COUNTER SERVICE | SEPTEMBER 2, 2026

Counter Service is Deet’s Eats’ daily 60-second video briefing on the consumer-brand news worth knowing. Here on Substack, we go one level deeper on the three stories and the operating lesson connecting them.

Three different stories landed this morning, but they are all making the same move: plugging into a system that already has money, attention, or customers. That is often faster than building another system from scratch.

TODAY’S SPECIAL: Medici raises $250 million

Medici Brands, the parent company of David Protein and HallPass, raised a $250 million Series B led by Greenoaks and Valor Equity Partners. David launched in September 2024 with a protein bar. It now reaches more than 35,000 retail locations and says it is on track to surpass $300 million in 2026 revenue. Medici has already added HallPass and plans to launch another consumer brand, Rowdy, later this year. The round is not just fuel for more protein bars. Medici is financing a multi-brand operating system that can move from one breakout product into several categories.

SIDE DISH: Sephora builds a drop calendar inside TikTok

Sephora is piloting TikTok Shop through exclusive monthly product drops beginning September 19. The important part is not simply that Sephora joined another marketplace. The retailer is creating appointment shopping inside an entertainment feed. A recurring drop calendar gives shoppers a reason to return before they know exactly what they are buying.

WHO’S COOKING: Tim Hortons links two loyalty economies

Customers who connect their Tim Hortons and Triangle Rewards accounts can now earn up to 5% in Canadian Tire Money on eligible Tim Hortons purchases. Coffee already creates frequency. Connecting that habit to another retailer’s rewards currency gives both companies a reason for customers to spend more often without building a new loyalty audience from zero.

THE CHECK

Capital, attention and habit are all infrastructure. The brands moving fastest do not insist on owning every piece. They find a system that is already working, plug into it and make the combined engine more valuable.

The Deeter Digest is one sharp weekly read on consumer brands, retail, funding and the moves worth knowing before your next meeting. Subscribe for free to get Monday’s edition.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. James Watt has made over two billion cans of beer, which, by his own math, means he's caused more hangovers than any other human on the planet.

Last week he launched a hangover drink. He called it karma.

Fool’s Fix is a sparkling electrolyte drink built to be the last thing you drink at night, and it is genuinely the most interesting launch of the week. Not because of the liquid. Because of the cap table. Watt is giving 10% of the entire company to his first 20,000 customers, and he was explicit about why: not influencers, not celebrities, not some famous face in return for an Instagram post.

Now look at what else happened this week. Beekeeper Coffee added Draymond Green, Rich Paul, Anthony Davis, and Jared Goff as investors. Chris Hemsworth invested in Australian whisky producer Archie Rose. Saint James launched Yerba Mate with a national campaign fronted by Victor Cruz, Isabela Rangel Grutman, and Jack Hughes.

Four brands went shopping for famous names in the same seven days that one founder deliberately did the opposite.

Both approaches can work. But one of them is a bet on attention and the other is a bet on ownership, and we are about to find out which one holds up. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

James Watt Gives 10% of His New Company to Customers

James Watt launched Fool’s Fix on August 24, a sparkling recovery drink positioned as the final drink of the evening. Citrus Salt and Pear, formulated with electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, glycine, and prickly pear across twelve active ingredients. Six 12oz cans run £23, so roughly £3.99 a can. UK first, then Europe, then the U.S. It sits under Second Best, his new beer venture.

It has a money-back guarantee: if you don't feel better the next morning, you get a refund.

And then the actual story. The first 20,000 customers each get 100 Founding Shares, collectively 10% of the business, for free. Former BrewDog Equity Punks who registered for Second Best get a stake automatically without buying anything.

Watt framed it directly. Founders give equity to celebrities, influencers, advisors, and investors. He decided to turn that model on its head and give it to customers instead.

You cannot separate this from what happened to the last group of people who believed him. BrewDog’s Equity for Punks scheme raised money from thousands of amateur investors across multiple rounds through 2021. When Tilray acquired parts of the business for £33 million in March, those shareholders got nothing. Watt stepped down as CEO two years ago, tried to buy the company back this summer, and is now building the next one on a promise not to do that again.

I covered the BrewDog buyback attempt in the P.S. of Issue #40 and said buying back the company you already blew up is a level of self-awareness I have to respect. This is the same instinct pointed at a better target. Whether it works depends entirely on whether 20,000 people believe the guy whose last crowdfunding cohort got wiped out.

The category timing is also sharp. We covered UNDO landing 900 Target stores last week with pre-alcohol gummies. Fool’s Fix is the same occasion from the other end. Hangover support has been a graveyard of one-time purchases for a decade because the product only matters at a moment nobody plans for. Both brands solved that by tying the purchase to the drinking itself rather than the morning after.

TowerBrook Partners With Rael

TowerBrook Capital Partners announced a strategic partnership with Rael, the women’s wellness platform founded in 2017 by CEO Yanghee Paik and two other Korean American women. Rael spans period care, skincare, hormonal wellness, and adjacent categories. Existing investors include Colopl Next, Signite Partners, Unilever Ventures, and BAM Ventures.

Women’s health keeps drawing institutional money, and the pattern is consistent: buyers want platforms, not products. Rael is not a period care brand that also sells skincare. It is a customer relationship that spans several categories, which is much harder to build and much more defensible to own.

Put it next to Essity buying Kenvue’s Brazilian feminine care business for $284 million last week, plus its earlier acquisitions of Knix and Modibodi. The category that used to be an afterthought inside diversified conglomerates is now what specialists are deliberately assembling.

KKR Buys Ci FLAVORS From L Catterton

KKR is acquiring Japanese beauty platform Ci FLAVORS from L Catterton and other shareholders. Founded around 2011, Ci FLAVORS owns brands across haircare, skincare, and beauty, including &honey. L Catterton originally invested in 2022.

Four years in and out. That is a fast hold period for a consumer platform, and it says something about how liquid Asian beauty assets have become.

It is also L Catterton’s second notable exit in a month. They sold Thorne to P&G for $3.8 billion three weeks ago after taking it private for $680 million in 2023. Meanwhile, they still own Kodiak, which has doubled since 2021, and they led Smash Foods’ $18 million round in July. That firm is having a year, and watching what they buy next is a reasonable proxy for where consumer capital thinks the puck is going.

The Drinking Occasion Is Being Unbundled

Four launches this week, all circling the same consumer.

BERO released glass bottles, reportedly the first craft non-alcoholic beer brand in the U.S. to do so. The Kingston Golden Pils bottle is available online and at select bars and restaurants in the U.S. and UK. Herb Light launched as a non-alcoholic, low-dose THC beer from the founders of Quality Meats, a Chicago ad agency: 40 calories, 1mg THC, 1mg CBD, with genuinely fun, nostalgic branding. Teeling Irish Whiskey entered canned cocktails with Phoenix Twist, combining its Small Batch whiskey with ginger, lime, and yuzu. And Willie’s Remedy+ launched Stardust Sleep Gummies at 10mg THC, 25mg CBD, and 10mg CBN.

Add Fool’s Fix for after and UNDO for before, and the occasion that used to be one product is now at least four. Something to drink instead. Something to drink alongside. Something to take first. Something to take after.

We have been tracking this from the deal side all summer. AB InBev’s beer volumes grew 1.1% while non-alcoholic grew 27%. Damm bought into a soda brand. Sazerac spent a reported £500 million on Au Vodka’s RTD business. The brewers understood, before almost anyone else, that growth had migrated out of the liquid and into everything surrounding it.

The BERO detail is the one I would flag for founders. Glass bottles in non-alc are not a formulation decision; they are a status decision. Non-alcoholic beer spent a decade apologizing for itself in cans that looked like a compromise. Putting it in glass and onto a back bar is a bet that customers want to be seen holding it.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Beekeeper Coffee Adds an Athlete Roster

Beekeeper Coffee announced a group of new celebrity and athlete investors including Draymond Green, Rich Paul, Anthony Davis, and Jared Goff. The canned coffee brand recently made its nationwide Target debut, expanding beyond regional grocers like Wegmans and The Fresh Market.

Rich Paul is the interesting name on that list. He is not a celebrity investor in the usual sense; he represents a large share of the NBA, which means the value is less about his audience and more about who he can introduce the brand to. That is a different asset than a posting schedule.

Still, four famous names arriving the same week James Watt built a company specifically to avoid this makes for a useful natural experiment. Beekeeper just got national distribution at Target. The names will drive awareness into those doors. The question, as always, is what month four looks like.

Chris Hemsworth Invests in Archie Rose

Chris Hemsworth invested in Archie Rose Distilling Co., the Sydney distillery founded in 2014 that is now Australia’s largest whisky producer and its number one independent gin producer. Hemsworth joins ahead of the brand’s U.S. debut later this year.

Celebrity spirits investments have had a rough month in this newsletter. LVMH exited Beyoncé’s whisky. Campari sold Cabo Wabo. But the structure here is closer to the version that works: an established producer with real volume and manufacturing depth adding a name for a specific market entry, rather than a name launching a brand from scratch. Archie Rose does not need Hemsworth to have a business. It needs him to get American attention.

Quick Hits

k2o, Kylie Jenner’s beauty-first hydration brand, went live online and in-store at Target nationwide across four varieties of its Advanced Skin Hydration Mix. Launched April 2026, $2 million in sales in five weeks. Jay Hunter, formerly Chief Revenue Officer at MaryRuth’s, took over as CEO earlier this year, which is the detail that matters more than the famous founder.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Nancy Twine Is Back

After scaling Briogeo to $100 million in revenue and selling it to Wella Company in 2022, Nancy Twine returns September 1 with a new haircare brand called Soulstice. The tagline is “where science meets soul.”

Second-time founders with a completed exit are the most interesting people in consumer right now, and we keep running into them. The Yasso founders built Snack Buddies and Foundership. The Corkcicle co-founder launched Heist. Now Twine, who did the hard version of this once already and knows exactly which parts of it were luck.

She also has something a first-timer cannot buy: every retail beauty buyer will take the meeting.

Create Puts Both Trends in One Sachet

Create expanded its Creatine + Electrolytes line with a Lemonade Collection in Strawberry, Peach, Raspberry, and Classic, plus a variety pack.

I have spent two months in this newsletter arguing that electrolytes are the new protein and creatine is the newest new protein. Create has now put both in a single product. I am declaring the ledger closed on that one.

Saint James Enters Yerba Mate

Saint James Iced Tea launched a Yerba Mate line at 150mg natural caffeine, 20 to 25 calories, and 3 to 4g of sugar across Mango Passionfruit, Raspberry Lemon, and Strawberry Tangerine. The national launch campaign features Isabela Rangel Grutman, Victor Cruz, and Jack Hughes. In August, the company reported 164% year-over-year revenue growth, with distribution in more than 25,000 retail doors across the U.S. and Canada.

That growth number is the story, not the campaign. A tea brand growing 164% has earned the right to extend into an adjacent caffeine format, and yerba mate is where the energy category is quietly pooling.

More Launches

TRUBAR extended its kids’ protein bar line with Banana Bread and licensed Minions packaging, launching DTC before Sprouts, Albertsons, and Safeway. That is the second Minions deal we have covered after Grüns, so somebody at Illumination is running a very good licensing desk.

REP, the UK protein brand, added Salted Caramel and Strawberry RTD milkshakes at 20g protein and five to six ingredients per can. Little’s Coffee launched an iced coffee concentrate line in Sweet Cinnamon, Frozen Vanilla, and Creamy Caramel. Hiya launched a Teen Daily Multivitamin gummy for ages 12 to 17 with 15-plus vitamins and minerals including B vitamins, myo-inositol, and K2.

And ARLO launched to bring Moroccan culinary argan oil into the American pantry. Cold-pressed, single-ingredient, USDA Organic, sourced exclusively from women-owned cooperatives in the Souss Valley. Co-founder Amine Maadir said his grandmother called it the elixir of oils, and he couldn't find it anywhere after moving to the U.S. Founder-origin stories are cheap. Ones with a supply chain attached are not.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Tony’s Chocolonely secured distribution at four of five national Canadian retailers in 18 months and is now a top-10 chocolate bar brand in the country. Combined U.S. and Canada revenue is north of $100 million a year. Eighteen months to top-10 in a category dominated by companies a century older is genuinely fast.

Chomps surpassed 65,000 points of distribution after launching nationwide at Starbucks, adding Costco Canada and Home Depot on top of recent launches at Sam’s Club, BJ’s, 7-Eleven, ExtraMile, and RaceTrac. MULO sales are up 81% over 52 weeks.

The number I would underline: 79% of Chomps buyers are incremental to the meat snack category. They are not taking share from Slim Jim; they are bringing people who never bought meat snacks into the aisle. That is the metric that gets a brand more shelf, because it grows the category for the retailer rather than reshuffling it.

Also worth noting where Chomps went. Starbucks and Home Depot are not snack aisles; they are occasions. Morning coffee and a hardware run. Floura landed at Starbucks nationwide the same week. Starbucks is quietly becoming a serious CPG channel.

Saint James reported 164% year-over-year revenue growth with distribution past 25,000 doors.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Starbucks: Floura went nationwide with its 15g Blueberry Matcha fiber bar, and Chomps landed nationwide. Sprouts: Drizzy launched online and in-store, roughly a month after relocating from Sydney. 7-Eleven: Protein Candy launched at 500-plus stores in Canada. Kroger: Xochi is now available throughout Texas. Costco: Doughlicious launched at select locations. Target: k2o went nationwide.

Drizzy is the fast one. We covered their U.S. launch plan in Issue #42 when Georgia Park and Jason Spyrides were still relocating with backing from Alexis Ohanian, RiverPark, and Nucleus. Squeeze-bottle peanut butter into Sprouts within weeks of landing is a genuinely quick turnaround.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Vacation named Nelson Miranda CEO. The University of Florida alum spent two decades at P&G before becoming CEO of DeMert Brands in 2020, the company behind Not Your Mother’s, which Henkel acquired earlier this year. A sunscreen brand built on nostalgia and design, bringing in a P&G operator with a completed exit, is the same move OLIPOP and Everyday Dose made this month.

Levain Bakery named Lorna Sommerville and Taya Stenson Co-CEOs. Sommerville comes from Coca-Cola, Mammoth Brands, and Function of Beauty. Stenson spent more than a decade at Starbucks. Packaged goods experience plus QSR experience is a deliberate pairing for a bakery deciding whether its future is stores, shelf, or both.

Nancy Twine returns with Soulstice, three years after the Wella exit.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Everybody gives equity to famous people. This week one founder gave it to customers instead, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

James Watt is giving 10% of Fool’s Fix to his first 20,000 buyers. His words: founders give equity to celebrities, influencers, advisors, and investors, so he decided to turn that model on its head. Same week, Beekeeper Coffee added four athlete investors, Chris Hemsworth backed Archie Rose, and Saint James put three famous faces in a national campaign.

Here is the thing. The celebrity playbook is not stupid. It works often enough that a rational operator keeps running it. Beekeeper just got Target nationwide, and Draymond Green plus Rich Paul will absolutely drive awareness into those doors. Archie Rose is a real distillery using Hemsworth for a specific market entry, not to invent a business.

But we have spent a month watching what happens when the famous name is the whole thesis. Alex Cooper’s Unwell had one of the biggest podcast audiences and shut down the beverage line in under two years. LVMH quietly offloaded Beyoncé’s whisky. Campari sold Sammy Hagar’s tequila. The ones that worked had something else underneath. IM8 is up 359% because Danny Yeung and Prenetics built an operating company first. k2o has a former MaryRuth’s CRO running it. Alix Earle used Cymbiotika for years before she took equity.

So the honest version is that celebrity is a cost-of-first-impression lever. It is efficient. It is also rented, repriced constantly, and it does nothing for the second purchase.

What Watt is testing is whether ownership does something different. If 20,000 people own a piece of Fool’s Fix, they are not an audience; they are a distribution channel with skin in the game. They tell friends because they benefit, not because they were paid to post. In theory, that compounds where a campaign decays.

In practice, I have real questions. Twenty thousand shareholders is an administrative burden most consumer companies would never take on voluntarily. The shares are almost certainly illiquid for years. And the people being asked to trust this are, in many cases, the exact people whose BrewDog Equity Punk stakes went to zero when Tilray bought the pieces for £33 million. Watt is asking a burned cohort to believe him a second time, which is either the boldest part of the plan or the part that sinks it.

I do not know which. That is what makes it worth watching.

But the underlying question applies to every brand reading this, and it has nothing to do with whether you can afford an athlete. It is this: when you hand out equity, are you buying attention or are you buying advocacy? Attention is cheaper, faster, and shows up in launch metrics. Advocacy is slower and shows up in reorders, which is the number that actually decides whether you are still here in three years.

Most brands buy attention and hope it turns into advocacy on its own. It usually does not.

Build accordingly.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

James Watt giving 10% of his new company to customers and why the Equity Punk history makes it complicated. TowerBrook backing Rael and the institutionalization of women’s health. KKR buying Ci FLAVORS out of L Catterton four years in. The drinking occasion splitting into four products. And Chomps hitting 65,000 doors with 79% incremental buyers.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

ARLO launched this week to sell Moroccan culinary argan oil in the United States. Cold-pressed, single-ingredient, sourced from women-owned cooperatives in the Souss Valley.

Co-founder Amine Maadir said his grandmother called it the elixir of oils. He grew up with it at the center of his family’s table in Morocco, moved to the U.S., and could not find it anywhere.

That is the oldest business idea there is. Somebody moves, misses something, discovers nobody sells it, and builds the company that does. Sriracha, Chobani, and about a third of the American pantry started exactly there.

We spend a lot of time in this newsletter on cap tables, velocity data, and trade dress rulings. It is worth remembering that a real percentage of the brands we will be covering in five years exist because somebody could not find the thing they grew up with.

Until next Monday, Jonathan Deeter Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. Prediction ledger, final entry. I said electrolytes were the new protein. I said creatine was the newest new protein. This week, Create launched a Creatine + Electrolytes lemonade line, putting both in one sachet, which means the trends have merged and I am officially out of runway on that bit. Still outstanding: pickle protein powder by Q1 2027. Four months left. Somebody please.

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This newsletter is finished with Trophy Wife Finishing Salts, elevating every bite since 2025.

Issue #43 | August 24, 2026

🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Five weeks ago I wrote that the Van Leeuwen trade dress ruling was the most important thing that happened in CPG that month, and that if your product lives on a shelf you should read it twice.

Rebel Creamery filed for Chapter 11 on August 14. Twenty-nine days after the judgment.

The filing lists $13.78 million in assets against $23.85 million in liabilities, and the $23.785 million Van Leeuwen judgment is essentially all of it. A packaging design decision made in 2018 ended a company in 2026. I have written many sentences in this newsletter about brand assets being real assets. This is the first time one of them has a bankruptcy docket attached.

Elsewhere: Sazerac spent a reported £500 million on a Welsh vodka brand founded by a kid who got kicked by Eden Hazard on live television. Mid-Day Squares raised $8 million in debt to build capacity ahead of Costco. Zevia’s activist investor wants to sell the whole company. And UNDO raised $1 million to put hangover gummies in 900 Target stores.

Let’s dig in.

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🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Rebel Creamery Files Chapter 11 Twenty-Nine Days After Losing on Packaging

Rebel Creamery filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Utah on August 14, listing roughly $13.78 million in assets against $23.85 million in liabilities. The assets break down to about $5.22 million in cash, $2.59 million in receivables, and $5.65 million in inventory. Van Leeuwen sits on the creditor list with a $23.785 million claim, which Rebel lists as disputed and is appealing.

We covered the underlying ruling in Issue #39. Judge Eric Komitee of the Eastern District of New York found on July 16 that Rebel had intentionally infringed and diluted Van Leeuwen’s trade dress. Not the name. Not the logo. The pint: monochromatic cardboard, matching lid, pastel palette, black script with an oversized initial, minimalist layout.

Here is the detail that has stuck with me since I read the coverage. In August 2024, a woman wrote to Rebel to complain that she sent her husband to buy Van Leeuwen, but he came home with Rebel instead because the products sat next to each other and looked the same. She said she nearly did it herself. Two years later, that email was evidence in a Brooklyn courtroom.

Van Leeuwen asked for $36.4 million. Komitee took Rebel’s own sales figures and cut roughly a third, reasoning that some of those sales came from genuine demand for keto ice cream rather than from the packaging. So the court separated what Rebel earned on its own merits from what it earned by looking like somebody else, and the second number was still large enough to end the business.

Rebel is a real company. Founded in 2017 by Austin and Courtney Archibald, sold to Walmart, Kroger, Target, and Safeway. It had cash, inventory, and receivables. None of that mattered against a single judgment tied to a design decision made eight years ago.

I said in July that Van Leeuwen won on documentation, and that founders should save their design files. I want to add the other half now. If you're launching into a crowded set, get somebody outside your payroll to review your comps next to the category leader and tell you honestly whether a distracted shopper could confuse them. That conversation costs a few hundred dollars. This one cost a company.

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Sazerac Buys Au Vodka in a Reported £500 Million Deal

Sazerac signed a binding agreement to acquire Au Vodka, the Swansea-based flavored vodka and RTD brand. Terms are confidential, but Sky News, citing drinks industry executives, reported a valuation around £500 million, roughly $677 million. Co-founders Charlie Morgan and Jackson Quinn are each expected to clear more than £100 million. The transaction is expected to complete within weeks.

Au Vodka’s 2025 canned cocktail sales rose nearly 37% to $81.6 million. The brand is known for gold bottles, eleven flavored expressions, and social media output that behaves more like a music label than a spirits company. DJ Charlie Sloth joined as an investor and director in 2017.

If the £500 million figure holds, this is one of the largest sums Sazerac has ever paid for a single brand, and the largest exit yet for a British RTD company.

Two things worth pulling out. First, Sazerac spent this money three weeks after Brown-Forman’s family rejected its $15 billion offer for the second time. After being turned down on the transformational deal, it went and bought growth somewhere else. That is a company with capital and a mandate, and it has now done Dirty Shirley, 818, SipMARGS, Western Son, SVEDKA, BuzzBallz, and Au in short order.

Second, look at where the RTD money keeps landing. Finnish Long Drink exited at $325 million. AB InBev’s Cutwater is approaching a billion. MOTH raised £11 million as the UK’s number two. Now Au at a reported £500 million. Canned cocktails have gone from a format to the most reliably liquid category in beverage alcohol, and the UK keeps producing the assets.

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Zevia’s Activist Wants a Sale

Kanen Wealth Management, which owns roughly 4% of Zevia, is publicly pushing the company to explore a sale. Zevia’s market cap sits just north of $100 million against 2025 net sales of $161 million. Kanen believes the company is worth roughly twice its current price in a sale.

We flagged this last week when Zevia’s board said it would review the proposal. The math is the whole argument: a brand in more than 41,000 retail locations, doing $161 million in sales, valued at less than one times revenue. Distribution that broad usually commands more than that, which is exactly the gap an activist exists to point at.

