Owning the tomato market. Violet Foods LLC, backed by Amphora Equity Partners, acquired the Muir Glen organic tomato brand from General Mills. This acquisition expands Violet Foods’ portfolio, which includes Sclafani, Fattoria Fresca, and Don Pepino (the #1 pizza sauce brand in the Northeast), in the $5 billion+ U.S. tomato market.

  • With all the new tomato sauce brands making moves I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them gets scooped up by Violet Foods soon 👀 - Nate

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