The uncomfortable read for founders is what Zevia represents. It got everything the pitch deck promises. National distribution, a real brand, a category that grew around it. And the public market decided that was worth less than the revenue it produces, largely because zero-sugar soda got very crowded and Zevia’s growth flattened while OLIPOP and Poppi took the oxygen.

Broad distribution is not a moat. It is an operating expense that happens to also be a milestone.

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Essity Buys Kenvue’s Brazilian Feminine Care Business

Essity acquired Kenvue’s feminine care division in Brazil for $284 million, including pad and tampon brands and the manufacturing facilities behind them. The Swedish consumer health group has been assembling this category for years, adding Knix, Modibodi, and Edgewell’s North American feminine care business.

This is portfolio surgery seen from the buying side. Kenvue, spun out of Johnson & Johnson and under real pressure, is shedding a regional business that is not core to its future. Essity, which has decided feminine care is exactly its future, picks it up along with the plants.

We watched Nestlé hand half its water business to Platinum Equity, Conagra put brands under review, and LVMH exit Beyoncé’s whisky. Same mechanic every time. One company’s non-core division is another company’s platform, and the specialist almost always pays more than the conglomerate thinks it is worth.

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More Deals Worth Watching

J.S.B. Industries acquired crustless sandwich brand Fave’Wich from Gold Medal Bakery, with Gold Medal staying on as a manufacturing partner. Fave’Wich launched early last year with sunflower butter and grape jelly, 6g of protein, no nuts or dairy, and got into Shaws, Stop & Shop, Big Y, Roche Bros, and select CVS locations. The PB&J war we have been tracking since Welch’s and Jams entered now includes consolidation, which is fast for a category this young.

Cawston Press acquired L.A. Brewery, the London kombucha and premium non-alc producer, following its January acquisition of non-alc beer brand LOAH. A UK soft drinks company quietly assembling a non-alcoholic platform.

River Associates acquired wet wipe manufacturer Diamond Wipes, its seventh deal of the year. Middle-market PE keeps buying the manufacturing layer while everyone watches the brands.

A1R Water listed on the Nasdaq via SPAC, raising $96 million. The Miami company produces water from atmospheric humidity, then mineralizes and cans it. A SPAC in 2026 is a choice, and I will be watching this one with genuine curiosity.

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💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Mid-Day Squares Raises $8M in Debt to Build Capacity

Mid-Day Squares secured $8 million in debt financing from Investissement Québec and Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions to expand manufacturing ahead of Costco and Walmart launches in the U.S. The brand has sold roughly 90 million bars since 2018 and is approaching 11,000 doors across North America.

Note the structure. This is debt, not equity, and it is government-backed development capital rather than venture money. Mid-Day Squares did $35 million TTM when we covered them in Issue #38, with No Bread PB&J as the fastest-growing line. They are financing capacity against proven velocity and confirmed retail commitments, without giving up ownership.

That is the seventh capacity story we have tracked in six weeks after Vitamin Well, Vita Coco, Orkla, Bertagni, Lotus Bakeries, and Bongards. The difference here is scale. You do not need a €500 million Biscoff expansion to be capacity-constrained. You need a Costco launch and a plant that cannot keep up.

UNDO Raises $1M and Lands 900 Target Stores

UNDO Gummies closed a $1 million seed and launched nationwide at Target. Founded in 2025 by Ben Delamont, Jen Delamont, and Kevin Mai, the LA brand makes pre-alcohol support gummies formulated with DHM, milk thistle, B12, magnesium, and zinc. It was already in more than 1,000 independent retailers before Target.

The independents came first, which is the part worth studying. A thousand independent doors is a real proof set, and it is the kind of evidence a Target buyer can act on. Same shape as Wandering Bear testing cartons in 300 stores before earning a national can rollout, and Ancient Crunch running 93 Whole Foods stores before going nationwide.

Also note the category. Hangover support has been a graveyard of one-time purchases for a decade because the product only matters the night before, and nobody plans. Positioning it as pre-alcohol rather than morning-after at least puts the purchase in the same trip as the alcohol.

Lily Collins Joins IM8

Lily Collins joined IM8 as a shareholder and brand ambassador, alongside David Beckham, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Aryna Sabalenka, Ollie Bearman, and Jay Shetty.

IM8 hit $45 million in Q2 revenue, up 359% year over year, on top of the $1 billion non-dilutive facility from General Catalyst we covered in Issue #38. In a month where Unwell shut down and two conglomerates dumped celebrity spirits, IM8 keeps compounding, and the reason is structural. Danny Yeung and Prenetics built the operating company first. The famous names sit on top of a real business rather than substituting for one.

Quick Hits

Dolce Glow raised an $11 million Series A led by CAVU Consumer Partners, with celebrity and influencer participation. Isabel Alysa launched the at-home tanning line in 2021 and hit Sephora in February. CAVU’s portfolio includes Poppi, Health-Ade, Once Upon a Farm, OSEA, and Thrive Market.

Pimentae, the UK canned cocktail brand, is crowdfunding on Crowdcube and has raised £155,000 from 145 investors with twelve days left.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Creatine Is Now a Line Extension

Three hydration and protein brands added creatine in a single week. Magna launched Magna + Creatine with 5g of creatine monohydrate, plus magnesium, sodium, and potassium, across three flavors. Salud launched Muscle + Strength with 5g of creatine plus 50mg of Senactiv. And Tonic, the UK supplement brand, is releasing Creatine + Brain in September at 10g per serving with taurine, biotin, and blueberry extract.

Two weeks ago, P&G paid $3.8 billion for Thorne, where creatine reportedly accounts for 25% to 30% of revenue. Needed launched women’s creatine the same week. Now three more brands have bolted it onto existing lines.

Creatine has completed the journey from bodybuilding powder to default functional add-on, which is exactly the arc protein took, and electrolytes are taking. The tell is that nobody is launching creatine brands anymore. They are adding creatine to existing brands, which is what happens when an ingredient stops being a product and becomes an expectation.

Heist Bets on Better Decaf

Heist is a new specialty coffee brand from Corkcicle co-founder Stephen Bruner and his wife Sarah Bruner, built around high-end decaf and low-caffeine coffee using a fully water-based decaffeination process instead of a chemical one.

Decaf has been the most neglected shelf in coffee for forty years, treated as a compromise product for people who are missing out. A specialty brand attacking it with sourcing quality and process transparency is a genuinely good idea, and it arrives as the entire beverage category tilts toward moderation. Non-alc beer, THC seltzers, functional soda, and now serious decaf. The through line is people wanting the ritual without the chemical.

More Launches

Sol de Janeiro launched an Intense Perfume Mist line across four Cheirosa scents promising ten hours of performance. The brand now sells one Cheirosa mist every second.

Good Protein launched Clear Protein + Electrolytes at 10g plant protein and 520mg electrolytes in Peach Rings, Watermelon Candy, and Pink Lemonade. O Positiv moved into beauty with URO Hair Growth + Volume. KAYALI launches a Lip & Body Collection on August 28.

Purely Elizabeth released Chewy Granola Bites at 6g fiber and 5g added sugar across four flavors, its first launch since Ferrero agreed to acquire it last week.

Froot Pops extended beyond enrobed frozen fruit into a sour-coated line with Fizzy Peaches and Zingy Blueberries. Sour continues to eat everything, which I called five weeks ago and am still slightly smug about.

Sourmilk launches Vanilla Bean at 14g protein and 4g added sugar from organic honey. Kreatures of Habit added Blueberry Cream Cruncher to its creatine and protein bar line. Little’s Coffee launched iced coffee concentrate sachets. Good Boy Vodka entered the ade category with LYTE, a 4.5% ABV non-carbonated line in Orange Rush, Blue Crush, Fruit Punch, and Lemon Lime, on YTD sales up around 150%.

Good Wipes did a Liquid Death collaboration on cream soda-scented flushable wipes, exclusive to Walmart, which is either the best or worst sentence in this issue.

The Quality Group is bringing More Nutrition to the U.S., launching on Amazon before a nationwide Vitamin Shoppe rollout in October. H1 revenue jumped more than 40% to €850 million, and the CVC-backed group also owns majority stakes in RAW Nutrition and BUM Energy.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Javvy will be in 40,000 doors by year-end, with its Protein Coffee line selling at three times the functional coffee category average on dollar velocity. We first covered Javvy going nationwide at Walmart in July, and that trajectory is holding.

Bucked Up is reportedly a $450 million brand and has surpassed 100,000 points of distribution.

Physician’s Choice is on pace to exceed $300 million in revenue this year across more than 80,000 retail locations, and is the number one probiotic brand on Amazon.

DASH Water reported its first-ever profit as UK sales jumped more than 40%. Founded by Jack Scott and Alex Wright in 2017.

NielsenIQ announced the winners of its ninth annual Design Impact Awards, recognizing eight packaging refreshes that delivered measurably better results, including Aval French Cider, Liquid I.V., and Back to Nature. Worth reading: Rebel Creamery filed Chapter 11 over packaging that same week. Design is measurable in both directions.

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🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Target: Stone & Skillet launched at 600+ stores, Pretty Tasty went storewide, and UNDO landed in nearly 900. Costco: Protein Pints launched across Texas. Walmart: Kindling Snacks and Wizard Wellness both entered select stores, with Wizard also at CVS. Whole Foods: Fable Fish launched in select stores. CVS: Space Camp went nationwide. Sprouts: Row 7 is now available nationwide. PureGym: Neutonic launched at 100+ locations. Westside Market: NYMBL Ice Cream launched. And YOSHI Matcha Liqueur signed with Southern Glazer’s for distribution across 47 U.S. markets.

Stone & Skillet is a nice one to see. We covered their $5 million raise back in May with a joke about premium English muffins, and 600 Target doors is a real answer.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Everyday Dose named Kyle Thibaut CEO. He spent two decades scaling Robinhood, Credit Karma, and TrueCar. Founder Jack Savage moves to Chairman. Second functional coffee and beverage brand this month to hand the CEO seat to a scaled operator while the founder stays on, after OLIPOP brought in Electrolit’s Christian Patiño Webb.

Righteous Felon Craft Jerky hired Mondelez veteran Cristina Marinucci as Chief Commercial Officer. She was Global Head of Shopper Insights & Analytics at Mondelez with prior roles at J&J, Mars, PepsiCo, and Reckitt.

Bobbie brought on former Liquid I.V. CMO Stacey Andrade-Wells as Chief Growth Officer a few months back. She spent nearly five years helping build Liquid I.V. into a billion-dollar brand.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Rebel Creamery had cash. It had inventory. It had receivables. It had Walmart, Kroger, Target, and Safeway. It filed for bankruptcy anyway, because of how it drew a pint in 2018.

I want to be careful here, because a lazy version of this take goes “protect your IP” and stops. That is true, and it is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that the court did something most operators never do. It separated Rebel’s revenue into the portion earned by the product and the portion earned by the packaging. Van Leeuwen asked for $36.4 million. Komitee cut roughly a third, reasoning that some of those sales came from real demand for keto ice cream rather than from the carton looking like somebody else’s carton. The remainder, the part attributable to the design, was $23.785 million.

Somebody put a number on what a look is worth. And the number was bigger than the company.

Most founders treat packaging as a marketing expense. You brief an agency, argue about the color, print it, and move on to the next thing. Nobody puts it on the balance sheet. Nobody insures it. Almost nobody documents the process well enough to prove they got there first, which is exactly how Van Leeuwen won: dated drafts, rejected concepts, revision rounds.

Meanwhile NielsenIQ handed out awards this same week for eight packaging refreshes that produced measurably better results. Three Wishes and Curie both rebranded last month around legibility and front-panel proof points. e.l.f. and Bubble ran a collaboration where the co-branded packaging was the product. Design keeps generating measurable financial outcomes in both directions, and most companies still treat it like decoration.

So here is the practical version.

If you are the leader in your set, your visual identity is an asset with a defensible value, and you should treat it like one. Keep the files. Date them. Register what you can. Watch the shelf.

If you are the challenger walking into a crowded category, the risk runs the other way, and it is bigger than you think. The temptation to signal “same thing, better price” through visual similarity is enormous, especially when your buyer wants you merchandised right next to the leader. Get an outside set of eyes on your comps before you print a single carton. Not your agency, who is invested in the work. Somebody who will tell you plainly whether a distracted shopper could grab the wrong one.

Because that is what happened here. A woman sent her husband for Van Leeuwen, and he came home with Rebel. She wrote in to say so. Two years later, her email was in a federal courtroom, and a month after that, the company was in Chapter 11.

The shelf is not a canvas. It is evidence.

Build accordingly.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Rebel Creamery filing Chapter 11 twenty-nine days after losing on packaging, and what the court’s math says about what a design is worth. Sazerac spending a reported £500 million on Au Vodka three weeks after Brown-Forman rejected it. Zevia’s activist wants a sale at less than one times revenue. And creatine finishing its transformation from product into expectation.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Charlie Morgan was a sixteen-year-old ballboy at a Swansea City match in 2013 when Eden Hazard kicked him. It was a national story for about a week, the kind of thing that follows a kid around.

Two years later he co-founded a vodka company with his friend Jackson Quinn. This week Sazerac agreed to buy it in a deal reportedly valuing the business around £500 million, with each founder expected to clear over £100 million.

I do not have a tidy lesson here. I just think it is a genuinely great story, and there aren't many like it in an industry that mostly runs on spreadsheets and shelf resets.

Until next Monday, Jonathan Deeter, Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. Prediction ledger update. Sour is the new pickle, and Froot Pops just launched a sour line, so that one is holding. Electrolytes are the new protein and are still holding. Creatine is now the newest new protein, which I am formally adding to the ledger this week. And I am still waiting on pickle protein powder by Q1 2027. We have four months. Somebody get on it.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Four things happened this week that only make sense together.

Ferrero agreed to buy Purely Elizabeth, a brand Elizabeth Stein started in 2009. Alex Cooper’s Unwell beverage business is reportedly shutting down after Halloween, less than two years after launch. Primal Queen says it beat Target’s in-store expectations by more than 100%. And Lifeway posted its 27th consecutive growth quarter selling fermented milk.

Seventeen years of building. Two years of celebrity attention. Both ended this week, and only one of them ended well.

We talk constantly about reach in this industry. Followers, impressions, celebrity partners, door counts. All four are inputs. None of them is demand. Unwell had one of the largest media engines a new beverage could ask for, and that engine got the cans noticed but couldn't make anyone buy a second one. Meanwhile, Carbliss ran a limited variety pack, watched it hit fourth-highest SKU velocity in all of U.S. food at 22% distribution, and made it permanent. Wandering Bear tested one format in about 300 Target stores and earned a different format nationwide.

The difference is observable behavior. Reorders, velocity, repeat purchase, contribution margin. The boring numbers that tell a buyer the customer came back without being chased.

Reach opens the door. This week, proof decided who got invited back. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Ferrero Agrees to Acquire Purely Elizabeth

Ferrero signed an agreement to acquire Purely Elizabeth, the wellness breakfast brand Elizabeth Stein founded in 2009. Terms were not disclosed. Ferrero says it will support innovation, operations, and distribution after close while preserving the brand’s identity, with Stein staying on.

Read the structure, because it tells you what Ferrero thinks it bought. This is not a company acquiring a granola recipe and dropping it into a factory schedule. It is a Nutella conglomerate buying credibility at the modern American breakfast table, something Ferrero has spent years unable to manufacture internally.

Every large food company is shopping for relevance right now. We have watched it all summer. P&G paid $3.8 billion for Thorne. Bain took Vitabiotics. Kirin took Jamieson. The smartest of these buyers understand the asset isn't just the product. It is the brand’s taste, the customer’s trust, and the permission that brand has earned to keep launching new things. Integration creates scale. Too much integration erases the reason you wrote the check.

Purely Elizabeth spent seventeen years earning the right to be acquired without needing to disappear. That is the whole game, and almost nobody plays it that patiently.

Unwell Reportedly Shuts Down

Alex Cooper’s Unwell beverage business is shutting down after Halloween, less than two years after launch. Unwell Media continues. The drinks do not.

This is the cleanest counterweight to every celebrity launch that crossed the feed this week, and there were a lot of them. Khloé Kardashian launched collagen protein chips. Kim Kardashian signed on with Broc Shot. Alix Earle invested in Cymbiotika. Oura signed Coco Gauff and Taylor Fritz. Any of those can work. But attention is the beginning of the test, not the result of it.

We have been building this case for a month now. LVMH offloaded its stake in Beyoncé’s whisky. Campari sold Sammy Hagar’s tequila. Axum had to bring in professional operators to run Wembanyama’s hydration brand. And now the biggest audience in podcasting could not keep a beverage line alive for two years.

A huge audience generates a first purchase. Beverage economics have to generate the second one. The liquid has to earn a spot in somebody’s routine, the distribution has to stay productive, and the margin has to survive the cost of getting cold cans into hands. Follower count is not purchase frequency, and Unwell found out fast.

The one to watch now is Alix Earle and Cymbiotika, because that deal is structured differently. She used the products for years, then bought equity in a brand already doing $150 million. Use, then scale, then ownership. That sequence has a much better track record than renting a famous face to hold a bottle once.

Nichols Buys VITHIT for £64 Million

Nichols acquired VITHIT for £64 million after the functional drinks brand generated €26.5 million in 2025 revenue. The deal covers 100% of VITHIT and its subsidiaries, and the brand sells across the UK, Ireland, and 13 other international markets.

This is what a clean strategic acquisition actually looks like. VITHIT already proved consumers want the product. Nichols brings the part that gets brutally expensive to build one country at a time: Vimto’s route to market, retailer relationships, and international operating experience.

Founders spend years building demand and then discover that distribution is a second company hiding inside the first one. Different skills, different capital requirements, different people. VITHIT found a buyer that already owns the second company, which is a much better outcome than spending five years and a growth round trying to build it yourself.

Also worth noting where this happened. The UK keeps producing functional beverage brands that get bought or scale fast. Reformed hit $70 million profitably in two years. PerfectTed is approaching $100 million in matcha. MOTH raised £11 million as the number two RTD in UK grocery. Now VITHIT exits at £64 million. That country is quietly running a factory for exactly this kind of business.

C&S Wants Control of Winn-Dixie, Not Just Its Purchase Orders

C&S Wholesale Grocers plans to become Winn-Dixie’s majority owner in a deal expected to close in early 2027. C&S runs more than 200 corporate grocery stores and 60 distribution centers, and says Winn-Dixie will pursue new stores, refreshes, and supply chain efficiencies after closing.

Wholesalers usually make their money behind the shelf. This moves C&S in front of it.

Control gives the company a network to point to. Procurement, distribution, store operations, and capital planning stop being four separate conversations with a customer and become one operating system. For brands, that changes how decisions get made. A retailer backed by its own wholesaler can move faster on assortment and replenishment, which is good. It can also centralize much more leverage, which is less good if you are the one negotiating.

We covered Kroger buying Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion back in July and made the point that every consolidation removes an independent buyer from the board. This is the same story from a different direction. If it closes, the shelf and the supply chain answer to the same owner.

FDA Moves to Close the Self-Affirmed GRAS Door

The FDA proposed replacing the voluntary self-affirmed GRAS pathway, which has been in place since 1997, with mandatory agency notification. The proposal would cover new ingredients and substances already self-affirmed and on the market. FDA would make a pre-filing decision within 45 days and a safety determination within 180 days.

To be precise about what this is: mandatory notification, not a new premarket approval regime. That distinction matters. But so does the disclosure requirement, and this is not a label tweak. It changes the evidence burden sitting behind your formula.

If you have been treating GRAS status as a document your supplier hands you, that stops being enough. You need to know who made the determination, what evidence supports it, and whether the same ingredient has already been filed by someone else. That work is a lot harder to do after your product is on shelf and a retailer’s compliance team asks for the file.

Put it next to WK Kellogg pulling artificial colors and BHT a year ahead of schedule, which we covered last week. Reformulation and regulatory diligence are both moving up the calendar because everyone can see where the pressure is heading. Do this work in product development, not in the folder you frantically assemble when somebody asks a question.

More Deals Worth Watching

Lactalis agreed to buy Saputo’s UK dairy business for roughly £988 million, including five manufacturing plants and brands like Cathedral City, Wensleydale, Davidstow, Clover, and Country Life. The division did about $1.2 billion over the past four quarters. Lactalis has been on an absolute tear, and this follows Protein Works earlier this year.

Zevia’s board said it will review a 4% shareholder’s call to sell the company, with Kanen Wealth Management floating $2.75 to $3.75 per share. Zevia is in more than 41,000 retail locations, which is plenty of distribution and apparently not enough peace.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

inKind Secures $414 Million

Restaurant finance platform inKind closed a $414 million second tranche led by Citi and Cross River, pushing total capital raised past $1.2 billion. The platform connects more than five million diners with over 8,500 restaurants representing nearly $30 billion in annual restaurant sales.

This is financing infrastructure rather than a consumer brand equity round, but the size is worth paying attention to. Restaurants need capital, diners want value, and inKind sits in between funding operators against future customer spend. It is the same picks-and-shovels instinct we saw with Proxy Foods AI and Springdale backing Hetal and Martie. The money keeps finding the layer underneath the brands.

Toss Raises £660,500 for the Everyday Squeeze

Sisters Grace and Sophie Devlin raised £660,500 for Toss to expand retail distribution, build awareness, and develop new formats. The UK dressing brand wants to move beyond salad into dipping, marinating, glazing, and spreading.

That sounds like product expansion. It is really occasion expansion, which is a different and better thing. A bottle gets more valuable the moment a customer can reach for it on a Tuesday without first having to buy lettuce. Every condiment brand that has broken out did some version of this.

A $300 Million Fund Targets Hospitality AI

EMERGING and Promethean launched a $300 million Experience Fund with a $500 million hard cap, targeting AI, automation, and data infrastructure for hospitality and experiential entertainment.

The interesting part is not the capital. It is the distribution attached to it. The fund says it has route-to-market visibility through Buyers Edge Platform across nearly one in three U.S. restaurants. Money is useful. Money that arrives with customers attached is a completely different offer, and that's why Cox Farms leading Hippo Harvest’s round mattered more than the $30 million itself.

Alix Earle Invests in Cymbiotika

Alix Earle invested an undisclosed amount in Cymbiotika after the supplement brand hit $150 million in 2025 revenue. Cymbiotika entered Target, raised $25 million in January, and moved into Ulta in March. Covered above, but the sequence deserves repeating: she used the products, then the brand scaled, then she took equity.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

SlimFast Tries to Outgrow Weight Management

Supreme is investing £5 million in SlimFast as the brand launches seven functional nutrition products priced from £8.99 to £12.99, moving into hydration, energy, protein, and everyday wellness through major retailers and Amazon starting mid-August.

SlimFast has awareness that a new wellness brand would spend a decade and a fortune buying. The question is whether the name can mean something other than dieting. Legacy brands can stretch, and Gap just proved it by reissuing its 1990s fragrances at $52 a bottle. But Gap was reactivating a memory people liked. SlimFast is trying to outrun one. Harder problem.

Domino’s Makes the Whole Pizza Personal

Domino’s will launch a Detroit-style personal pizza nationwide on August 31, the first pizza named after the 65-year-old chain. A two-topping Domino goes into the $6.99 Mix and Match deal when customers pick two or more eligible items.

The innovation is not the crust. It is giving one person an entire pizza built for them instead of a slice of something shared. Portioning became the product, which is the same move Little Spoon made with Pancake Spoonies and Lunchly made with Lil Sammies. Format is doing more work than flavor right now.

Protein Keeps Absorbing Other Categories

Khloud launched collagen protein chips exclusively at Walmart, 17g of protein and 2g of collagen per bag. Protein does the repeat-purchase job. Collagen gives you a reason to look twice. We first covered Khloud in May at $15 million raised and 29,000 doors, so the category jump from popcorn to functional chips is real movement.

AG1 launched Essentials Gummies, 50 ingredients in an eight-gummy daily serving at $49 a month. The powder built the habit. The gummies remove the shaker bottle, which is the entire pitch.

Broc Shot brought on Kim Kardashian as an advocate rather than an investor or collaborator. The broccoli seed supplement expects a six-month campaign to deliver at least a million new customers and a sales day roughly 20 times normal. That is a wonderfully specific number to publish in advance, and we will all get to see whether attention converts.

Hims is preparing to launch peptides while Wall Street stays cautious about what the category adds this year. Peptides keep showing up. Feel Peptides raised $3 million back in May trying to make them feel less gray-market and more premium wellness club. The ingredient is arriving faster than the trust in it.

Carbliss Turns a Limited Release Permanent

Carbliss is making Backyard Bliss permanent after the anniversary variety pack reached the fourth-highest SKU velocity in total U.S. food at only 22% distribution during the four weeks ended July 12.

That is how limited releases are supposed to work. The launch created a bounded test with a real end date. The customer response earned permanence. Scarcity was not the strategy; it was the measurement period. Most brands run LTOs as a marketing beat and never look at what the data was actually telling them.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Lifeway Foods posted record Q2 sales of $66.9 million, up 24.1%, for its 27th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. Nearly seven straight years is not a launch spike. It is distribution, volume, and repeat purchase stacking on top of each other until kefir stops looking niche. No celebrity, no viral moment, just fermented milk compounding quietly since 2019.

CAVA grew Q2 revenue 31.3% to $365.4 million with same-restaurant sales up 9%, including 5.3% guest traffic growth, ending the quarter at 476 locations. Price increases can flatter a comp. Traffic growth is much harder to fake.

Bongards’ Creameries is investing $135 million to add roughly 120,000 square feet and 180 million pounds of annual process cheese capacity, with commercial operations scheduled for early 2028. That is the sixth capacity investment we have tracked in five weeks after Vitamin Well, Vita Coco, Orkla, Bertagni, and Lotus Bakeries. Nobody builds that much space because a trend report looked encouraging.

Red Robin grew comparable restaurant revenue 1.3% and signed three pending refranchising agreements covering 116 restaurants, expected to generate $96 million in gross proceeds. Fewer company-owned stores means more cash to cut debt and fix what stays.

Tyson Foods will close beef facilities in Joslin, Illinois, and Eagle Mountain, Utah, and will seek a buyer for its Pasco, Washington plant. The restructuring affects at least 2,500 workers and follows a $138 million quarterly operating loss in beef. A historic cattle shortage turned excess processing capacity into an operating problem, which is a useful reminder that capacity cuts both ways.

Food safety got expensive again. FDA elevated a recall of more than 19 million eggs sold under Kroger, Simple Truth, and other labels to Class I, its highest risk level. The related salmonella outbreak includes 98 illnesses and 26 hospitalizations across 17 states. That is the third supplier-driven outbreak we have covered in five weeks after Taylor Farms and the jalapeño recall. Your supply chain is your brand, and private label makes supplier risk into retailer risk the second it hits the carton.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Target Rewards the Test

Primal Queen says it beat in-store expectations by more than 100% after launching two products in 900 Target stores, and claims it bootstrapped to $300 million in lifetime sales in under 30 months while staying profitable. Those are company claims and should be treated as such, but the retail expansion is what competitors should study.

Wandering Bear rolled four cold brew cans into every Target nationwide after testing 32-ounce cartons in roughly 300 Midwest and Northeast stores. The pack format changed. The proof traveled with it.

Same pattern as Ancient Crunch, which tested 93 Whole Foods stores before going nationwide. Buyers are still taking bets. They just want the evidence before the bet instead of after.

Convenience Becomes a Real Meal Channel

Tres Picosos rolled its top-selling burritos into more than 1,200 QuikTrip stores across 23 states. Convenience is no longer an impulse channel for candy and drinks. For the right product it is a scaled all-day meal network, and the brands treating it that way are getting there early.

Asda is testing a wholesale convenience format with independent operator One-O-One across three Glasgow stores, each carrying about 3,500 products spanning own-label, fresh, chilled, and food-to-go.

More Shelf Wins

Levels expanded Walmart distribution nearly 120% with four new whey protein flavors and sizes, projecting 10,000 retail locations and 30,000 points of distribution this year.

Javvy is on pace for 40,000 retail doors by year-end per CPG Wire, with its Protein Coffee selling at three times the functional coffee category’s average dollar velocity. We covered Javvy going nationwide at Walmart in July, so that trajectory is holding.

Smash Kitchen has the top-selling ketchup and mustard SKUs at Sprouts and is pacing past $100 million in annual sales per CPG Wire citing SPINS. Winning the anchor products is what gives the rest of a pantry platform permission to exist.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

OLIPOP named Electrolit chief Christian Patiño Webb CEO as co-founder Ben Goodwin moved to Executive Chairman and Head of Innovation. OLIPOP was valued at $1.85 billion in its 2025 round. Moving from founder CEO to scaled beverage operator suggests the next constraint is execution, not imagination. Keeping Goodwin on innovation suggests they know exactly which part of the business he should still be touching.

Oura signed long-term ambassador deals with Coco Gauff and Taylor Fritz ahead of the U.S. Open, with the campaign running through The Athletic, LinkNYC, and The New York Times. Smart way to move recovery data out of the quantified-self niche and into a mainstream performance story. Oura confidentially filed for an IPO earlier this year, with 2026 revenue reportedly expected around $1.5 billion, so the timing isn't accidental.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Distribution is not demand. Neither is an audience, a celebrity partner, a funding announcement, or a national launch.

All of those create opportunity. None of them creates the customer behavior that makes an opportunity durable. This week gave us unusually clean examples on both sides of that line.

Unwell had Alex Cooper’s audience and a media company purpose-built to keep the brand visible. The beverage business will reportedly close after Halloween. Broc Shot expects Kim Kardashian to deliver a million new customers. Khloud has Khloé Kardashian and Walmart. Oura has two top tennis players and a campaign covering half of New York. Every one of those can generate trial. Not one of them can make somebody reorder.

Now look at who earned more infrastructure this week. Carbliss put a limited variety pack into market, watched it hit number four velocity in all of U.S. food at 22% distribution, and made it permanent. Wandering Bear tested cartons in 300 Target stores and earned a nationwide can launch. Primal Queen says it doubled Target’s expectations. Lifeway has grown for 27 straight quarters. Bongards is putting $135 million behind 180 million pounds of new capacity.

None of those companies got rewarded for the size of their announcement. They got rewarded for evidence.

The distinction gets lost because reach and demand rise together at the very beginning. A famous founder posts the product. Retailers take the meeting. Customers try it. Revenue jumps. Everyone screenshots the chart before a single cohort has had time to come back.

The actual business shows up later, and it shows up as questions. Did the second order happen without another paid impression? Did the retailer expand doors because the first doors sold through, or because your agency pitched them hard? Did the hero SKU stay productive after launch week? Did gross margin survive freight, promotions, spoilage, chargebacks, and the dozen other line items that never make the Instagram carousel?

This is exactly why Purely Elizabeth was such a good target. Ferrero agreed to buy a brand that spent seventeen years proving it belongs in the basket. Ferrero can add distribution and operating muscle without having to manufacture the underlying reason anyone buys it, because that part is already done. Nichols made the identical bet on VITHIT. The demand exists. The buyer supplies the machine.

So if you are building right now, stop treating each expansion as proof that the last one worked. More doors hide weak velocity for a couple of quarters. More followers hide low repeat rates. More funding hides bad unit economics until it suddenly doesn't. Scale does not fix small errors; it multiplies them, and Unwell just showed us how fast that math runs on a beverage.

Earn the layers in order. First the customer. Then the reorder. Then the shelf. Then the facility. Then the strategic buyer who wants you to stay exactly as you are.

Reach opens the door. Proof gets you invited back.

Build accordingly.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Why Ferrero wants Purely Elizabeth to stay Purely Elizabeth. What Unwell’s reported shutdown tells us about audience-led brands after a month of celebrity exits. How Carbliss turned a limited release into a permanent SKU using velocity data. The FDA coming for self-affirmed GRAS. And C&S buying control of Winn-Dixie.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Resy now lets diners find and book U.S. restaurant reservations directly inside ChatGPT.

That reads like a restaurant tech story. I think it is a distribution story, and a big one.

A restaurant used to compete for the map result, the ranking inside a reservation app, and the person walking past the front door. Now it can appear in a conversation the moment somebody types “where should I eat tonight.” The recommendation and the transaction happen in the same window, with no click-out to anywhere.

Consumer brands should be paying close attention. We spend every week in this newsletter talking about shelf space, retail media, and algorithmic reach, all of it rented from someone else. Search is turning into an answer, and the answer is turning into checkout.

The next shelf might not look like a shelf at all.

Until next Monday, Jonathan Deeter, Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. Domino’s waited 65 years to name a pizza after itself, which is a level of restraint I genuinely admire. Most founders name three products, a newsletter, and a holding company after themselves before the first production run. Meanwhile, my prediction ledger stands: sour is the new pickle, electrolytes are the new protein, and I am still waiting on pickle protein powder by Q1 2027. Celtic Sea Salt putting electrolytes in a salt company got me halfway there.

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August 10, 2026

🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Celsius posted record revenue last week, and the stock fell 17%.

The breakdown explains the reaction. Total revenue hit $818 million, Alani Nu supplied $364 million of it, and the Celsius brand itself fell 11.7%. Investors did the arithmetic during the call.

I keep seeing this shape. Simply Good Foods grew through Quest while Atkins declined. Conagra’s fastest-growing asset is a meat stick it bought in 2024. AB InBev’s beer volumes rose 1.1% while its non-alcoholic line rose 27%. And this week P&G, which already owns Metamucil, Align, and New Chapter, agreed to pay $3.8 billion for Thorne.

None of that means the legacy brands are worthless. It does mean that a lot of the growth showing up in consolidated numbers was purchased rather than built, and the market has started pricing the difference.

Let’s dig in.

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🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

P&G Agrees to Buy Thorne for $3.8 Billion

P&G agreed to acquire Thorne from L Catterton for $3.8 billion. L Catterton took the company private for $680 million in 2023, which puts the headline value up more than $3 billion in under three years.

Thorne did more than $500 million in 2025 and should reach roughly $650 million this year, compounding above 30% annually since going private. Most of its customers are under 40, its direct-to-consumer business keeps climbing, and P&G reportedly beat Haleon to get it.

Here’s the detail I can’t stop thinking about: Thorne’s creatine business reportedly accounts for 25% to 30% of revenue. A Fortune 50 company just agreed to pay $3.8 billion for a supplement brand, and roughly a quarter of that brand’s revenue comes from creatine. Two years ago, that ingredient was still marketed mostly as powder for men in gyms. This week, Needed launched a women’s creatine line at 5g per serving, which tells you where the customer went.

This is P&G’s second health deal of the year after Wonderbelly, and it lands in a crowded stretch. Bain bought Vitabiotics for $1.2 billion. Kirin agreed this week to buy Jamieson Wellness for C$2.5 billion. Unilever bought Grüns, Lactalis bought Protein Works, and Nestlé is reviewing its own supplement portfolio. If you run a supplement brand with real distribution and defensible science, there’s a decent chance you’re already in somebody’s model.

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Celsius Sets a Record and Loses 17%

Celsius Holdings reported Q2 revenue of $818 million, a company record and 10% growth. The stock dropped more than 17% anyway.

Alani Nu contributed $364 million. The core Celsius brand fell 11.7%.

Celsius bought Alani Nu for $1.8 billion in early 2025, and that deal now looks less opportunistic than necessary, because it’s the reason the consolidated business grew at all. Strip out the acquisitions, and the flagship is shrinking inside a category that’s still expanding.

I’d sit with this one if you’re building anything with more than one product line. Celsius did the conventional thing correctly. It identified a fast-growing brand, paid a full price, and integrated it well. Alani Nu is performing. The problem is that Alani Nu is now load-bearing, and a business with one load-bearing asset has no margin for that asset to have an off quarter.

Compare it to Monster, which reported the same week. Monster’s net sales rose 20.2% to $2.54 billion, and the core Monster Energy segment grew 21.6%. The flagship is the engine. That’s the difference between a portfolio that compounds and one that gets carried.

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80 Acres Farms Shuts Down After Raising More Than $350 Million

Indoor agriculture heavyweight 80 Acres Farms is winding down after raising more than $350 million and supplying over 18,000 retail locations.

This wasn’t a demand problem wearing a startup costume. It was an economics problem wearing a technology costume. Controlled-environment agriculture promises consistent local supply, fewer food miles, less water, and immunity from weather, and every one of those claims can be true while the cost structure still fails. Energy, labor, and facilities don’t care how good the pitch deck is.

The company had capital, retail distribution, and scale. What it never got was utilization strong enough to carry the fixed costs.

That’s worth holding next to Hippo Harvest, which raised $30 million a few weeks ago to expand robotic greenhouses from one acre to thirty. I’m not calling the outcome. But the vertical farming thesis just got its most expensive stress test, and the results are public.

Kraft Heinz Takes $7.4 Billion in Impairments

Kraft Heinz reported a $6.4 billion operating loss after recording $7.4 billion in non-cash impairments. It also raised its 2026 organic-sales outlook, though the revised guidance still projects a full-year decline of 0.5% to 2.0%. Raised from bad to less bad.

Read those together, and you get an honest picture. New CEO Steve Cahillane sees better near-term trading and is putting $700 million into marketing and innovation, up from the $600 million he originally committed. At the same time, the company is acknowledging that major brands are worth far less than it had been carrying them for. Last year’s charge was $9.3 billion.

This is the balance-sheet version of the Celsius story. A headline can improve while the underlying portfolio weakens, and accounting can delay the reckoning for a while. Neither one manufactures demand.

Legacy food isn’t dead. But awareness without relevance is an expensive asset to maintain, and Oscar Mayer and Kraft Mac & Cheese are the two lines Cahillane singled out as needing work.

More Deals Worth Watching

Axum Capital Partners made a controlling investment in Barcode, the hydration brand backed by Victor Wembanyama, who stays on as a shareholder and strategic partner. Terms weren’t disclosed. Barcode launched in 2021, and RTD sports drinks remain one of the hardest categories in beverage, so Axum is betting that professional operators plus a famous name convert better than a famous name alone.

Sargento Foods agreed to buy La Terra Fina, moving past natural cheese and into the deli case for the first time. It’s a clean adjacency: refrigerated dairy, cold chain, and existing retail relationships pointed at dips, spreads, and quiches. Both companies are private, and terms weren’t disclosed.

The Farmer’s Dog acquired Woof after serving more than a billion meals, adding enrichment to a business built on nutrition. The Pupsicle is an established hero product, which makes this platform building rather than diversification for its own sake.

Bain Capital agreed to acquire Gong cha, the 2,200-store bubble tea chain. Bubble tea can look fragmented from the sidewalk. At 2,200 stores across 29 countries, it’s institutional.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

NOON Raises $2.5 Million for a Target Launch

Australian brand NOON secured $2.5 million from BFG Partners, RiverPark Ventures, and Habitat Partners to fund a launch into nearly 2,000 Target stores. Cade Fleming and Tamir Triguboff founded the company in 2025 and sell it as breakfast in a can: 20g of protein, 5g of fiber, no added sugar.

Look at the sequence. Founded in 2025, raising in 2026 to fund a national placement. This round isn’t paying for discovery. It’s paying for inventory against shelf space the brand already won, which is a much easier check to write.

Proxy Foods AI Raises a $6 Million Seed

Proxy Foods AI raised $6 million for an AI-native food and beverage product development platform.

This isn’t another brand fighting for facings. It’s selling tools to the companies doing the fighting, which is the same instinct behind Springdale backing Hetal and Martie last month. As retailers demand faster innovation, anything that reduces failed bench work gets valuable.

The obvious risk applies here as much as anywhere: a faster workflow only helps if the output survives regulatory review, sensory testing, sourcing, and scale-up. Formulation software doesn’t run a plant trial.

More Capital Moving

Neutonic closed a seven-figure seed led by Redrice Ventures after growing 300% year over year and landing at Bristol Farms.

Boba POPS raised $2.238 million from 462 community investors to fund a fivefold production expansion.

Uncle Arnie’s added $2 million from existing investors, extending the $7.5 million Series A it raised in August 2025. The THC beverage brand sells through both traditional retail and dispensaries.

Krème, the French skincare brand, took its first outside equity from IRIS Ventures after doubling revenue every year since 2020. It built that through the pharmacy channel, which almost nobody in American beauty thinks about.

Dear Biology closed a pre-seed ahead of a melatonin-free sleep launch later this month.

G.O.A.T. Foods took its first outside investment from LesserEvil co-founder Charles Coristine and the Solomon family. The company sells candy and snacks through domains including Licorice.com and Pretzels.com, which I’ll come back to at the end.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

e.l.f. and Bubble Collaborate

e.l.f. Beauty and Bubble released a limited-edition line of hybrid skincare and makeup priced from $10 to $18.

It’s a smart pairing. e.l.f. just posted 36% growth and its thirtieth consecutive growth quarter, and Bubble hired its first CMO this week in Diana Rubin, who helped scale Sol de Janeiro. Two brands that own the under-$20 shelf, sharing audiences instead of splitting them.

The co-branded packaging is genuinely good, which matters more than it did a year ago. Van Leeuwen won $23.8 million last month defending a pint design.

Protein and Function

Premier Protein launched a sparkling protein soda with four flavors at 15g of protein, 3g of sugar, and 90 calories. Jumex entered protein shakes with 30g bottles going into 2,942 Walmart stores. TRUBAR launched a Pro line at 18g of protein and 12 to 13g of fiber. Seven Sundays moved into pancakes with 10g-protein Oatcakes. Needed launched women’s creatine at 5g per serving.

Protein has stopped behaving like a category and started behaving like a required claim, showing up across beverages, breakfast, snacks, and now pantry.

Food, Pantry, and Wellness

Chef Esther Choi launched Sessy, a Korean-American pantry brand with sesame oil, soy sauce, and gochujang made with Sempio, one of Korea’s oldest food companies. Choi runs mŏkbar and co-hosts Food Network’s 24 in 24.

TRUFF released Smoky Pineapple Hot Sauce at Whole Foods. Fix & Fogg launched Banana Caramel Peanut Butter and nailed the label. Hot Girl Pickles moved into grab-and-go pouches. Wasted, which turns surplus bread into shelf-stable pasta, launched on Misfits Market with Whole Foods coming.

Lemme announced NAD+ capsules for an August 11 online launch and August 16 at Target. Mimitime, from Cocokind founder Priscilla Tsai and creator Ava Lee, hits Target August 16 with 1,500mg of marine collagen per serving.

Plant People expanded its kids line with a melatonin-free sleep formula. Celtic Sea Salt entered hydration. Hero Cosmetics launched three cleansers.

WK Kellogg Moves Early

WK Kellogg will pull artificial colors and BHT from the rest of its cereal portfolio by the end of 2026, nearly a year ahead of schedule.

Reformulating a full portfolio is slow and expensive, so finishing early tells you something about what the company expects. My read is that they see regulatory and consumer pressure increasing rather than easing, and they’d rather absorb the cost on their own timeline than someone else’s.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Monster Beverage grew Q2 sales 20.2% to $2.54 billion, crossing $2.5 billion in a quarter for the first time. International rose 34.6% to $1.16 billion and now makes up 46% of sales. The core Monster Energy segment grew 21.6%, while Alcohol Brands fell 15.2%. A two-for-one stock split takes effect August 11.

Kodiak has doubled since L Catterton took a majority stake in 2021 and expects $580 million in retail sales. Same investor, same week, opposite engine from Thorne: one sold for $3.8 billion, the other keeps compounding by extending a core product into new categories.

illycaffè grew first-half revenue 19% to €373 million with EBITDA up 10% to €53 million, despite high green coffee prices.

Grillo’s Pickles started production at a new $54 million plant in Indiana. The 155,000-square-foot facility should create about 150 jobs.

Lotus Bakeries plans to invest €500 million in Biscoff capacity across three continents after first-half sales rose 14%.

That’s the fifth capacity investment we’ve tracked in four weeks, after Vitamin Well, Vita Coco, Orkla, and Bertagni. For a lot of these companies, the constraint isn’t demand anymore. It’s how many cases they can physically make.

Food safety turned into an operating story. A Salmonella outbreak tied to recalled jalapeños reached 345 cases across 27 states with 36 hospitalizations. By late Saturday, USDA had flagged 18 meat and poultry products made with the recalled peppers. City Foods separately recalled about 3,215 pounds of ready-to-eat pastrami and corned beef over possible Listeria. That’s two supplier-driven outbreaks in three weeks, counting Taylor Farms.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Walmart: Jumex launched protein shakes in 2,942 stores. Laird Superfood expanded five coffee and creamer products into more than 1,000 stores. Nurture Life took frozen kids meals into more than 700.

Target: NOON entered nearly 2,000 stores. Cravings by Chrissy Teigen doubled from 800 to roughly 1,600. Beekeeper Coffee launched online and in-store with four RTD cold brew flavors.

Costco: Ritual went nationwide. Sam’s Club: Joyride launched nationwide. Whole Foods: Ancient Crunch went nationwide after a 93-store test. The Vitamin Shoppe: Shakeology entered nearly 500 stores after passing a billion servings.

The door counts look impressive, and the more interesting detail is what preceded them. Ancient Crunch tested 93 stores first. Shakeology had two decades of direct-selling data. NOON raised money specifically to stock a placement it had already won. Buyers are still taking bets, but they’re asking for evidence before the bet, not after.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Ancient Crunch hired former QUINN Snacks CEO Al Matulis as Head of Retail and former LALO Tequila SVP Greg Reintjes Jr. as CMO. Paired with the nationwide Whole Foods rollout, that’s a company staffing for a national plan rather than reacting to one.

Belgian Boys named Louisa Lawless Chief Commercial Officer. She previously helped scale Nutrabolt, Core Nutrition, and Red Bull.

Diana Rubin joined Bubble as its first CMO after scaling Sol de Janeiro at L’Occitane.

McDonald’s named 26-year veteran Skye Anderson president of its U.S. business, which puts her over nearly 14,000 restaurants.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

The brand on the building isn’t always the brand driving the growth.

Celsius made that concrete. Record revenue of $818 million, Alani Nu supplying $364 million of it, the core brand down 11.7%, and the stock down 17% after the results. The number was real. So was the composition, and the composition is what got priced.

The shape repeats often enough to be worth naming. Simply Good Foods grew through Quest while Atkins declined. Conagra’s fastest-growing asset is a meat stick brand it bought in 2024. AB InBev grew beer volumes 1.1% while non-alcoholic sales grew 27%. P&G already owned three supplement brands and agreed to pay $3.8 billion for a fourth. In each case the legacy brand slows, the acquired brand carries the quarter, and the consolidated number reads fine until somebody opens the segment breakout.

I think acquisition has quietly become a substitute for innovation at a lot of these companies. Buying growth is faster than repairing a declining flagship and far easier to explain to a board. It also works, right up until the acquired brand is the only thing working. At that point you haven’t diversified. You’ve relocated the business onto an asset you paid a premium for and didn’t build.

Monster is the useful contrast, because it reported the same week and looks nothing alike. Sales up 20.2% to $2.54 billion, international up 34.6%, and the core Monster Energy segment up 21.6%. The flagship is doing the work. Kodiak is the smaller version of the same story: doubled since 2021, heading toward $580 million, built by extending one core product rather than buying sideways. And L Catterton owns both Kodiak and the Thorne stake it just sold, which I find funny in a way that probably says something about me.

So what do you actually do with this if you’re running a brand?

Watch which line is growing, not just which line is largest. If your newest SKU is outgrowing the original by a wide margin, figure out why before somebody else makes you explain it. Sometimes the new thing is the real business, and you should move resources. Sometimes the original is quietly decaying, and the new thing is covering for it. Those look identical on a revenue chart and require opposite responses.

And if you’re pitching a strategic buyer right now, think about the position you’re pitching into. A company shopping for growth because its own brands have stalled is in a different negotiating posture than one filling a gap in a healthy portfolio. That’s worth understanding before you walk in.

Build accordingly.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Why P&G agreed to pay $3.8 billion for Thorne and why roughly a quarter of its revenue comes from creatine. The Celsius results that erased 17% on record revenue. Monster crossing $2.5 billion with its core brand up 21.6%. And why 80 Acres Farms couldn’t make $350 million work.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

G.O.A.T. Foods just took its first outside investment. The company sells candy and snacks, and its distribution advantage is that it owns Licorice.com and Pretzels.com.

Somebody registered those domains and waited. Now, when a person types the name of a product into a browser, that company is where they land.

Every brand in this newsletter is competing for shelf space, retail media placement, and algorithmic reach. All of it rented, all of it repriced by somebody else on a schedule you don’t control.

Owning the word people search isn’t a growth hack. It’s real estate.

Until next Monday,

Jonathan Deeter Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. Two weeks ago I said electrolytes were the new protein. This week Celtic Sea Salt, a company whose entire business is salt, launched a hydration line. Adding electrolytes to salt is either the most logical brand extension in the history of commerce or the precise moment the trend ate itself, and I genuinely cannot tell which.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Something strange happened in beverage alcohol this week, and it took four deals to see it.

LVMH sold its stake in Beyoncé’s whisky back to Beyoncé. Campari sold Cabo Wabo and a cognac house to a buyer that specializes in neglected spirits brands. Brown-Forman’s family shareholders rejected a $15 billion offer for Jack Daniel’s for the second time in three months. And Spanish brewer Damm bought into a British soda company.

Meanwhile, AB InBev said Cutwater is on track to become a billion-dollar brand.

Read those together. Spirits companies are pruning. Beer companies are buying growth outside beer. One family that could cash out for $15 billion said no twice.

The growth in alcohol has moved outside alcohol. The companies that saw it early are writing checks. Everyone else is deciding what still belongs in the portfolio.

Let’s dig in.

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🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Brown-Forman Rejects Sazerac’s $15 Billion Bid. Again.

Brown-Forman’s board rejected Sazerac’s renewed all-cash offer of $32 per share, roughly $15 billion. Sazerac went directly to shareholders and directors after the board rejected the same proposal in May, and said it would improve the terms if Brown-Forman engaged.

The family did not blink. Wolf Pen Branch LP, which represents Brown family members holding the majority of Class A voting shares, called the proposal “not actionable” and said it did not fit their vision for the company.

The combination would have put Jack Daniel’s and Buffalo Trace under one roof and created the world’s second-largest drinks group behind Diageo. It also would have ended Brown-Forman’s 156 years of family control.

That is why the premium did not matter. Brown-Forman’s voting stock is controlled by fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation family members who are not optimizing for an exit. Ownership structure is strategy, not a cap-table footnote.

There is a cost to that choice. Brown-Forman ended merger talks with Pernod Ricard in April, cut 12% of its global workforce last year, and still needs to replace retiring CEO Lawson Whiting. Independence does not make those problems disappear. It means the family believes solving them is worth more than $15 billion.

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Celebrity spirits lose their conglomerate protection

Moët Hennessy sold its stake in SirDavis American Whisky to Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, giving her full ownership of the brand they launched together in 2024. Terms were not disclosed. SirDavis is now woman-, family-, and Black-owned, and enters its next chapter without LVMH.

Most coverage framed this as Beyoncé gaining control. The direction of the transaction matters more: LVMH sold. La Lettre reported in January that Moët Hennessy wanted SirDavis off the books to focus on core brands. The division also cut roughly 13% of its workforce last year.

Campari made a similar call this week, selling Cabo Wabo Tequila and Bisquit & Dubouché Cognac to Cobblestone Brands. Cobblestone’s thesis is simple: buy brands that are too small to matter inside a conglomerate but large enough to work as standalone businesses.

In seven days, two global spirits groups exited celebrity-linked brands. Fame can buy trial, distribution meetings, and launch attention. It cannot manufacture repeat purchase. Beyoncé now owns all of SirDavis, but she also owns the work LVMH’s distribution machine used to do.

Full ownership is freedom when demand travels with you. Otherwise, it is exposure.

Brewers want growth that is not beer

Spanish brewer Damm acquired a stake in Dalston’s, the UK better-for-you soda brand stocked at Asda, Waitrose, Ocado, and thousands of independent stores. Dalston’s gets Damm UK’s production and distribution infrastructure. Damm gets another route beyond beer.

Now look at AB InBev. The company reported $16.66 billion in Q2 revenue, with beer volumes up 1.1%. No-alcohol sales grew 27%. Cutwater delivered triple-digit revenue growth and is tracking toward a billion-dollar brand.

That gap explains the deal flow. Brewers have cold-chain distribution, retail relationships, and a core category growing around one percent. Non-alcoholic soda, canned cocktails, and functional drinks offer the growth their legacy portfolios cannot.

Orkla spends €207 million to feed BUBS

Orkla is acquiring The European Candy Group for €207 million. ECG operates four factories and expects €110 million in revenue and €21 million in adjusted EBITDA in 2026. Orkla’s stated reason is capacity: it needs more candy production to keep up with demand for BUBS.

This is the third straight week we have seen a company buy its own supply. Vitamin Well merged with EMPWR to own bar manufacturing. Vita Coco bought its Thai coconut supplier. Starco bought a baking-mix plant. Now Orkla is buying four candy factories.

Co-manufacturing becomes the constraint right when demand proves out. By then, the brand is negotiating from weakness. Orkla has the balance sheet to solve that problem with an acquisition. Most brands do not.

The operating lesson is not “buy a factory.” It is to model capacity earlier than feels necessary. Demand is only useful when you can fill the order.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Align Ventures closes a concentrated $125 million fund

Align Ventures closed Fund II with $125 million in commitments. The firm plans to write $2 million to $10 million checks across 15 to 20 consumer brands. Its portfolio includes Starface, OLIPOP, California Naturals, The Farmer’s Dog, and Blue Zones Kitchen, with exits including Billie, Coterie, Hims, Touchland, and FIGS.

The math tells the strategy. This is not spray-and-pray seed investing. Align is concentrating capital behind fewer brands and keeping room for follow-on checks. The exit list is the pitch: it has returned money in a category where many funds have not.

Consumer capital is not disappearing. It is consolidating around fewer managers backing fewer companies with more conviction.

The Farmer Companies hires someone who has run the play

Whisps parent The Farmer Companies raised $17 million from Raff Ventures and AJAX Capital Partners and named former Dot’s Pretzels CEO Randy Johnson as chief executive. Johnson helped take Dot’s from $19 million to $250 million in annual sales before its $1.2 billion sale to Hershey.

The hire is the strategy. The company owns Whisps plus snack licenses for Guinness, Cabot Creamery, and Nathan’s Famous. It has brands, licensing relationships, and now fresh capital. Johnson has already run the exact national-scale play the board wants.

When a company announces the CEO and the round together, it is telling you the clock has started.

Epicutis proves there is life outside Sephora

Professional skincare brand Epicutis raised $25 million from GroundForce Capital after reaching more than 4,000 professional accounts and reporting a 100% revenue CAGR over two years.

Everyone chases Sephora and Ulta. Epicutis built through med spas and dermatology offices, where the person recommending the product is already trusted. The channel is less glamorous, but customer acquisition can be cheaper and the expert endorsement is built into the sale.

Quick Hits

Vaca: $1.5 million seed led by BAM Ventures. The beef-tallow and organic-corn chip brand says it is tracking toward more than $1 million in August revenue, sixteen months after launch.

Plantopia: $ 9 million, co-led by Schreiber Foods and Siddhi Capital. A global dairy producer investing in dairy alternatives tells you exactly why the round matters.

DITTO: $6 million for menstrual-health nutrition, led by FoodLabs with Eka Ventures participating.

DAYLY: Strategic capital from Morrison Seger roughly a month after launching morning and nighttime toothpaste formulas built around circadian wellness.

ESW Beauty: Investment from TikTok creators Katie Fang and Aliya Rachinski. Revenue is expected to exceed $20 million this year, up from $11 million in 2025.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Gap sells 1995 for $52

Gap returned to beauty with Dream, Grass, Heaven, Harmony, and Om. The revived fragrances retail for $52, with Victoria Pedretti leading the “Wear What You Feel” campaign.

This is not a traditional product launch. Gap reopened its archive and found recognition it did not have to buy. More on that before we close.

Beverage and Snack

Free Rein Coffee: Protein cold brew with 20g of protein, plus protein K-Cups. Coffee is officially in the protein arms race.

Joel Gott Wines: Sauvy B, a canned Sauvignon Blanc spritz with electrolytes, now at Total Wine, Target, and Walmart. I genuinely cannot decide whether this is innovation or a cry for help.

Nello: Apple Rush energy drink with 150mg of green-tea caffeine, exclusive to Target.

Brio Nutrition: mushroom drinks enter natural, conventional, and liquor channels, beginning with a storewide ABC Fine Wine & Spirits launch.

VKTRY Protein: 3.3-ounce shots with 23g of protein, launching September 1 from TRUBAR and IQ Pouch founder Brad Pyatt.

Ni-Howdy: squeezable soy sauce. Finally, a format improvement nobody needed a white paper to understand.

Buff Beauty: 22 nail and beauty-tool SKUs from Birchbox co-founder Katia Beauchamp, including a “skincare for your nails” line.Beauty and Wellness

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Vita Coco’s supply-chain bet gets an immediate proof point:
Vita Coco reported net sales of $216 million, up 28%. Net income more than doubled to $49 million, and adjusted EBITDA rose to $67 million from $29 million. Gross margin expanded from 36% to 49%, helped by roughly 700 basis points of tariff refunds. Full-year net-sales guidance increased to $790 million to $805 million.

Private label grew 83%, and the company closed its $175 million Copra acquisition on July 22. Vita Coco bought more control over its supply chain, then reported its strongest quarter of the week three days later.

IP enforcement is becoming a revenue line:
Timeline won $5.3 million in damages against 19 sellers of counterfeit Urolithin A supplements. That follows Van Leeuwen’s $23.785 million trade-dress judgment last week.

Two weeks, two consumer brands, nearly $30 million in IP awards. Keep the old packaging files. Register what is defensible. Enforcement is expensive until it pays.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Walmart added Rogue Snacks in 2,800 stores. Walgreens brought Refresh Gum to more than 2,200 locations. Sprouts took Swishables’ portable mouthwash sticks nationwide, pushing the brand beyond 6,000 retail doors in twelve months.

Elsewhere: SkyPop Protein Soda reached Southern California Costco; Protein Candy entered Hy-Vee; SOLLOS Yerba Mate landed on Gopuff; Smood Sweets joined Misfits Market; Kirra Iced Tea reached Goop Kitchen; and Brio’s mushroom drinks went storewide at ABC Fine Wine & Spirits.

The standout is Swishables. Mouthwash sticks are easy to understand, easy to display, and built for the impulse zone. Six thousand doors in a year is what format-market fit looks like.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Stefano Curti joined Dossier as executive chairman after decades at Johnson & Johnson and a run as global chief brands officer at Coty. American Pacific Group acquired a significant stake in Dossier earlier this year. That combination usually means the company is preparing for a more disciplined scale phase.

Diana Rubin became Bubble’s first CMO after helping scale Sol de Janeiro at L’Occitane Group and spending more than a decade across Kiehl’s, YSL Beauty, and Lancôme.

Ben Bennett notched another exit. TSG Consumer is acquiring a majority stake in Saltair, the body-care brand co-founded by Bennett’s incubator The Center and Iskra Lawrence. Naturium, Phlur, and Saltair now give The Center three beauty exits in three years. Saltair is expected to exceed $150 million in sales this year, and Lawrence will remain chief community advocate.

Three exits in three years is not a lucky streak. It is a system.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Beer companies learned adjacency because decline forced them to. Spirits companies learned portfolio pruning because premiumization stopped hiding weak volume.

That difference matters. A brewer can put soda, canned cocktails, non-alcoholic beer, functional drinks, and eventually THC beverages through much of the same route-to-market machine. A spirits house built around heritage, aging inventory, and high prices has less room to pivot. You cannot turn a 150-year-old cognac house into an electrolyte soda because the category moved.

So the brewers buy. The spirits groups sell. Damm buys Dalston’s. AB InBev points investors toward Cutwater and no-alcohol growth. LVMH exits SirDavis. Campari sells Cabo Wabo and Bisquit & Dubouché.

This does not mean alcohol disappears. It means the valuable asset is shifting from the liquid to the occasion. Consumers still want something cold at dinner, something social at a party, something to hold at a bar. They are less committed to that thing containing traditional alcohol.

Founders should understand the leverage this creates. If you are building a non-alcoholic, functional, or adjacent beverage, the big brewer may need your growth more than you need its capital. It already has the trucks, the retailer relationships, and the cold-box space. What it lacks is a portfolio growing faster than one percent.

Celebrity founders should study the other side. Fame opens the launch window. It does not guarantee a place in the strategic partner’s portfolio two years later. Full ownership sounds great until the distributor walks out with its infrastructure.

Build demand that survives the partner.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Why Brown-Forman’s family rejected $15 billion, why LVMH walked away from Beyoncé’s whisky, and why beer companies keep buying everything except beer. Plus Orkla’s €207 million candy-capacity bet and Gap selling 1995 in a bottle.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Gap’s new fragrance line includes a $52 bottle called Grass. The original came out in the nineties.

The company did not invent a new product. It went into its own archive, found something people still remembered, and put it back on the shelf. In a market where recognition is expensive, cultural memory is an asset that costs almost nothing to store.

Van Leeuwen won $23.8 million last week because it kept its old design files. Gap is selling nostalgia it created thirty years ago. Different outcomes, same lesson.

Your archive is an asset. Most founders treat it like storage.

Until next Monday, Jonathan Deeter Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. Joel Gott put electrolytes in canned Sauvignon Blanc. We have added electrolytes to water, coffee, candy, wine, and whatever Ascent is doing. Electrolytes are the new protein: a legitimate performance ingredient slowly becoming a marketing default. When someone puts them in a cracker, remember I called it here.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. This was the week Big Food started selling itself for parts.

Nestlé handed half its water business to Platinum Equity in a $5.6 billion joint venture. Intersnack took Utz private at $2.9 billion. Bain bought Vitabiotics for around $1.2 billion. Vita Coco spent up to $275 million on a Thai coconut supplier. Oatly put Greater China under strategic review. That’s on top of Conagra’s brand fire sale and the McCormick-Unilever Foods review already in motion.

Six conglomerates, one instinct: we cannot run all of this well, so someone else should own part of it.

Meanwhile, in the aisle nobody was watching, a category war broke out over peanut butter and jelly. And a Brooklyn ice cream brand won $23.8 million because a competitor copied its pint.

Two stories, one lesson. The giants are learning that focus is worth more than scale. The small brands are learning that what they own isn’t the recipe. It’s the shelf presence. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Nestlé Sells Half Its Water Business to Platinum Equity

Nestlé and Platinum Equity announced Peranel, a 50/50 joint venture housing Nestlé’s waters and premium beverages business at an enterprise value of $5.6 billion (€4.9 billion). The portfolio spans more than 30 brands sold in 120 countries: S.Pellegrino, Perrier, Acqua Panna, Nestlé Pure Life, and a stack of local water brands. Paris-headquartered, led by current Nestlé Waters CEO Muriel Lienau, with roughly €3.0 billion in cash proceeds to Nestlé at closing, expected in the first half of 2027. Nestlé also signaled it will divest several value brands from its VMS portfolio early next year.

Read the structure, not the headline. Nestlé isn’t dumping a failing business. Water and premium beverages are among its fastest-growing categories, and Perrier and S.Pellegrino are among the most recognizable beverage brands on earth. What Nestlé is dumping is the obligation to run it. Platinum Equity brings three decades of carve-out experience and roughly $48 billion in AUM, and the JV structure lets Nestlé keep half the upside while handing over day-to-day control and the operational headaches that come with it, including Perrier’s ongoing regulatory issues in France.

For founders, this reshapes the map. Peranel is a dedicated, PE-backed hydration platform with a mandate to grow organically and by acquisition, unencumbered by Nestlé’s approval layers. If you’re building a premium water or functional hydration brand, a serious acquirer just came into existence.

Intersnack Takes Utz Private at $2.9 Billion

Germany’s Intersnack Group is acquiring all outstanding Utz Class A shares at $14.25 each, a roughly 91% premium to the July 20 close, at an enterprise value of about $2.9 billion. When it closes in Q4, Utz becomes private, with Intersnack and the Rice and Lissette family entities each owning 50%. Dylan Lissette becomes executive chair. Utz brings Zapp’s, Boulder Canyon, On The Border, Golden Flake, and its namesake, on more than $1.4 billion in 2025 net sales.

Two things stand out. That 91% premium is a brutal verdict on where Utz’s public valuation had drifted; as Barclays put it, the surprise wasn’t that a deal happened but that it took years of valuation compression to get there. The SPAC-era listing never delivered the currency Utz needed, and the family is now taking half the company back off the public market.

Second, this is Intersnack’s first meaningful U.S. presence. A European snacking giant built across Europe and Oceania just bought its way into American salty snacks in one transaction, and paid up to do it. For emerging snack brands, a new deep-pocketed strategic just planted a flag in your category.

Bain Capital Buys Vitabiotics for About $1.2 Billion

Bain Capital agreed to acquire Vitabiotics, the UK’s number one vitamin and supplement company, along with the wider VB Group, including Meyer Organics in India and its African operations. Terms weren’t officially disclosed, but multiple outlets put the deal around $1.2 billion. Founded in 1971 by Professor Kartar Lalvani, who becomes Chairman Emeritus at close, and led since 2015 by his son Tej Lalvani, the company sells in more than 90 countries with brands including Wellman, Wellwoman, Pregnacare, Perfectil, and Osteocare. The sale followed a competitive auction that drew Blackstone, EQT, and TPG.

Bain already owns a significant stake in 1440 Foods (Pure Protein, Met-Rx, Body Fortress), so this is platform-building in nutrition, not a one-off. The interesting detail is geographic: Bain’s Asia private equity team is leading, with the growth thesis pointed at India, MENA, and China rather than the UK. Vitabiotics is a British brand being bought primarily for its emerging-market runway.

Add it to the ledger: Danone bought Huel, Nestlé bought yfood, Lactalis bought Protein Works, and now Bain takes the UK’s biggest vitamin brand. Every well-run supplement brand with real distribution is sitting inside somebody’s acquisition model.

Vita Coco Buys Copra for Up to $275 Million

Vita Coco acquired Copra, a leading producer of super-premium Thai Nam Hom coconut water, for $175 million upfront plus an earnout in 2029 ranging from $45 million to $100 million based on 2028 performance. The initial price was 80% cash, 20% Vita Coco stock. Copra expects 2026 net sales above $100 million and has compounded at 48% annually over three years. The deal brings a Thailand factory with access to Nam Hom coconuts and an extract-and-fill-on-site model.

This is a supply chain acquisition wearing a brand acquisition’s clothes. Vita Coco already controls more than half the U.S. coconut water market, so it wasn’t short of distribution. What it lacked was a super-premium cold-chain position and direct access to a specialty coconut variety. Buying the Thai factory means owning the input, not renting it. It’s the same instinct behind EMPWR’s four facilities and WILDE’s 130K plant. When a category gets competitive enough, the moat stops being the brand and starts being the supply. Vita Coco did $610 million in net sales last year with a stated goal of $1 billion within five years. You don’t get there on marketing.

The IPO Window Cracks Open: Jersey Mike’s and Reformation

Two consumer IPOs launched roadshows on July 20, and neither made this week’s roundups. Jersey Mike’s filed a 43,478,261-share Class A offering at an expected $21 to $25, listing on the NYSE as JMKE. Reformation launched its roadshow for 14,062,500 shares at $15 to $17, NYSE: REF, pricing July 29 and trading July 30. Reformation is Permira-backed; Jersey Mike’s is Blackstone-backed.

After years when consumer companies couldn’t go public at acceptable valuations, two sponsor-backed brands testing the window the same week is a real signal. Watch how they price. If they hold, the exit path that’s been closed to late-stage consumer brands starts reopening, and that changes the math on every growth round being negotiated right now.

⚖️ THE PACKAGING RULING EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD READ

Van Leeuwen won a sweeping trade dress judgment against Rebel Creamery. After a bench trial, Judge Eric Komitee of the Eastern District of New York found Rebel intentionally infringed and diluted Van Leeuwen’s pint trade dress, ordering Rebel to disgorge $23.785 million in profits, permanently enjoining the packaging, and requiring a redesign conveying a substantially different commercial impression. The ruling came July 16, so it slipped past last week’s cutoff, but it matters too much to skip.

Van Leeuwen never claimed Rebel copied its name or logo. It claimed four packaging elements: monochromatic pints with matching lids, a pastel palette, black script lettering with an oversized initial, and minimalist design. Rebel argued those elements are commonplace. The court rejected that, holding trade dress protects the overall combination and commercial impression, not each individual component.

If your product lives on a shelf, this is the most important CPG development this month. The court sized the remedy at Rebel’s profits, reduced 33% to account for demand attributable to Rebel’s keto positioning rather than the copied look. And Van Leeuwen won on documentation: dated drafts, rejected concepts, revision rounds, press, and sales growth tied to the look. One caveat: this is a district court decision; it doesn’t bind other courts, and Rebel hasn’t said whether it will appeal.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Smash Foods: $18M Led by L Catterton

Smash Foods secured an $18 million growth investment led by L Catterton, with existing investors Éclair Partners and The Family Fund participating. Founded in 2019 by Anna Peck and Steve Ford, Smash reimagines jam using real fruit, chia seeds, and dates, and has extended into toaster pastries and protein balls. Revenue tripled in 2025, and the brand recently passed 10,000 doors across Whole Foods, Sprouts, Costco, Target, H-E-B, and Publix. L Catterton’s food portfolio includes Good Culture, Goodles, Kodiak, and Little Moons.

Jam is having a moment nobody predicted, and L Catterton writing the check confirms it isn’t a fluke. Ten thousand doors with 3x growth is the profile that attracts a strategic-minded growth investor rather than a pure venture round.

MOTH: £11M ($14.7M) for UK Convenience and U.S. Expansion

London RTD cocktail brand MOTH closed an £11 million round led by Puma Growth Partners, with Beringea, Guinness Ventures, and Rianta Capital participating, bringing total raised to £23.5 million. Turnover hit £20.9 million last year, up 67% year over year and 146% over two years, roughly three times category growth. MOTH is the No. 2 RTD brand in UK grocery, sits in 40,000+ UK distribution points, is a certified B Corp, and sells a can every four seconds. U.S. expansion runs through Whole Foods, Target, Trader Joe’s, and Binny’s.

RTD cocktails remain one of the most acquisitive categories in bev-alc. Finnish Long Drink, St. Agrestis, BeatBox, Monaco, and SipMARGS all found strategic homes. A No. 2 UK grocery brand growing 67% is squarely on that path.

Organic Traditions: $10.5M Series A

Canadian wellness brand Organic Traditions raised $10.5 million from strategic angels including Shopify, Frito-Lay, and Colgate-Palmolive executives. Founded 25+ years ago by Jerry Zeifman and now led by his daughter Ally Mamalider, it spans functional lattes, mushroom coffees, greens, and fiber smoothies. Revenue is up 70% over three years, with 82% U.S. retail growth projected. Its Fiber Flow sold out three times online, and the capital targets 1,500+ U.S. stores.

A 25-year-old bootstrapped family business raising its first institutional round on the back of a fiber product is a very 2026 story. Fiber is the ingredient of the year, and the angel roster is a distribution roster.

Quick Hits

Jesse & Ben’s raised a $10 million Series A led by Greycroft, with participation from Foundership, the CPG holding company built by Yasso founders Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington, whose venture portfolio also includes Slate Milk. The Yasso founders now touch this category from three directions: their own brands, Snack Buddies, and Foundership’s checks.

Peppertux raised a $2.35 million bridge led by Santatera Capital with Lever VC participating. The California pistachio brand spans spreads, sauces, and snacks, sits in 3,000 doors, and has a stated path to 7,000 by year-end. The Dubai chocolate trend turned pistachio into a durable flavor platform.

SEMCAP made a minority investment in MERIT, the clean minimalist makeup brand. The investment was led by Vasiliki Petrou, the longtime Unilever beauty executive behind the Tatcha, K18, and Hourglass acquisitions, who joins MERIT’s board. Petrou’s track record is buying beauty brands and scaling them to exits, which tells you the thesis.

Starco Brands acquired Custom Bakehouse, a branded and private-label baking mix producer with a 75,000-square-foot facility in Santa Fe Springs, California. Starco (Soylent, Skylar, Art of Sport) buying manufacturing rather than another brand is the same supply-chain instinct driving Vita Coco.

Apogee 21 acquired bankrupt Luca Mariano Distillery for $19.5 million, including a 529-acre campus and 6,600 bourbon barrels, and separately picked up the Rod & Hammer whiskey brand and its San Luis Obispo distillery. Distressed spirits assets are trading at real discounts right now.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

The PB&J War Goes Nuclear

Three more entrants landed in a category that didn’t exist eighteen months ago.

Sola launched Sola Bites nationwide at Walmart in Strawberry & PB and Grape & PB, with 11g protein, 17g fiber, 4g net carbs, and no added sugar. Lunchly, the MrBeast, KSI, and Logan Paul brand, dropped Lil Sammies Crustless Sandwiches exclusively at Walmart with 13g protein, no high fructose corn syrup, and no dyes, in Peanut Butter & Grape, Peanut Butter & Strawberry, and Cookies & Cream. And Smash Foods just raised $18 million on a business built around reimagined jam.

Count the field. Uncrustables holds the incumbent position. Jams built a better-for-you challenger, won an NFLPA deal, and just added Grape at Target and Walmart. Welch’s entered frozen PB&J at Walmart with 12g protein. Mid-Day Squares says No Bread PB&J is its fastest-growing line. Now Sola, Lunchly, and Smash. That’s seven brands fighting over a sandwich.

Here’s why. PB&J is nostalgic, portable, kid-approved, and trivially easy to fortify with protein and fiber. It requires zero consumer education. In a market where the hardest thing to buy is trial, a format everyone already loves is the cheapest distribution advantage available. The winner will be whoever solves texture and shelf life, not whoever has the most protein.

Beverage and Snack

Nutrabolt is taking C4 into sparkling protein with a clear-style drink at 20g protein, zero sugar, and 95 calories, in Strawberry Watermelon and Cherry Vanilla. Clear protein is the fastest-moving format in the category, and Nutrabolt is heading toward a billion-dollar IPO, which is a scale signal.

Rotten launched two BFY candy lines, Tiniez and Chewers, at 11g protein, 5g prebiotic fiber, and 40% less sugar. Halfday rolled out 12 oz sleek cans nationwide at Target with 6g fiber and 35-40 calories. Chilly Willy debuted graham-crusted rolled ice cream. BEZI launches Dippers next month, pairing single-serve labneh with gluten-free crackers. And Smyle released ROX, a xylitol-and-arginine candy designed to support teeth rather than damage them

Beauty and Wellness

K18 launches FutureIQ, a $120 biomimetic hair longevity serum, August 5th. Re:You, from Dr. Evan Zhao (creator of Revela, acquired by Oddity Tech), debuted three serums at $128 to $141. Summer Fridays enters bodycare August 8th. Lemme launched its first gummy ring format. Dear Biology launches a melatonin-free sleep line August 24th, targeting the grogginess and dependency problem. Dynasty debuted a hydration mix formulated for women’s hormonal and metabolic needs. And California Naturals launched a $11.99 kids personal care line across Sprouts, Target, Amazon, and Ulta.

Rebrands Worth Studying

Three Wishes unveiled a cleaner identity, removing clutter, improving legibility at distance, and pushing protein, fiber, and sugar callouts to the front. Founded by Margaret and Ian Wishingrad, the brand is up more than 40% year over year in 52-week MULO data. Curie, Sarah Moret’s eight-figure personal care brand, launched identity 2.0: bolder, more modern, built for people in motion. Curie has the largest repeat-purchase rate in its category at Walmart.

Both did the same thing: reduce noise, increase legibility, move proof points to the front panel. And after the Van Leeuwen ruling, a distinctive, well-documented visual identity is demonstrably an asset with a dollar value attached.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

The Quality Group reported H1 revenue of €850 million, up more than 40% year over year. The German VMS specialist behind ESN, More Nutrition, RAW Nutrition, and BUM Energy crossed €1 billion in annual revenue in 2025. European functional nutrition is compounding faster than almost anything in American CPG.

Oatly surged after reporting Q2 revenue of $240.1 million, up 15.2% (12.7% constant currency), beating estimates by roughly 9%. Gross margin improved to 33.9%, net loss narrowed to $31.3 million from $55.9 million, and adjusted EBITDA turned positive at $0.4 million for a second consecutive quarter. Full-year constant-currency growth guidance jumped from 3-5% to 8-10%. Note the detail that fits this week’s theme: Oatly’s Greater China business remains under strategic review, including a potential carve-out.

Yough! is reportedly the top-selling pizza brand at Target, using Greek yogurt dough to deliver 40-50g of protein per pizza. It only launched at Target in March. That is an extraordinarily fast climb, and more evidence that protein-fortified versions of familiar formats are the highest-velocity innovation in food right now.

Outlaw Light shipped 180,000 cases in June, up from 80,000 in January and 90,000 in February. Roughly doubling monthly volume inside six months is the kind of curve that attracts strategic attention in beer.

Taylor Farms update: the Cyclospora outbreak we covered last week escalated further, with Michigan case counts climbing sharply through the week. The recall and investigation remain active.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Target: Laurel’s launched at 1,700+ stores. Costco: Khloud is now in SoCal warehouses, and Saint James Iced Tea went nationwide. Kroger: Huxley launched at 290+ stores. Sprouts: GROUNDED launched storewide. Erewhon: Fruit Bliss launched storewide. Thrive Market: Konsoom launched nationally. Citarella: Motif launched in NYC.

And ARMRA is the distribution story of the week. After building a nine-figure DTC business, Dr. Sarah Rahal’s colostrum brand is now fully omnichannel, expanding its retail footprint more than 8x in its second year of retail and surpassing 7,600 doors, a 78% increase from Q1 alone, driven by Sprouts, Erewhon, Walmart, Whole Foods, and The Vitamin Shoppe. DTC-first brands crossing into retail at that speed is the defining go-to-market pattern of this cycle.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Steve Lesnard succeeds Ben Mand as CEO of Yerba Madre, effective immediately. Lesnard served on the board and previously held C-suite roles at Godiva, Sephora, Nike, and The North Face. Scott Miller, co-founder and CEO of YESLY Water, joins the board.

Prequel hired Nathalie Kristo as CEO and Toral Patel as CMO. Kristo spent nearly two decades at L’Oréal before running Huda Beauty; Patel came from Kopari via L’Oréal and Estée Lauder.

Torch Beverages, the Miami THC seltzer brand, hired Ryan Bouton (Halo Top) as CMO and Ryan Heuser (Liquid Death, White Claw) as Head of Experiential Marketing after doubling revenue and passing 4,000 doors. Hiring the Liquid Death playbook into THC seltzer is a deliberate choice.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Big Food has stopped trying to be big.

Look at seven days. Nestlé gave up operational control of Perrier and S.Pellegrino, both iconic and growing, because running them alongside coffee, pet food, and infant nutrition cost more attention than it was worth. Utz’s founding family took half the company off the public market. Bain bought Vitabiotics from a family that ran it for 55 years. Oatly is reviewing whether to carve out China. Add Conagra’s review and the McCormick-Unilever deal now with UK regulators, and the pattern is unmistakable.

For thirty years, the operating theory of CPG was that scale wins: buy more brands, consolidate manufacturing, negotiate harder, spread overhead across more SKUs. That theory is being dismantled in public, one carve-out at a time.

What killed it was fragmentation. When there were four ways to reach a consumer, owning fifty brands meant leverage. Now there are four hundred, and every one rewards focus. A brand that knows exactly who it’s for and doesn’t need three approval layers to greenlight a flavor. Conglomerate structure became the tax. So the giants are keeping the half they can run and selling the half they can’t. Private equity is the natural buyer because PE’s entire model is focus: Platinum will run Peranel as one business, Bain will run Vitabiotics on an India and MENA plan, Intersnack will run Utz as a salty snack company and nothing else.

Now flip to the other end of the barbell. While the giants shrank, seven brands piled into peanut butter and jelly, and a Brooklyn ice cream company won $23.8 million because someone copied its pint.

Those two stories are the same story. When scale stops being the moat, what’s left is the thing consumers actually recognize: the format they already love, and the look they already know. Van Leeuwen didn’t win because of a recipe or a patent. It won because it built a visual identity distinctive enough that a court could measure what copying it was worth, and disciplined enough to have documentation proving it got there first. The PB&J brands are all racing toward a format that requires zero consumer education for the same reason.

The giants are selling scale. The winners are buying recognition. If you’re building right now, the question isn’t how big you can get. It’s whether anyone would know your product from six feet away with the label turned around, and whether you saved the files that prove you designed it.

Build accordingly.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Nestlé handing Perrier and S.Pellegrino to private equity. Utz going private at a 91% premium. Bain’s $1.2 billion Vitabiotics bet and what it means for every supplement brand with distribution. The Van Leeuwen ruling and why your packaging is now a measurable asset. And the seven-brand war over peanut butter and jelly.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Van Leeuwen sued Rebel Creamery in 2021. The case took five years. The deciding evidence wasn’t a patent or a trademark registration. It was a folder of old design files: dated drafts, rejected concepts, revision rounds, proving Van Leeuwen got to that pastel minimalist pint first and got there deliberately.

Five years of litigation, and it came down to whether somebody bothered to save their work.

Every founder reading this has a Dropbox folder full of packaging comps nobody has opened since 2023. That folder is not clutter. It is the only evidence you will ever have that the look on your shelf is yours.

$23.785 million. Save your files.

Until next Monday, Jonathan Deeter Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. Two weeks ago I predicted sour was the new pickle. This week Rotten launched two sour lines with 11g of protein and Smyle put out a candy that’s good for your teeth. But the real signal is Lunchly: MrBeast, KSI, and Logan Paul, three creators with a combined audience larger than most countries, decided the highest-value thing they could sell is a crustless PB&J. Not a snack bar. Not an energy drink. A sandwich your mom made. Nostalgia is the last undefeated category.

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Proudly seasoned by Trophy Wife - The Official Finishing Salt of The Deeter Digest. Because you are the prize, and so is this salt.

🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. The most fascinating CPG stat of the week came from a New York Times profile: Driscoll’s is now the second-highest-earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola. A $7 billion berry company controlling roughly a third of the U.S. berry market. Not a soda. Not a snack. Berries.

Meanwhile, the money moved. Marc Lore’s Wonder raised $650M at a $9 billion valuation. David Beckham’s IM8 lined up $1 billion in non-dilutive financing. Conagra halved its dividend and put its non-core brands on the block. Coca-Cola finally answered Pepsi’s prebiotic soda. And a Cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms lettuce escalated into a 27-state recall over the weekend.

The theme this week is the incumbents waking up. Coca-Cola is chasing prebiotic soda a year after Pepsi. Conagra is tearing itself down to rebuild. Mondelēz writing venture checks into sour candy. The giants spent years watching emerging brands define the new categories. Now they’re moving — and when a company the size of Coca-Cola or Conagra changes direction, the whole shelf shifts with it. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Wonder Raises $650M at a $9B Valuation — Building the Entire Meal Stack

Marc Lore’s food-tech platform Wonder raised more than $650 million in a Series D at a $9 billion pre-money valuation, with returning investors Accel, GV, and NEA joined by new backers including Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, AllianceBernstein, and Kayne Anderson. The round brings Wonder’s total raised to roughly $3 billion, and Lore told Fortune the company will be ready to go public early next year. Its footprint has tripled from 46 to 140 locations since May 2025.

Wonder is not raising money to build another restaurant chain. Lore — who sold Jet.com to Walmart for $3.3 billion — is trying to own the entire meal stack: recipes, automated kitchens, hosted and acquired restaurant brands, a delivery marketplace (Wonder owns Grubhub), at-home meal kits (it owns Blue Apron), and eventually robotics and drones. At a $9 billion valuation, investors aren’t underwriting food halls. They’re underwriting vertical integration as the moat: whoever controls the most links — creation, kitchen, marketplace, last mile — captures margin fragmented players can’t. If it works, Wonder becomes the infrastructure layer under a huge slice of how America eats.

Conagra Halves Its Dividend and Puts Non-Core Brands on the Block

Conagra cut its annual dividend in half, from $1.40 to $0.70 per share, and announced a strategic review of non-core assets after a rough fiscal 2026. The company took a roughly $2 billion non-cash impairment charge, posted a quarterly loss, and issued weak guidance. Shares are down about 18% this year and roughly 65% over three years. New CEO John Brase, who came over from Smucker and took the chair in June, is leading the reset.

This is what a legacy food company in genuine trouble looks like. Conagra owns Slim Jim, Birds Eye, Healthy Choice, and Swiss Miss, and the portfolio is getting squeezed from three directions: inflation-fatigued shoppers trading down, GLP-1 users eating less, and emerging brands stealing share. The dividend cut frees up about $335 million a year, but the strategic review is the real headline: Brase is signaling that brands not playing a strong strategic role could be sold.

Here’s the part founders should watch. Conagra acquired FATTY Smoked Meat Sticks in 2024, and it’s reportedly one of the few things in the portfolio growing fast. That’s the pattern across Big Food: the legacy center-store brands are declining while the acquired better-for-you brands are the growth engine. When Conagra starts divesting, some of those brands land with PE firms and smaller strategics, and the M&A cycle gets another wave of inventory. A giant restructuring is a giant redistribution of brands.

Coca-Cola Enters the Prebiotic Soda War

Coca-Cola is releasing prebiotic versions of Coke Zero, Sprite Zero Sugar, and Fresca, each in a sleek 12 oz can, reportedly delivering 6g of prebiotic fiber. This follows PepsiCo, which soft-launched Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in 2025 and took it nationwide earlier this year.

The two largest beverage companies on earth are now both selling fiber-fortified soda. Think about how fast this happened. OLIPOP and Poppi built modern functional soda from nothing, proved consumers would pay a premium for a gut-health story, and got so big that PepsiCo bought Poppi for $2 billion. Now both Coke and Pepsi are directly extending their flagship brands into the prebiotics space. This is the incumbent counterattack: rather than acquiring only the disruptors, they’re bolting the disruptors’ key benefit onto brands that already own the cooler.

The question is whether it works. OLIPOP and Poppi won by being neither Coke nor Pepsi. Coca-Cola putting fiber in Coke Zero is legacy soda plus a functional callout — it may convert the consumer who wants the gut-health halo from a familiar brand, but not the one who left Big Soda behind on purpose. Either way, 6g of fiber in a Sprite Zero means the functional soda thesis has gone mainstream.

IM8 Secures $1 Billion in Non-Dilutive Financing

IM8, co-founded by David Beckham and Prenetics CEO Danny Yeung, closed up to $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. General Catalyst finances up to 70% of IM8’s marketing spend in exchange for a capped share of income tied to the customer cohorts that money acquires. Once GC recovers its investment and hits its cap on a cohort, all future value goes to IM8. No fixed repayment, no maturity, no covenants, no equity dilution. IM8 was founded in December 2024, is on a run rate north of $210M, heading toward $300M annualized by year-end, operates in 43 countries, and plans to launch IM8 Hydration in Q4 and a gummies line in Q1 2027.

This is the most important financing structure in consumer right now, and it’s not really a fundraise — it’s a customer-acquisition machine. The CVF only makes money if IM8’s customers do, so it’s underwriting cohort economics rather than betting on an exit. For a subscription brand with strong retention, that’s close to free rocket fuel: scale marketing hard, keep 100% of the equity, hand over only a capped slice of the customers’ money acquired. Expect every DTC brand with proven cohorts to chase this. The catch: it only works if retention is genuinely excellent. For brands quietly buying growth, it exposes them fast.

⚠️ LATE SATURDAY UPDATE

Breaking inside the window

Taylor Farms Cyclospora Recall Escalates to 27 States

Late Saturday night, Taylor Farms expanded a voluntary recall of iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico to 27 states, tied to a multistate Cyclospora outbreak the CDC has traced to shredded lettuce served at Taco Bell locations across five states. The outbreak has reached 1,644 illnesses and 94 hospitalizations, with no deaths reported. The recall covers Marketside products sold at some Walmart locations, as well as numerous foodservice items distributed June 29 through July 16. A Taylor Farms de Mexico sample tested positive for Cyclospora on Saturday — though on Sunday the FDA said that result should be considered a false positive, with no other samples testing positive so far. Sysco has halted distribution of all Taylor Farms Mexican iceberg lettuce.

The founder angle is the whole point. Consumers see Taco Bell, Marketside, and the salad brand on the bag. They do not see the supplier contracts or the underlying traceback systems. One contaminated input — or even one disputed positive test — distributes reputational damage across an entire retail and restaurant network at once. Your supply chain is your brand, whether or not your name is on the front of the package. The companies that invest early in traceability and supplier redundancy are buying insurance against the week a parasite two suppliers deep becomes their headline.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Hippo Harvest — $30M Series C for Robotic Organic Greenhouses

Hippo Harvest closed a $30 million Series C led by Cox Farms, North America’s largest greenhouse operator. The money funds a 30-acre expansion at a new Hollister, California facility — up from one acre today — plus a next-gen robotic growing system and a launch of indoor-grown spinach. The company uses autonomous mobile robots as indoor “tractors” and machine learning to grow USDA-certified organic greens with 92% less water and 94% less land than field farming, at competitive prices. Retail partners include Sprouts.

This connects directly to Driscoll’s thesis. Driscoll’s built a $7 billion berry machine through genetics and cold-chain control. Hippo Harvest is betting that the next version of that advantage will come from robotics and controlled-environment agriculture. And the lead investor matters: Cox Farms is a strategic, the largest greenhouse operator on the continent, taking a front-row seat to automation it may eventually want to own. The future of produce is genetics, controlled environments, automation, and logistics — the same moat, new tools.

Final Boss Sour — $4M with Mondelēz SnackFutures Attached

Final Boss Sour secured $4M led by Evolution VC Partners, with Mondelēz International’s SnackFutures Ventures, The Angel Group, Melitas Ventures, and GFR Fund participating. Incubated in Science Inc.’s startup studio and co-founded by Tommy Riggs, London Lazerson, and James Hicks. The brand makes real dried fruit candied with a proprietary sour coating and is gearing up for a major retail push: Walmart, Kroger, H-E-B, Wegmans, and Hy-Vee now, with Target and 7-Eleven planned for this fall. Hicks calls it the fastest-growing sour snack brand in the country.

The Mondelēz SnackFutures money is the tell. When a strategic’s venture arm invests in a sour candy startup ahead of a Walmart-and-Target rollout, it’s buying a front-row seat to an acquisition target. Mondelēz owns the candy shelf globally, and better-for-you sour candy made from real fruit is exactly the format its legacy portfolio can’t organically produce. Science Inc. incubating it means the go-to-market was engineered from day one. Built to be bought.

FAVE — $1M Seed Led by Supernatural Ventures

Organic drink mix brand FAVE raised $1M, led by Supernatural Ventures. Founded by Ryan Raish, a 20-year CPG sales veteran who helped scale Guayakí, Honest Tea, Popchips, and Chloe’s Pops. The mixes are USDA Organic and low-sugar, and just launched in 10-count cartons at nearly 500 Sprouts stores. The founder résumé is the story — two decades of learning how to get better-for-you products onto shelves, and 500 Sprouts doors on a $1M seed — that reflects those relationships.

BUFFS — $1.1M Pre-Seed Ahead of August Launch

BUFFS closed $1.1M in pre-seed ahead of an August 11th launch. Co-founded by recent college grads Beckett Kitaen and George Zhou, BUFFS makes grass-fed, seed-oil-free beef puffs with 10- 12 g of protein in three flavors. Two recent grads raising over a million pre-launch on a beef-puff concept — the protein-snack format keeps fragmenting into new textures, and seed-oil-free taps the loudest ingredient conversation in food.

Funds Worth Watching

Two small vehicles were formalized this week. Hockey Stick Ventures launched a $3M Fund I; founder Sean Hershman has already backed Recess, The Coconut Cult, Renais Gin, Slate Milk, De Soi, and Liquid Death. And Springdale Ventures expanded beyond brands into retail infrastructure, investing in Hetal (retail insights and execution) and Martie (overstock grocery and beauty marketplace). As emerging CPG matures, the picks-and-shovels layer — retail execution software, overstock liquidation — becomes its own investable category.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Little Spoon Drops Eight New Products After 100 Million Meals

Little Spoon unveiled eight new products, including Peanut Puffs (an early-allergen-introduction snack), Fruit Puzzlers (a puzzle-shaped fruit snack exclusive to Target), and Pancake Spoonies (a 9g-protein pancake cup ready in under two minutes). Since launching the first fresh baby food in 2017, Little Spoon has grown into America’s No. 1 online baby and kids food company, delivering more than 100 million meals.

Little Spoon is executing the kids-nutrition platform playbook to perfection: start with fresh baby food, build parent trust, then expand across every stage and format. Each new product leverages the same relationship and trust, and the Target-exclusive Fruit Puzzlers show the retail relationship is deep enough to warrant custom SKUs. When you’ve delivered 100 million meals, you’ve earned the right to own the entire kids’ shelf.

Clare — GLP-1 Support for Women

Clare is a new all-in-one supplement for GLP-1 users, launching in August with a drink mix that delivers 10g of protein, 4g of prebiotic fiber, and electrolytes at 60 calories in Crisp Lemon Ginger. Co-founded by Hugh Perkins, Alden Dowdy, and William Cook, born from Dowdy’s own experience with GLP-1 side effects at Harvard Business School. GLP-1 companion nutrition is one of the most obvious white spaces in wellness, and Clare’s aspirational branding positions it above the clinical-looking competition.

More Launches Worth Watching

Bessi launched a cottage-cheese protein ice cream, and Hopkind — a functional non-alcoholic beer from the Symbiome skincare founders — arrives August 17th with hydration and recovery benefits. On The Brightside is a calming soda formulated around Zembrin, a plant extract that takes effect within 20 minutes. Jams is adding a Grape PB&J at Target and Walmart, NO CAP! is doing a Sour Punch–licensed soda line, and Chameleon Coffee launched a grass-fed A2 RTD range at Sprouts.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Driscoll’s: $7B, #2 Brand in American Supermarkets

Per a New York Times profile, Driscoll’s is now the second-highest-earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola. It commands roughly one-third of the U.S. berry market, and berries have surpassed $10 billion as a retail category — nearly double grapes, the next-largest produce category. A 1989 board resolution to make all four berries available year-round turned Driscoll’s into a genetics and cold-chain operation that grows in 21 countries and sells in 48. The most under-discussed CPG powerhouse in America.

Simply Good Foods Q3: $357M, Down 6.3%

Simply Good Foods reported $357M in Q3 net sales, down 6.3%, driven by a 24.6% net sales decline at Atkins (retail takeaway -23.9%). OWYN slipped 1.3%; Quest grew 1.4%. CEO Joe Scalzo called the problems “largely execution driven rather than category-driven” — notable, since the broader purposeful-nutrition category grew 10%. A cautionary tale: even a well-run acquirer can lose ground when the flagship legacy brand loses relevance faster than the acquired brands can offset it.

The Quick Numbers

Mid-Day Squares hit $35M TTM, with the new No Bread PB&J line as its fastest-growing product. NOCA Beverages is on pace to surpass 1 million cases, adding 700 Kroger doors and expanding to 1,400 Target doors. And SMACKIN’ has sold more than 25 million bags of sunflower seeds in six years — until recently, entirely bootstrapped.

🖥️ OPERATIONS SIDEBAR

The story under the shelf

fairlife’s Ransomware Shutdown

Coca-Cola-owned fairlife temporarily halted U.S. production after a ransomware attack. fairlife is one of Big Beverage’s fastest-growing platforms, and the take isn’t “cybersecurity matters.” It’s that production infrastructure is now software infrastructure: a digital breach can stop the line as completely as a plant failure. As CPG manufacturing gets more automated and connected, every operator’s risk map now includes an attack surface that has nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with whether the plant turns on Monday morning.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Kroger: Prima at nearly 500 stores; SkyPop Protein Soda rolled out. Walmart: Javvy nationwide; Welch’s Real PB&J and Jams Grape arriving. GNC: Mars Men launched nationwide after a $100M+ run rate and L Catterton partnership. Target: Fancypants Baking Co. at 600 stores; Little Spoon Fruit Puzzlers and Little Bellies Nibblers on shelf. Harris Teeter: Snack Buddies storewide. Casey’s: BeefCake Jerky at 375 stores. 7-Eleven: TRUBAR at select stores. H-E-B: Jams launched. Bristol Farms: Neutonic launched.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Andy Judd, former Poppi CMO, joined the board of frozen waffle brand Evergreen. Before Poppi, Judd helped build Yasso, ONE Brands, and Laird Superfood. Evergreen is the #1 frozen waffle brand in the two largest natural retailers, and adding the marketing mind behind a $2 billion exit is a serious scaling signal.

John Brase took over as Conagra CEO from Smucker in June; his first move — halving the dividend and launching a strategic review — sets the tone for a multi-year turnaround at one of Big Food’s most challenged portfolios.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

The incumbents are finally moving, and it tells you the disruption cycle has entered a new phase.

For three years the story has been the same: nimble emerging brands define a category, prove the thesis, build velocity, and either scale or get acquired by a giant that couldn’t innovate fast enough. OLIPOP and Poppi built functional soda. David and the protein brands built high-protein everything. The incumbents mostly watched, then bought.

This week, they stopped just watching and buying. They started building and cutting.

Coca-Cola is putting 6g of prebiotic fiber into Coke Zero, Sprite Zero, and Fresca — a direct response to the category Poppi and OLIPOP created, extended onto brands Coke already owns. Mondelēz’s venture arm is writing checks into sour candy startups like Final Boss before they hit Target, buying a seat at the table for formats its legacy portfolio can’t produce. And Conagra is doing the hardest thing a legacy company can do: admitting the old playbook is broken, cutting the dividend in half, taking a $2 billion impairment, and putting its own brands up for review.

Here’s what ties it together. The incumbents have internalized that they cannot simply acquire their way out of irrelevance. By the time a brand is worth buying, the strategic pays a premium. So now they’re doing three things at once: building functional versions of their own flagships, investing early in the disruptors, and pruning dead weight to free up capital.

But watch Simply Good Foods for the warning. It’s an acquirer that did everything right — bought Quest, bought OWYN, assembled a purposeful-nutrition platform — and still posted a 6.3% decline because its flagship, Atkins, is losing relevance faster than the acquired brands can offset. The category grew 10%. Simply Good’s takeaway fell 6.7%. Even smart incumbents lose if their biggest brand is dying and the acquired brands aren’t scaled enough to carry the company.

The lesson for founders is sharper than ever: the incumbents are now competing with you on the shelf, not just in the boardroom. Coke’s prebiotic soda will sit next to OLIPOP. Conagra’s divested brands create new competition and new acquirers. The giants are awake. Build something they can’t easily replicate — a genuine community, a proprietary format, cohort economics like IM8’s, or supply-chain control like Driscoll’s — because the moment your benefit can be bolted onto a flagship brand with a billion-dollar marketing budget, being first stops being enough.

Meanwhile, Driscoll’s just quietly kept being the second-biggest brand in the entire supermarket — no hype, no round, just berries and cold-chain logistics compounding for decades. And Wonder raised $650 million to build the automated infrastructure under how we’ll eat next. Two ends of the same barbell: the compounding platform nobody talks about, and the vertically integrated machine everybody’s betting on.

Build accordingly.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Wonder’s $9 billion bet on owning the entire meal stack. Coca-Cola is entering the prebiotic soda war. Conagra’s dividend cut and brand fire sale. IM8’s $1 billion non-dilutive machine. The Taylor Farms outbreak and why your supply chain is your brand. And why Driscoll’s is the second-biggest supermarket brand in America and nobody’s talking about it.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

The reason you can buy raspberries in the middle of winter is a 1989 boardroom decision — the Meadowood Declaration — committing Driscoll’s to year-round global availability of all four berries when that seemed impossible. Today it’s a genetics and cold-chain operation growing hundreds of varieties, most of which never reach a shelf.

Every week we cover funding rounds, celebrity brands, and billion-dollar exits. And the whole time, the second-biggest brand in the grocery store has been a family berry company most CPG newsletters have never once mentioned.

The flashiest brand isn’t the biggest business. The biggest business is the one that solved an impossible logistics problem and compounded quietly for 37 years.

Build accordingly.

Until next Sunday, Jonathan Deeter Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. — James Watt is trying to buy BrewDog back from Tilray through his new venture Second Best, reportedly offering free equity to the crowdfunders his last company burned. Buying back the company you already blew up is a level of self-awareness I have to respect, even if I wouldn’t bet on it. Meanwhile, the pickle industrial complex marches on: Firehook dropped a Dill Pickle cracker with Grillo’s. But my new theory is that sour is the next pickle. Final Boss Sour raised $4M. Create dropped Sour Grape creatine. NO CAP! is doing Sour Punch soda. Screenshot this.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Kroger is acquiring Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion — its first major acquisition since the failed Albertsons megamerger. One less independent regional grocer. One bigger retail media machine. And one more reset for every emerging brand that counted Giant Eagle as a separate buyer to pitch.

Meanwhile, UK-based Reformed raised $22M after scaling functional coffee to $70M in revenue — profitably, in two years. Cazcanes Tequila signed Reyes Beverage Group across six states with the former WhistlePig CEO as president. Monster struck a landmark Big 12 deal — jersey patches and field logos, a first for energy drinks in college sports. Country Life acquired Aura Cacia to build toward an exit of its wellness platform. Cann launched its first non-infused line. And Magic Mind says it now sells one shot every three seconds.

The theme this week is routes. Kroger's buying Giant Eagle is buying routes to the shopper. Cazcanes signing Reyes is buying routes to the shelf. Varun Beverages, spending $32M in Kenya, is buying routes to a continent. Monster renting the Big 12 is buying attention routes. The product matters, but the route decides who wins. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Kroger Acquires Giant Eagle for $1.65B — The Shelf Itself Consolidates

Kroger entered a definitive agreement to acquire Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion — its first major acquisition since the failed Albertsons megamerger.

This is the biggest retail story of the year for emerging brands, and it’s not close. Giant Eagle operates hundreds of supermarkets across Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Maryland. For decades, it’s been an independent regional buyer — a separate pitch, a separate reset, a separate relationship for every brand trying to build the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest.

Now it folds into Kroger. The implications run in both directions. For brands already in Kroger: potential access to hundreds of new doors through one buying relationship. For brands that used Giant Eagle as their regional proving ground before pitching Kroger, that stepping stone just disappeared. One less independent buyer in America means fewer paths to shelf and higher stakes per pitch.

And don’t miss the retail media angle. Kroger Precision Marketing is already one of the largest retail media networks in the grocery industry. Adding Giant Eagle’s shopper data and store network makes the machine bigger — more first-party data, more ad inventory, more leverage over brands that increasingly have to pay to play. After the Albertsons deal collapsed, Kroger needed a growth story. $1.65B for Giant Eagle is a fraction of the $24.6B Albertsons price with a fraction of the regulatory risk. Expect this one to close.

Reformed Raises $22M — Profitable at $70M in Two Years

UK-based Reformed closed $22M led by IRIS Ventures with JamJar Investments participating. Founded in 2024 by Neil Saada and Neil Marrakchi. Functional coffee, matcha, and mocha products. Profitable and scaled to $70M in annual revenue.

Read that timeline again. Founded in 2024. $70M in revenue. Profitable. Raising in 2026. That’s one of the fastest, most profitable scaling stories in functional beverage anywhere in the world. Most brands at $70M are burning cash to buy growth. Reformed got there in two years while making money.

IRIS Ventures leads matters — their wellness portfolio includes Healf (the UK wellness marketplace where Oshun just launched), Maurten, Biomel, and Olistic. JamJar is the fund from the Innocent Drinks founders — operators who built and sold a beverage brand to Coca-Cola. The functional coffee category keeps producing outliers: PerfectTed approaching $100M in matcha, Diamond Brew raising for craft instant, and now Reformed at $70M in profitable sales. The UK is quietly becoming the functional beverage factory of the world — and every one of these brands is a future acquisition target for the same strategics buying everything else.

Country Life Acquires Aura Cacia — Building Toward a Platform Exit

PE-backed Country Life acquired Aura Cacia from Frontier Distribution. Founded in 1982, Aura Cacia is the #1 brick-and-mortar aromatherapy brand, specializing in essential oils and skincare. Country Life — backed by Lion Equity — also owns protein brand Biochem and personal care brand Desert Essence. Post-acquisition revenue is well above $100M. Country Life expects to acquire a fifth brand and reach hundreds of millions in sales before seeking an exit.

The platform playbook, stated out loud. Most PE-backed platforms execute quietly — Country Life is telling you the plan: acquire a fifth brand, scale to hundreds of millions, exit. Supplements (Country Life), protein (Biochem), personal care (Desert Essence), and now aromatherapy (Aura Cacia, the #1 brick-and-mortar brand in its category). Four brands spanning the wellness aisle. The comps tell you where this goes: eComplete acquired Noted Aromas at 1.55x sales, and L’Occitane paid $164M for Dr. Vranjes Firenze at 3.6x sales. A diversified wellness platform at several hundred million in revenue commands a premium multiple from a strategic or larger PE firm. Same blueprint as Second Nature Brands in snacks and Bridgepoint in dermatological skincare — buy category leaders, assemble the platform, sell the whole thing for more than the parts.

Cazcanes Signs Reyes Beverage Group — The WhistlePig Playbook Activates

Cazcanes Tequila announced a distribution partnership with Reyes Beverage Group across six markets: Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Hawaii, effective August 1st. Late last year, Cazcanes hired former WhistlePig CEO Jeff Kozak as President — Kozak scaled WhistlePig from $1M to over $100M.

Premium spirits scale when the truck network gets serious. Reyes is the largest beer distributor in America, and its beverage division taking on a premium tequila across Texas, Colorado, and Arizona — three of the most important tequila markets in the country — is the infrastructure moment for Cazcanes. Kozak’s hire last year now makes complete sense: you bring in the operator who scaled WhistlePig 100x, and his first major move is locking in the route network. The sequence matters. Operator first. Distribution second. Volume third. Every premium spirits brand trying to scale should study the order of operations.

Belle Brands Acquires Versed — Buying Shelf Presence and Trust

Belle Brands, part of Windsong Global, acquired Versed to expand its beauty platform and reach in mass retail.

Versed is one of the most recognizable clean skincare brands in mass — built by Who What Wear’s parent company and scaled through Target with dermatologist-adjacent positioning at drugstore prices. For Belle Brands, this isn’t just buying products. It’s buying shelf presence and customer trust that would take years and millions to build organically. Versed comes with established Target real estate, years of clean-beauty brand equity, and a consumer who already knows what the brand stands for.

The mass beauty acquisition landscape keeps consolidating: Belle Brands buying Versed, Avenir buying Wrinkles Schminkles, Country Life buying Aura Cacia — all in the same two weeks. The pattern is identical across all three: platforms acquiring established brands with proven distribution rather than building from scratch. Shelf presence is the asset. The products are almost secondary.

Monster Rents College Football — Landmark Big 12 Deal

Monster struck a first-of-its-kind deal with the Big 12: jersey patches, field logos, the works. A first for energy drinks in college sports.

Red Bull built its own events for three decades — Formula 1 teams, cliff diving, air races, esports. Monster just rented one of the biggest attention machines in America instead. College football is the most-watched sport in half the country, and the Big 12 footprint (Texas, Florida, Arizona, Utah, Kansas, Ohio) maps directly onto the energy drink heartland. With Celsius at $2.5B, Alani up 94%, Bloom at $423M growing 646.5%, and Nutrabolt heading for a $1B IPO, Monster is defending its $8.3B franchise by buying cultural real estate the challengers can’t afford. Rent attention or lose it.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Laoban — $7.2M as Frozen Asian Expands

The dumpling brand that just launched Lo Mein exclusively at Whole Foods raised $7.2M. Frozen is where velocity hides now — the freezer aisle keeps producing funded brands (Laoban, Frozen One, ‘ndulge, Evergreen) because frozen delivers the margin structure and shelf life that fresh emerging brands can’t match.

Bayou Best Foods Acquires BettaF!sh — Alt-Seafood Consolidation Begins

Bayou Best Foods acquired Berlin-based seaweed brand BettaF!sh.

Alt-seafood consolidation has officially started. The plant-based seafood category never got the funding wave that alt-meat did — which means the brands that survived did it on real economics, not venture subsidies. BettaF!sh built seaweed-based tuna alternatives with European retail distribution and a genuinely differentiated ingredient story. Bayou acquiring rather than building signals the same pattern we’ve tracked in every category this year: buying proven brands beats launching new ones. Watch for more consolidation as the alt-seafood survivors get scooped up at reasonable prices by platforms hunting for category exposure without category risk.

Varun Beverages Buys Kenyan Operations for $32M

Varun Beverages, PepsiCo’s bottler, acquired a Kenyan beverage business for $32M.

Distribution grows by buying routes, not building them. Varun keeps executing the same playbook across Africa and South Asia — acquire local bottling and distribution infrastructure, plug in PepsiCo’s portfolio, own the route. Building a distribution network in a new country takes a decade. Buying one takes a quarter. At $32M, Varun gets trucks, warehouses, retail relationships, and local operating knowledge that no amount of greenfield investment could replicate on the same timeline. The route thesis of this week’s newsletter in its purest form.

Kimba — $5.4M Seed from Selva Ventures

AI-powered scent diffuser raised $5.4M led by Selva Ventures with Able Partners, bringing total funding to $6.5M. Founded in 2023 by Ben Fuxbruner and Gabi Beck — Fuxbruner developed the concept after struggling with PTSD and insomnia following a near-death incident in combat. $299 pre-order with subscription scent refills every three months. Connects to Oura and Apple Watch to determine when to release scents.

Sleeptech keeps attracting capital: Eight Sleep raised $50M at a $1.5B valuation, Somnee secured a $10M seed extension, and now Kimba brings scent into the stack. Selva, leading (Grüns, Arrae, Perelel, Crown Affair), puts a consumer-wellness heavyweight behind a hardware-plus-subscription model. The founder story — building from personal PTSD and insomnia — gives Kimba an authenticity most sleep gadgets can’t manufacture.

Manasi 7 — $1.5M from Divinity Studio

Organic Swedish beauty brand secured its first outside investment. Founded in 2018 by makeup artist Susanne Manasi Persson. Sixty products across skincare and beauty. Won Business of Fashion’s emerging brands category in 2025. Divinity Studio — a newly established investment platform — evaluated the brand for over a year before investing.

A year of diligence for a $1.5M check tells you Divinity is building a concentrated portfolio, not spraying capital. Scandinavian organic beauty with a working makeup artist as founder is the kind of credibility-first brand that scales slowly, then suddenly.

Rise Brewing vs. PepsiCo — Trademark Fight Brewing

The RTD coffee brand is in a trademark case against PepsiCo. Emerging brand versus $250B conglomerate over naming rights is a David-and-Goliath story worth tracking — these cases shape what insurgent brands can call themselves when the giants come to compete.

Four Loko Licenses Into Hemp

A licensing deal brings Four Loko into the intoxicating hemp beverage set. The brand that defined chaotic energy in alcohol is now entering THC beverages — a category that hit $239M in tracked channels, up 135%. The most on-brand category extension imaginable.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Cann Launches 0MG — The THC Brand Goes Zero

Cann launched its first non-infused line: Blood Orange Cardamom and Lemon Lavender, formulated with magnesium, electrolytes, L-Theanine, and passion flower. Online now, retail in August. Cann did nearly $40M in revenue in 2025.

The leading THC social tonic building for the occasion when THC isn’t invited. Cann 0MG targets the same sober-curious consumer with the same brand and flavor language, minus the intoxicant. At $40M in revenue, Cann has the brand equity to stretch across both sides of the functional relaxation aisle — and 0MG can go into every retailer that can’t legally stock the infused line. That’s the real play: the non-infused SKU unlocks mainstream distribution the THC products never could.

Misfits Launches Stuffed — Protein Candy Gets Indulgent

Misfits’ most indulgent range to date and its first with whey and collagen protein. Candy bar texture, 17g protein, 170 calories, zero added sugar. Salted Caramel, Peanut Butter, Chocolate Frosting. On their website and Amazon.

The protein candy race is about who tastes least like protein. Barebells launched candy last month. Vibes dropped Sour Blue Raspberry Boost this week. Misfits Stuffed enters with the candy-bar-first, protein-second positioning that’s winning everywhere — the treat that happens to have macros, not the supplement pretending to be a treat.

Backflip — Creator Cereal Goes Straight to Target

YouTuber Ben Azelart and serial entrepreneur Shaun Neff launched Backflip, a better-for-you cereal free from seed oils, synthetic dyes, glyphosate, and gluten. 6g protein per serving. Four flavors, debuting at Target.

Creator brands are going shelf-first now. No DTC phase, no waitlist, no drop model — straight to Target with four SKUs. Azelart brings 40M+ followers, and Neff brings the brand-building machine behind Neff Headwear and dozens of celebrity ventures. The Magic Spoon comparison is obvious, but the strategy is inverted: Magic Spoon spent years in DTC before retail. Backflip is betting the creator audience converts at shelf on day one.

Kreatures of Habit — DAILY BAR at Sprouts + RV Tour

Michael Chernow’s brand launched its 20g protein, 3g creatine DAILY BAR nationwide at Sprouts — 9-10g fiber, no seed oils or sugar alcohols. Chernow is hitting the road in an RV through SoCal, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, partnering with run clubs and sampling at Sprouts stores.

The creatine industrial complex meets founder-led field marketing. Protein plus creatine in a bar is the format convergence we’ve tracked all year (JiMMYBAR!, Plainspeak, AG1 Pro). The RV tour with run clubs is the kind of community-first launch that money can’t shortcut — and exactly what a founder with Chernow’s restaurant-hospitality DNA knows how to execute.

Welch’s Real PB&J Sandwich — 12g Protein at Walmart

Welch’s launched frozen PB&J sandwiches in three flavors, each with 12g of protein, at Walmart. The grape jelly icon coming directly from Uncrustables — and Jams — with a protein-forward angle neither leads with. The frozen sandwich aisle that Jams cracked open is now a three-way fight.

Melting Forest — Glow Up at Sprouts

Sparkling protein line in the Sprouts Forager Set: 15g protein, 5g collagen, magnesium, mushrooms, and vitamins, available in four flavors (Hibiscus Berry, Apple Ginger, Blood Orange Saffron, Lemon Rosemary). Founded by functional beverage vet Sean McDonald in 2024. Sparkling protein with adaptogens is the OLIPOP-meets-Be LOVE convergence point.

More Launches Worth Watching

Dolly Parton “Cup of Ambition” — Dolly launches a coffee brand. The name alone earns the shelf space.

Reese’s Pieces’ first new flavor in 10 years. Legacy candy doesn’t need constant reinvention — it needs novelty rare enough to feel like an event.

Kellogg Super Stars — a K-12 cereal built for schools. The cafeteria delivers institutional volume today and taste memory for the next decade.

Pet Honesty Cat Squeezables — science-backed cat wellness in a lickable format cats already love. Format is the new formulation, even in pet.

Vibes Candy Sour Blue Raspberry Boost — nostalgia flavor, swapped ingredient panel.

Firehook x Grillo’s Pickles — limited-edition pickle cracker rolling out nationally through July. The pickle industrial complex now includes crackers.

Nantucket Crisps x All Time Low — the chip brand is partnering with the rock band on a limited flavor.

Circadia launched a sleep platform that automatically optimizes room temperature. Rogue Fitness launched the Air Rhino lower-body air resistance trainer. Bala launched its first apparel collection. Evolv launched an oral hair growth peptide supplement.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Magic Mind: One Shot Every Three Seconds

Per co-founder and CEO William Hicks, Magic Mind now sells one shot every three seconds — roughly 28,800 shots a day — while pushing deeper into Target, Fresh Thyme, and New Seasons. The productivity shot brand turning subscription velocity into retail expansion.

Cann: ~$40M in 2025 Revenue

The THC social tonic leader’s revenue disclosure alongside the 0MG launch. The infused category’s most established brand is now big enough to fund its own hedge against the category’s regulatory risk.

Reformed: $70M Revenue, Profitable, Founded 2024

The fastest profitable scale story in functional beverage. Two years from founding to $70M with positive unit economics.

Evergreen: Top-Selling Frozen Waffle in Natural, Double-Digit Growth

Top seller across the two largest natural retailers with double-digit growth in the latest 12 weeks — and now former Poppi CMO Andy Judd on the board.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

HARRIS TEETER

Snack Buddies made its retail debut storewide. The Yasso founders’ mini muffin brand is picking the Southeast grocer for launch — freezer aisle placement, storewide from day one. Serial founders don’t do regional tests.

SPROUTS

Kreatures of Habit DAILY BAR nationwide. Melting Forest Glow Up line in the Forager Set. The natural channel continues to function as the protein and functional launchpad.

TARGET

Backflip debuted with four flavors. Magic Mind is expanding deeper. Target remains the shelf where creator brands and functional brands prove mainstream demand.

WALMART

Welch’s Real PB&J Sandwich line launched. The Uncrustables challenger fight now has a third entrant at America's largest retailer.

REYES BEVERAGE GROUP

Cazcanes across Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Hawaii starting August 1st. The route network is the strategy.

FRESH THYME + NEW SEASONS

Magic Mind is expanding across both natural chains alongside the Target push.

WAKEFERN

Wakefern updated its own-brand food and beverage portfolio around evolving customer preferences. Private label is becoming a retailer-owned brand house with guaranteed shelf space. This pairs directly with the Kroger-Giant Eagle story — retailers aren’t just consolidating doors; they’re building brand portfolios that compete with the national brands paying for placement. Every emerging brand’s shelf competition now includes the retailer itself. And the retailer never loses the reset.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Andy Judd, former Poppi CMO, joins Evergreen’s Board of Directors. Before Poppi, Judd drove growth at Laird Superfood, Yasso, and ONE Brands. The frozen waffle brand that’s already #1 in natural, adding the marketing mind behind Poppi’s $2B exit, is a scaling signal. Backed by Melitas Ventures and Terpsi Capital.

Jeff Kozak, former WhistlePig CEO (scaled $1M to $100M+), is now President of Cazcanes — and his first major move is the Reyes distribution deal. Operator first, distribution second, volume third.

Michael Chernow is taking Kreatures of Habit on the road personally — a multi-state RV tour through five states. Founder-led field marketing at its most literal.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

The route is the strategy. Every major story this week proves it from a different angle.

Kroger paid $1.65 billion for Giant Eagle. Not for the brand. Not for the private label. For the routes — hundreds of stores, millions of shoppers, and a retail media machine that gets bigger with every door. After the Albertsons deal died, Kroger didn’t abandon consolidation. It just picked a target small enough to close.

Cazcanes signed Reyes across six states — and it did so by hiring the WhistlePig operator first, because Jeff Kozak knew the route network is what turns a premium tequila brand into a business. Varun Beverages, PepsiCo’s bottler, spent $32M buying a Kenyan beverage company — not for the products, for the routes. Distribution grows by buying routes, not building them.

Monster rented the Big 12 — jersey patches, field logos, the first energy drink deal of its kind in college sports. That’s a route too: a route to attention in the exact geography where energy drinks over-index, defended against Celsius, Alani, and Bloom’s 646.5% surge.

And for emerging brands, the Kroger-Giant Eagle deal is the one that changes your math. One less independent buyer in America. One less regional proving ground. The consolidation isn’t just happening to brands anymore — it’s happening to the shelf itself. Fewer doors controlled by fewer companies means every pitch carries higher stakes and every relationship compounds harder.

The winners this week didn’t wait. Reformed got profitable before raising. Cann built the non-infused hedge before regulation forced it. Snack Buddies went storewide on its debut. Magic Mind converted subscription velocity into retail doors.

Own your route or rent it — but know which one you’re doing. The brands that control how the product reaches the shopper are pulling away from the brands that just make a good product and hope.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Breaking down Kroger’s $1.65B Giant Eagle deal and what one less independent grocer means for every emerging brand’s pitch math. Reformed hitting $70M profitably in two years. Country Life’s stated platform playbook. Cazcanes is activating the WhistlePig playbook with Reyes. Monster renting college football. And why the route — not the product — is deciding who wins.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Reformed was founded in 2024. It’s now at $70M in revenue. Profitably.

No blitzscaling. No burn. No “we’ll figure out margins later.” Two guys named Neil built a functional coffee brand to $70M in two years while making money, and then raised $22M from a position of strength.

The growth-at-all-costs era produced brands that needed the next round to survive. The proof era is producing brands that raise because they want to, not because they have to.

Be the brand that raises because it wants to.

Until next Sunday,
Jonathan Deeter
Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. — Firehook launched a pickle cracker with Grillo’s. The pickle industrial complex now officially spans: lip balm, hydration packs, beer, shots, hot sauce butter, hop water lemonade, and crackers. I said Phase 4 was pickle protein powder. I’d like to formally revise my prediction: pickle protein powder AND a pickle-flavored sleep aid by Q1 2027. The pickle does not sleep. But soon it will help you.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Nutrabolt tapped J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America to lead a U.S. IPO that could raise $1 billion. The company behind C4 Energy and Bloom Sparkling Energy reportedly surpassed $1B in revenue last year. Bloom’s dollar sales are up 646.5% year-over-year to $423M. KDP acquired a 30% stake at a $2.8B valuation in 2022. And now Nutrabolt wants to go public.

Meanwhile, Saltair hired Raymond James to explore an exit — $150M in projected sales and what would be The Center incubator’s third beauty exit after Naturium ($355M to e.l.f.) and Phlur (to TSG). ACON Investments acquired YumEarth, the organic candy brand at 30,000 doors. Vitamin Well, the owner of Barebells, is merging with its own bar manufacturer EMPWR — buying the supply chain so nobody else can rent it. Apothékary raised $16M from Shiseido’s venture arm. And Frozen One closed $5.75M with Ryan Tedder.

The theme this week is graduation. Nutrabolt is graduating from private to public. Saltair is graduating from incubation to exit. Vitamin Well is graduating from outsourcing to owning its supply chain. And YumEarth is graduating from founder-led to PE-backed platform. The brands that prove velocity long enough eventually graduate to the next level. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Nutrabolt Eyes $1B IPO — Bloom at $423M, Up 646.5%

Nutrabolt tapped J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America to lead its U.S. IPO. The company could raise as much as $1 billion. Founded in 2002 in Austin. Reportedly surpassed $1B in revenue last year. KDP acquired a 30% stake at an approximately $2.8B valuation in 2022. Bloom Sparkling Energy dollar sales hit $423M for the 52-week period ending April 19th, up 646.5% year-over-year.

Six hundred and forty-six percent growth. From Bloom alone. The energy drink brand that started as a TikTok-viral greens powder is now doing $423M in tracked dollar sales in its sparkling energy format, growing nearly 7x year over year. Nutrabolt, at $1B+ in revenue with that kind of growth trajectory, makes the IPO math compelling.

For context: Monster delivered $8.3B in 2025 net sales with a $94B market cap — roughly 11x revenue. Celsius did $2.5B with a $7.4B market cap — roughly 3x revenue. If Nutrabolt prices at even 5-6x on $1B+ in revenue, that’s a $5-6B public company. KDP’s 30% stake at $2.8B in 2022 already looks like one of the best corporate venture investments in beverage history.

The three leading banks — J.P. Morgan, Goldman, and Bank of America — are the A-list underwriting syndicate. This isn’t a test-the-waters filing. This is a company preparing for a major public debut. After Suja raised $186.7M on the Nasdaq and posted $107M in Q1 with 50% gross margins, the IPO window for consumer brands is demonstrably open. Nutrabolt would be the largest consumer brand IPO since the correction.

Saltair Explores Exit — The Center’s Third Beauty Blockbuster

Saltair tapped Raymond James to explore a potential exit. Projected 2026 sales of approximately $150M. Co-created by British model Iskra Lawrence and brand incubator The Center. Available at Target, Ulta, and Amazon. If completed, this would be The Center’s third major exit: Naturium ($355M to e.l.f. in 2023), Phlur (to TSG in 2025), and now Saltair.

The Center is quietly becoming the most successful beauty incubator in America. Three exits in four years. Naturium at $355M. Phlur to TSG. Now, Saltair is at $150M in projected sales, heading for its own process. Backed by Prelude Growth Partners, The Center’s portfolio also includes Cyklar, Make Beauty, and Prequel (launching at Space NK UK on July 14th from the same incubator that produced the Naturium and Phlur exits).

The incubator model works when the operator knows exactly what acquirers want: clean formulations, strong retail distribution (Target, Ulta, Amazon), a credible founder or celebrity face, and $100M+ in revenue growing rapidly. Naturium had it. Phlur had it. Saltair has it. And the Center keeps building brands to that exact specification.

At $150M in projected sales, Saltair is at the same scale as when TSG acquired Phlur. If the multiple is similar to Naturium’s ($355M on what was likely $100-150M in revenue), Saltair could command $300-500M. Raymond James running the process with initial bids due soon means this deal moves fast.

ACON Acquires YumEarth — Organic Candy at Scale Gets PE Backing

PE firm ACON Investments acquired YumEarth, an organic and allergy-friendly candy brand. Founded in 2007 in Stamford, CT. Available at 30,000 doors, including Target, Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods, and Sprouts. ACON tapped Spanish confectionery giant Fini as a strategic industry partner with an ownership stake.

The first mover in better-for-you candy gets PE backing after nearly two decades of building. 30,000 doors. Organic, non-GMO, no artificial dyes, gluten-free, free from the top nine allergens. YumEarth built the better-for-you candy category before Harken, SmartSweets, Better Sour, or any of the insurgent candy brands we cover weekly. ACON bringing Fini — a global confectionery firm distributing to 100+ countries — as a strategic partner alongside the acquisition signals the thesis is international expansion. Take a brand that owns organic candy in the U.S. and scale it globally through Fini’s distribution network.

Vitamin Well Merges with EMPWR — Buying the Supply Chain

Vitamin Well Group, owner of Barebells, is merging with Belgian nutrition bar manufacturer EMPWR. EMPWR has been Barebells’ key manufacturing partner for several years and operates four facilities across Europe and North America. Waterland Private Equity backed EMPWR. Cinven acquired a majority stake in Vitamin Well at a reported valuation of $3B+ in 2024. Bridgepoint also owns a significant minority.

Buying your own manufacturer. The vertical integration trend we’ve tracked all year just produced its most significant deal. Vitamin Well isn’t building a new factory — it’s acquiring the company that already makes its products. Four manufacturing facilities across two continents. Every bar Barebells sells was already being made in these facilities. Now Vitamin Well owns them outright.

This is what happens when a protein bar brand hits $3B+ in valuation: you can no longer afford to have someone else control your production. Co-packing at scale means your manufacturer also serves your competitors. Owning the manufacturer means your competitors need to find a new factory. David purchased one of its key suppliers, Epogee, last year. Stars + Honey is building 60K sq ft. WILDE built 130K sq ft. Vitamin Well just bought four facilities. The vertical integration arms race in protein is accelerating at every level.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Apothékary — $16M from Shiseido’s LIFT Ventures

Japanese-inspired herbal wellness brand raised $10M in equity from Shiseido’s LIFT Ventures, NextLevel Management, and angels, plus $6M in debt from RSF Social Finance. Founded by Wall Street veteran Shizu Okusa in 2019. Expects $40M in revenue this year. Available at Ulta, Whole Foods, Vitamin Shoppe, and Sprouts. Anne Mahlum (Solidcore founder) is a previous investor.

Shiseido’s venture arm leading an herbal wellness brand is the strategic signal. Shiseido already owns NARS, Laura Mercier, and Drunk Elephant ($845M acquisition). LIFT Ventures' investment in Apothékary suggests the Japanese beauty conglomerate views ingestible wellness as adjacent to its skincare portfolio. $40M expected this year with Ulta, Whole Foods, Vitamin Shoppe, and Sprouts distribution is a multi-channel brand that’s proven it works beyond DTC. The $6M in debt alongside $10M in equity is a smart capital structure — use equity for brand building, use debt for working capital and inventory.

Frozen One — $5.75M from Brand Foundry Ventures

High-protein ice cream brand closed $5.75M led by Brand Foundry Ventures. Supernatural Ventures also participated alongside Abe Burns and Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic lead singer). Added David Valenza-Frost (ex-Van Leeuwen VP Supply Chain) as COO and Ashley Montgomery Ross (ex-Onnit VP Revenue) as SVP Sales. Launched last year with distribution at Target, Wegmans, Raley’s, Central Market, and others.

Brand Foundry, the firm that also led Bawi’s $6M, keeps backing emerging brands with proven retail velocity. Ryan Tedder's investment expands cultural reach beyond the functional-food consumer. The operational hires are the real story: a Van Leeuwen supply chain exec and an Onnit revenue exec joining a protein ice cream brand in its first year. When you hire Van Leeuwen’s supply chain leadership to run your operations, you’re building for the kind of retail scale that Van Leeuwen operates at. The protein ice cream category keeps attracting capital and talent simultaneously — Frozen One, ‘ndulge, Smearcase, David’s $90 pints.

InvestEco — Fund IV at $106M CAD

Toronto-based consumer fund closed $106M CAD. Since 2002, portfolio includes LesserEvil Snacks (exited to Hershey $750M), Mid-Day Squares, Algae Cooking Club, Little Sesame, Om Mushroom Superfood. Expects 6-10 investments from Fund IV.

LesserEvil's exit to Hershey for $750M is the headline return that raised Fund IV. InvestEco’s two-decade track record in Canadian and North American consumer brands gives it pattern recognition that most emerging managers lack. Mid-Day Squares and Algae Cooking Club are brands we cover regularly in the portfolio. $106M CAD gives InvestEco meaningful check-writing capacity at the growth stage.

Supply6 — $5M+ Series A from Unilever Ventures

Indian VMS brand secured Series A led by Unilever Ventures with actress Kriti Sanon and Zeropearl VC. Offers daily drink mixes and nutrition bars. Unilever Ventures’ India portfolio also includes SkinInspired, What’s Up Wellness, and Secret Alchemist.

Unilever Ventures is building an Indian wellness portfolio through multiple investments. After L’Oréal acquired Innovist (Bare Anatomy, Chemist at Play, SunScoop) two weeks ago, Unilever is making its own India play through the venture arm. The battle for India’s wellness consumer is now mirroring the beauty battle — L’Oréal and Unilever competing for the same market through different strategies.

Mila — $2.5M Pre-Seed from Mensch Capital

Design-forward intimate wellness brand closed $2.5M from Mensch Capital Partners with Sticker Ventures and angels. Co-founded by Ada Trujillo and Kim Aviv in Miami.

The intimate wellness category continues to attract capital as consumer stigma fades and design-forward brands make it feel approachable. Mensch Capital is leading the addition of a firm focused on consumer brands at the earliest stages.

Oat Cult — £220K from Anotherway Ventures

UK overnight oats brand with gut-focused formulation containing 1B+ live cultures. Small round from Anotherway Ventures and angels.

The UK functional breakfast category at the pre-seed stage. Gut-focused overnight oats with live cultures are a format that bridges the convenience of overnight oats with the functional positioning of probiotic supplements.

Bethenny Frankel Acquires Minority in dpHUE

Bethenny Frankel acquired a minority stake in dpHUE, an at-home hair color brand. Will serve as Chief Brand Officer, working with founder Donna Pohlad. Frankel continues building a CPG portfolio — MUSH collab at Target, now dpHUE equity.

Avenir Collective Acquires Wrinkles Schminkles

Former Amazon aggregator (formerly Olsam Group) acquired the Australian wrinkle-patch brand. Bootstrapped. Approximately $14M in annual sales. Amazon aggregators are pivoting to beauty brand acquisition. Whether a tech-first acquirer can operate a beauty brand is the experiment.

Edrington Sells Wyoming Whiskey Back to Co-Founder

Premium spirits company (Macallan, Highland Park) sold its majority stake back to co-founder David DeFazio via WW Partners. Edrington went from a minority (2018) to 80% (2023) and now exists entirely. Another founder buying back their brand — same pattern as Tilray/Atwater.

Sazerac Acquires Garrard County Distilling for $20M

Sazerac picked up a 50,000-square-foot distillery south of Lexington at a court-ordered auction. The distribution machine adds production capacity. At $20M, it’s small for Sazerac but adds Kentucky distilling infrastructure.

Hormel Exits Brazil

Hormel sold its Brazilian operations to Zanchetta Alimentos. Streamlining the portfolio to focus on markets with stronger growth opportunities. Previously sold a 51% stake in Justin’s to make it a standalone. Conglomerates keep shedding non-core international assets.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Bloom Sparkling Energy: $423M, Up 646.5%

Not a launch, but the most important product data point of the week. Bloom’s sparkling energy line did $423M in dollar sales for the 52-week period ending April 19th. Up 646.5% year-over-year. The growth rate that’s powering Nutrabolt’s $1B IPO. From green powder to $423M in energy drinks in under three years.

Plainspeak Launches — Creatine + Protein + Collagen for Women

New science-backed supplement brand from Goldilocks incubator. Co-founded by Sara Brooks and Rachel Pollard (former CMO of Clio Snacks). Debut product Strength Water: 15g protein, 5g creatine, 5g collagen, calcium, and vitamin D. The creatine-for-women positioning is the next frontier of the creatine industrial complex — everything we’ve tracked (AG1 Pro, Create, Lemme, JiMMYBAR!) has been gender-neutral or male-skewing. Plainspeak explicitly targeting women with creatine changes the addressable market.

Liquid I.V. Expands Across Europe

Unilever is expanding Liquid I.V. to Spain, Germany, France, Sweden, and Iceland. The #1 hydration brand in the U.S. with $1B+ in annual sales is going international through Unilever’s distribution infrastructure. Already thriving in Italy and the UK. This is what Unilever’s distribution machine does — it takes an American brand and puts it in every European market simultaneously.

So Good So You Hires General Mills Veteran as CEO

Jennifer Jorgensen takes the helm after 26 years at General Mills and leading Back to Nature’s post-acquisition turnaround. Bansk Group acquired a majority stake earlier this year. SGSY is the #1 wellness shot brand in total U.S. multi-outlet channels, growing 5x over four years. Hiring a General Mills veteran for a wellness shot brand signals preparation for the next phase of scale.

More Launches Worth Watching

Juni two new summer flavors — 8,000+ doors, 15M cans sold, 10 consecutive quarters of 100%+ growth. Jay Shetty and Radhi Devlukia’s adaptogenic sparkling tea keeps compounding.

Capri-Sun Game On — the juice brand re-entering energy drinks with novel packaging and cross-functional ingredients.

Rhinegeist x Kroger Super Lager — co-branded affordable lager debuting in three Kroger regions in August. A brewery and a grocery chain co-creating a beer.

Coconut Cult x SunLife Organics — Banana Cream Pie Froyo at SunLife’s Hamptons outpost.

Oat Haus x Kylie Kelce — Salted Caramel Granola Butter benefiting Eagles Autism Foundation.

HOPWTR x Good Girl Snacks — Pickle Lemonade Sparkling Hop Water. The pickle industrial complex extends to non-alc.

Ciggy’s — premium vodka seltzer launching exclusively on Nantucket from athletes, entrepreneurs, and creators.

Dutch Barn Vodka — Ricky Gervais’ British spirits brand launching RTD cocktails.

Refresh packaging refresh and expansion into mints and Energy + Focus gum.

Little Twists — allergy-friendly baking mixes debuting at Summer Fancy Food Show.

Gisou honey-infused hair and body mists — sold out at Sephora on launch.

Annual Leave — new fragrance brand from two Le Labo veterans.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Bloom Sparkling Energy: $423M, Up 646.5%

The single most impressive growth number in CPG this year. $423M in dollar sales growing nearly 7x year-over-year. The engine behind Nutrabolt’s $1B IPO.

ZBiotics: 15 Million “Pre-Alcohol” Shots Sold

At $7-9 per shot retail, that’s over $100M in cumulative revenue for a product that requires significant consumer education. Proving that even complex science-backed products can scale when the value proposition is clear enough.

Premier Protein #1 on Amazon Prime Day

The top-selling item on Amazon Prime Day was a 12-pack of Premier Protein shakes. Liquid I.V. came in at #3. Functional nutrition and hydration are dominating the biggest shopping event on Amazon.

Lotus Bakeries Stock Up ~600% Over 10 Years

The parent company of Biscoff. One of the strongest performing CPG stocks of the decade. Proof that a single-brand platform with global distribution and cultural ubiquity produces extraordinary shareholder returns.

Juni: 8,000 Doors, 15M Cans, 10 Quarters of 100%+ Growth

The adaptogenic sparkling tea brand is hitting every milestone simultaneously. When you post 100%+ growth for ten straight quarters, the compounding becomes its own story.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

SPROUTS

Be LOVE launched nationwide — 15g protein, 5g collagen from the Vital Proteins founder. B.T.R. Nation launched nationwide. Natty Ice Cream at 30+ locations. Bebe Got Back launched nationwide. Four brands are going chainwide at Sprouts simultaneously.

H-E-B

Mission MightyMe launched at 240+ stores. Meaningful door count for a brand entering the most important regional grocer for emerging food brands.

TARGET

New Primal launched nationwide with a Snack Mates refresh. The meat snack brand is entering mass retail at a national scale.

WAWA

Bloom Sparkling Energy launched. The $423M brand is entering the convenience channel through one of the East Coast’s most important c-store chains. Convenience is where energy drinks win in the impulse-purchase moment.

EREWHON

PRIMA launched. The LA credibility stamp continues.

VITAMIN SHOPPE

DryWater storewide confirmed from last week.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Jennifer Jorgensen, a 26-year General Mills veteran, was named CEO of So Good So You. Led Back to Nature’s post-acquisition turnaround into one of the fastest-growing cookie and cracker brands. When the #1 wellness shot brand hires a General Mills lifer, they’re building for institutional scale.

Alexandre Ruberti was confirmed as Zevia's CEO, replacing Amy Taylor. 16 years at Red Bull. A Red Bull lifer running a zero-sugar soda company brings beverage distribution expertise from the most successful energy drink in history.

Paulina Char is leaving Tower 28 after eight years (employee #1, developed SOS Spray and ShineOn Lip Oil Jelly) to join MPH Beauty, founded by makeup artist Mary Phillips. When employee #1 at a beloved indie beauty brand leaves for a creator-founded brand, the talent migration toward creator-led companies is real.

David Valenza-Frost (ex-Van Leeuwen VP Supply Chain) as COO and Ashley Montgomery Ross (ex-Onnit VP Revenue) as SVP Sales at Frozen One. Van Leeuwen operations plus Onnit revenue expertise at a protein ice cream startup.

Lori Harvey named Chief Creative Advisor at Kevin Hart’s Gran Coramino tequila. Connecting with female consumers through Harvey’s cultural reach.

Rachel Shelowitz (ex-Lawless Beauty CEO) is running Saltair as CEO. Erin Sale (ex-Murad CMO) as CMO. The Center is loading Saltair with experienced operators ahead of the exit process.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Bloom Sparkling Energy grew 646.5% to $423 million in dollar sales. In one year. For a brand that didn’t exist in its current form three years ago.

Let me put that in the context of every energy drink brand we’ve tracked this year: Celsius at $783M in Q1 (20.9% market share). Monster at $2.35B in Q1. Alani is surging 94% under Celsius. And now Bloom at $423M growing nearly 7x.

Nutrabolt going public at a potential $5-6B valuation isn’t just an IPO. It’s a referendum on whether the market believes the energy drink category can support a third major platform alongside Monster and Celsius. The answer, based on the Bloom data, appears to be yes.

But the story I keep coming back to is The Center. The beauty incubator that produced Naturium ($355M to e.l.f.), Phlur (to TSG), and now has Saltair at $150M heading for an exit. Three exits in four years from the same incubator. Same playbook every time: partner with a credible founder or celebrity, build clean formulations with skincare-grade ingredients, launch at Target and Ulta, scale to $100-150M, exit to a strategic or PE firm.

The incubator model in beauty is working because it’s repeatable. The Center isn’t building one brand — it’s building a factory that produces exitworthy brands. Prequel is already launching at Space NK. That’s likely exit number four in development.

Meanwhile, Vitamin Well is buying its own manufacturer. YumEarth is getting PE backing after 18 years. Frozen One is hiring Van Leeuwen operators. Apothékary is taking Shiseido money. The common thread across every story is maturity. These aren’t launch announcements and seed rounds. These are IPO filings, exit processes, manufacturing acquisitions, and operational hires from scaled companies.

The CPG landscape in 2026 is graduating from startup energy to institutional infrastructure. The brands that survive this transition — from founder-led to operator-run, from co-packed to vertically integrated, from venture-backed to publicly traded or PE-owned — are the ones that will define the next decade.

Graduate or get left behind.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Breaking down Nutrabolt’s $1B IPO and whether Bloom’s 646.5% growth justifies a $5-6B public company. Saltair exploring an exit — The Center’s third beauty blockbuster in four years. ACON is acquiring YumEarth after 18 years of building organic candy. Vitamin Well is buying EMPWR to own the bar supply chain. Apothékary’s $16M from Shiseido. And why the CPG landscape is graduating from startup energy to institutional infrastructure.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

The Center built Naturium. Sold it for $355M. Built Phlur. Sold it to TSG. Built Saltair. It’s heading for an exit at $150M in projected sales. Built Prequel. It’s launching at Space NK next week.

Four brands. Same incubator. Same playbook. Three exits completed or in process. One more in development.

At some point, The Center isn’t an incubator. It’s a beauty brand assembly line with a proven output: $100M+ brands that strategics want to buy. The model is the product.

Until next Sunday,
Jonathan Deeter
Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. — The top-selling item on Amazon Prime Day was Premier Protein shakes. Not electronics. Not home goods. Not fashion. Protein shakes. Liquid I.V. was #3. The two biggest shopping moments on the biggest shopping day on the world’s biggest e-commerce platform were both functional nutrition products. The consumer has spoken. Loudly. In bulk. With free shipping.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Danone just paid a reported $1.4 billion for an Australian functional nutrition company most Americans have never heard of. Three months after buying Huel for $1.15B. MADE Group — Cocobella coconut water, Rokeby protein shakes, Impressed cold-pressed juices — over €300M in revenue, double-digit growth, across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Danone’s deputy CEO called MADE “a mini Danone.” TPG Capital, the seller, earned nearly $2 billion five years after acquiring the business. Five years. Two billion dollars. From a functional nutrition portfolio in the Southern Hemisphere.

Meanwhile, P&G and Haleon have entered the bidding for Thorne alongside Unilever at a $4 billion valuation — $650M in expected 2026 revenue. Sazerac stopped just acquiring RTD brands and started building its own — three new canned cocktail brands launched this week. L Catterton invested in RŌZ haircare. Pat McAfee bought into Jams. Coconut Cult secured $12.5M to build a 300,000-square-foot factory. And Bacardi took full ownership of Teeling Irish Whiskey.

The theme this week is control. Danone is buying full control of MADE and its Australian dairy JV. Bacardi is taking full ownership of Teeling. Sazerac is building its own RTDs instead of just acquiring them. Coconut Cult is buying its own manufacturing capacity. The smartest operators are moving from minority positions and partnerships to full ownership because the next phase of growth requires control — of the brand, the production, and the distribution. Let’s dig in.

🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Danone Acquires MADE Group — Reported $1.4B, Three Months After Huel

Danone is acquiring MADE Group from TPG Capital for a reported A$2 billion (~$1.4B). Founded in 2005 in Melbourne. Brands include Cocobella (coconut-based), Rokeby (RTD protein shakes), Impressed (cold-pressed juices), NutrientWater, and The Collective. Over €300M in revenue with double-digit growth. Significant presence in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Danone is also acquiring the remaining 49% of its Saputo Dairy Australia joint venture.

Danone bought Huel for $1.15B three months ago. Now MADE for $1.4B. That’s $2.55 billion deployed into functional nutrition in a single quarter. Danone isn’t dipping its toe into functional nutrition — it’s cannonballing. The MADE deal at roughly 4.5x revenue on €300M+ in revenue, with double-digit growth and attractive margins, is a premium justified by the APAC footprint. Danone has established positions in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia — some of the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world — in categories (protein, gut health, coconut, cold-pressed) that are all growing in the double digits.

TPG Capital's $2B return five years after acquiring MADE is one of the strongest PE returns in consumer we’ve tracked. Buy a functional nutrition portfolio. Let it compound at double-digit growth for five years. Sell to a strategic for nearly $2B. That’s the model every PE firm is trying to replicate.

Danone’s deputy CEO calling MADE “a mini Danone” tells you everything about the strategic fit. Protein yogurts. Plant-based products. Functional drinks. It’s the exact same category map Danone operates globally, just in a geography where Danone was underweight. This isn’t diversification. It’s replication.

Thorne Bidding War: P&G and Haleon Join Unilever at $4B

P&G and Haleon are reportedly circling Thorne alongside Unilever. L Catterton acquired Thorne in 2023, and the brand is now valued at $4 billion. Revenue hit $500M in 2025 and is pacing for $650M this year.

The supplement brand that L Catterton has been shopping just went from one suitor to three. Unilever seemed like the natural buyer — they’ve spent billions building a wellness portfolio (Grüns $1.2B, Liquid I.V. $1B+, OLLY, Nutrafol). But P&G's entry into the bidding adds the world’s largest consumer goods company to the conversation. P&G acquired Wonderbelly in January — a signal they’re expanding into wellness. Haleon (Centrum, Emergen-C) owns the legacy supplement shelf and has been quiet on M&A since spinning off from GSK.

Three bidders at $4B. $650M in expected revenue. That’s roughly 6x revenue — a premium but justified for the most trusted supplement brand in America with a clinical-grade positioning that neither Centrum nor OLLY can replicate. The bidding war dynamics mean L Catterton has leverage to push the price above $4B. When three strategics compete for the same asset, the seller wins.

Sazerac Launches Three Own RTD Brands — Building, Not Just Buying

Sazerac launched three canned cocktail brands it built from scratch: Endless Afternoon Whiskey Lemonade, Buckhorn Whiskey Lemonade, and Lovebug Hard Cream Soda.

This is a significant strategic shift. Sazerac has spent the last 18 months acquiring RTD brands: BuzzBallz (up 65% to $570M under Sazerac), Dirty Shirley, SIPMARGS (equity plus exclusive distribution), and 818 Tequila (equity plus exclusive distribution). Now they’re incubating their own brands. That’s the move from distribution machine to brand creator. The infrastructure that scaled BuzzBallz 65% post-acquisition is now being used to launch brands that Sazerac owns from day one — no minority stakes, no distribution agreements, full ownership. Three brands across whiskey lemonade and hard cream soda is Sazerac targeting the casual RTD consumer from every angle.

Bacardi Takes Full Ownership of Teeling Irish Whiskey

Bacardi is acquiring full control of Teeling Irish Whiskey. Founded in 2012 by Jack and Stephen Teeling, brothers with a whiskey heritage dating to the 1780s. Bacardi took a minority stake in 2017, became the majority shareholder in 2022, and now takes full ownership. Recent Bacardi acquisitions include Ilegal Mezcal ($130M) and D’USSÉ Cognac.

Fourteen years from founding to full acquisition by a global spirits giant. The patient capital playbook in spirits: minority first (2017), majority next (2022), full ownership now. Bacardi watched Teeling execute for nine years before taking full control. The same playbook Nestlé ran with yfood (49% in 2023, full acquisition in 2026) and Constellation with HOPWTR. Every strategic acquirer uses the same approach: invest a minority stake, watch the brand perform, increase the stake, and acquire outright. The risk-reward is asymmetric — a small check up front, full ownership only after velocity is proven.

Pat McAfee Invests in Jams — Media Machine Meets the Brand That Beat Uncrustables

Former NFL player and media star Pat McAfee invested in Jams. Beyond capital, McAfee will provide creative strategy, partnership support, and feature Jams across his media properties.

The Jams investor roster keeps getting more interesting. JJ Watt. Caleb Williams. Now Pat McAfee. The NFLPA licensing deal. Andrew Strife (LesserEvil $750M exit) as CEO. And the brand is still outselling Uncrustables at Target. McAfee’s media properties reach millions of sports fans daily — The Pat McAfee Show is one of the most-watched sports programs in America. Jams being featured across that media ecosystem give the brand exposure that would cost millions in paid advertising. This isn’t an investment. It’s a media distribution deal disguised as an equity check.

L Catterton Invests in RŌZ Haircare

L Catterton made a significant minority investment in RŌZ, a clean pro-grade haircare brand. Founded by celebrity hairstylist Mara Roszak in LA in 2021. Available at Sephora, Credo, Goop, and Nordstrom. Previous investors include Silas Capital, G9 Ventures, and Lily Collins.

L Catterton entering haircare alongside its investments in Remedy (skincare, $50M expected), Thorne ($4B), and CHAMP (athlete investing platform). The firm is deploying across every beauty and wellness vertical simultaneously. RŌZ’s positioning — clean, professional-grade haircare at Sephora and Nordstrom — mirrors the trajectory of brands like Crown Affair (Stride-backed, all-door Sephora) and K18 (True Beauty Ventures). Silas Capital already on the cap table means two of the most active beauty investors share conviction.

Coconut Cult Secures $12.5M for 300,000 Sq Ft Factory

Coconut Cult secured $12.5M in equipment financing from Bridge Finance Group. Will expand into a 300,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Utah. Grew 142% in 2025. Expects 90% growth this year. Recently jumped from the natural channel to mass retail.

Three hundred thousand square feet. The largest manufacturing investment by an emerging CPG brand we’ve tracked this year. For context: WILDE opened 130K sq ft. Applied Nutrition acquired 107K sq ft. Stars + Honey is building 60K sq ft. Snackish has 65K sq ft. Coconut Cult at 300K sq ft is in a different league. Growing 142% and expecting 90% more this year, while also jumping into mass retail, requires manufacturing capacity that co-packers simply cannot provide. Equipment financing (debt, not equity) means Coconut Cult isn’t diluting ownership to build the factory — the business generates enough predictable cash flow to service the debt. Smart capital structure.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Los Sundays — Investment from NÜTRL Founders

California tequila brand secured investment from Paul and Melissa Meehan, co-founders of NÜTRL Vodka Soda. The Meehans scaled NÜTRL to #1 vodka soda in Canada and #2 in the U.S. before AB InBev acquired it in 2020. Los Sundays is preparing to launch in Canada. The Meehans also invested in Chilly Ones (low-ABV/NA beer) earlier this year.

The NÜTRL founders investing in Los Sundays is the Casamigos alumni effect for vodka soda. Operators who built and exited a spirits brand are now investing in the next generation. The Meehans don’t just bring capital — they bring the AB InBev acquisition playbook, Canadian market entry expertise (NÜTRL launched in Canada first), and relationships with every distributor in North America. Los Sundays getting that operational knowledge alongside the investment is worth more than the check.

Maxine’s Heavenly — $3M from Blueberry Capital

Better-for-you cookie brand raised just under $3M led by Blueberry Capital with Listen Ventures, Rocana Ventures, Paperboy Ventures, and others. Recently acquired a manufacturing facility. Expects $7.5M in net sales this year, up from $2.4M in 2025.

Tripling revenue from $2.4M to $7.5M while acquiring manufacturing. The vertical integration trend hits even sub-$10M brands. Owning the facility at this stage gives Maxine’s Heavenly margin control and flexibility most cookie brands don’t have until they’re ten times this size. Listen Ventures' participation adds the firm behind several successful emerging CPG exits.

Fascent — $1.5M for French Fragrance in the U.S.

French fragrance brand raised $1.5M to support U.S. growth. Founded by Fanny Fortin Descamps and Edwina Réthoré, two longtime beauty executives, in 2023. Growing fast. Retails at Oh My Cream, Merci, Credo, and Luckyscent.

European indie fragrance entering the U.S. through prestige doors. Credo and Luckyscent, as U.S. retail partners, position Fascent in the discovery-driven prestige fragrance channel where emerging brands build loyal followings. Two veteran beauty executives founding a fragrance brand bring industry relationships and product development expertise from day one.

Myota — $4.5M Series A from PeakBridge

UK-based gut health brand closed $4.5M led by PeakBridge. Founded by Thomas Gurry and Kat Stennett. Clinically backed fiber blends and nutrition bars. DTC plus B2B (supplying Joe & The Juice and others). The UK gut health category is accelerating: Epetōme closed a 7-figure round, Hero Group acquired The Gut Stuff, and Dr. Karan Rajan launched LOAM.

B2B plus DTC in gut health. Supplying Joe & The Juice means Myota’s fiber blends are already in a premium foodservice environment, reaching consumers who might never walk down the supplement aisle. The UK gut health market is heating up, with multiple brands raising capital and being acquired simultaneously.

The Zero Proof Acquires The New Bar

Leading non-alc beverage platform acquired The New Bar, a non-alc drink discovery brand. Founded by Brianda Gonzalez in 2022. Started as an LA bottle shop, became the first non-alcoholic partner of Coachella. Develops hospitality programs for venues and restaurants.

Non-alcoholic beverage consolidation at the platform and retail level. The Zero Proof, by combining its distribution platform with The New Bar’s hospitality programs and Coachella credibility, creates a more complete non-alc ecosystem — online discovery, bottle-shop retail, and on-premise hospitality, all under one roof.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Sazerac Builds Three RTD Brands from Scratch

Endless Afternoon Whiskey Lemonade. Buckhorn Whiskey Lemonade. Lovebug Hard Cream Soda. Covered in detail above. The distribution machine that scaled BuzzBallz 65% is now building its own brands.

De Soi Launches Social Spritz — Functional Non-Alc

De Soi is going beyond non-alc aperitifs with Social Spritz — 1,000mg of energizing adaptogens (L-Tyrosine, L-Theanine, Ginseng, Vitamins B6 and B12). Three flavors: Lemon Elderflower, Peach Ginger, Blackberry Hibiscus. Giving zero-proof a more functional reason to exist beyond “it’s not alcohol.”

‘ndulge Launches High-Protein Ice Cream Bars with Massive Distribution

New high-protein ice cream bar brand from Chris Spencer (previously co-founded Keto Pints). Five flavors. 10g protein, probiotics, 100-160 calories. Launched at Albertsons, Kroger, H-E-B, Sprouts, Hannaford, and others. Launching with distribution at five major grocery chains is a day-one position most ice cream brands spend years building.

DAYLY Vitamin-Infused Toothpaste

Functional AM/PM toothpaste system with 40 vitamins, minerals, and botanicals. Founded by Shamir Patel and Ananda Saba. Four formulas for adults and children — morning and night. Turning brushing your teeth into a wellness stack.

Lemme Creatine Expansion + Solidcore Takeover

Lemme expanded Creatine Body Toning Gummies with Blue Raspberry and Sour Apple. Kicked off a nationwide class takeover with Solidcore. The creatine industrial complex meets experiential marketing.

Algae Cooking Club x made by musashi — Smoked Tomato Oil

The collab play that’s working. Algae Cooking Club previously partnered with Nara Smith on Roasted Garlic Oil. Now Smoked Tomato Oil is made by Musashi. Being selective about creator partnerships while the co-branded label builds credibility with each drop.

More Launches Worth Watching

Protein Pints launched Protein Pops at Sprouts — 10g protein, 180-190 calories, 75% less sugar. Frozen novelties from the protein ice cream brand.

Merkato by Marcus — Marcus Samuelsson’s simmer sauces. Restaurant-quality flavor for everyday cooking. Summer Fancy Food Show debut.

YUMI cookies at Target — 4g protein, 3-4g fiber, 6g sugar. The baby food brand entering the kids’ cookie market.

Brewt’s RTD margarita line — 10% ABV, five flavors. The mixer brand is entering the ready-to-drink market.

Nomie — organic just-add-water kids’ meals. Shelf-stable, three varieties.

HOPWTR x Good Girl Snacks — Pickle Lemonade Sparkling Hop Water. The pickle industrial complex meets non-alc.

Laoban frozen Lo Mein bowls at Whole Foods exclusively.

Be LOVE Clear Protein at Sprouts — 15g protein, 5g collagen, zero sugar. From Vital Proteins’ Kurt Seidensticker.

King’s Hawaiian Soft Pretzel Bites at 830+ Sheetz — first single-serve convenience store SKU.

Laird Superfood Protein Matcha — 10g protein, Lion’s Mane, electrolytes.

Huel refreshed the packaging of its greens with Pink Grapefruit and Strawberry Lemon flavors.

Vibed THC beverage brand refresh — imagine if Vacation made a beverage line.

Evenmouth — microbiome oral care with oral probiotics from a Board Certified Dentist.

Prequel skincare launching at Space NK UK July 14th — from the incubator behind Naturium and Phlur exits.

Snif Body Whips — bestselling scents in body care at Sephora.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Thorne: $500M in 2025, $650M Pacing in 2026, Three Bidders at $4B

Unilever, P&G, and Haleon all circling. L Catterton shopping at $4B. The most significant supplement M&A deal of 2026 has become a bidding war.

McCormick Q2: Net Sales Up 16.7%

The spice giant beat Wall Street estimates. Strong execution across the portfolio. McCormick continues to perform as a standalone after the Unilever food merger was settled.

k2o by sprinter: $4.3M Since April Pivot

After pivoting from canned cocktails to beauty supplements, k2o generated $4.3M in sales since April. The “beauty from within” category is reportedly expected to reach $7.5B by 2036, up from $3.3B today. A real-time pivot producing real-time results.

Coconut Cult: 142% Growth in 2025, 90% Expected in 2026

The coconut yogurt brand that jumped from natural to mass retail is building a 300K-sq-ft factory to keep up. Equipment financing, not equity. Smart capital structure.

Scott’s Protein Balls: 86 to 350 Target Stores in Four Months

Quadrupled Target door count in four months. The velocity data earned the expansion.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Target

Stars + Honey made its national retail debut after 300% growth and $24M from VMG. The Only Bean launched nationwide. YUMI cookies launched. Three brands hitting Target.

Walmart

Ritual expanded to 1,900 doors. The supplement brand is continuing its mass retail buildout.

Sprouts

‘ndulge ice cream bars launched alongside Albertsons, Kroger, H-E-B, and Hannaford. Protein Pints Pops are launching June 29th. Be LOVE Clear Protein exclusively. Three protein-forward frozen and beverage brands at Sprouts.

H-E-B

Something & Nothing launched at 200+ stores. ‘ndulge ice cream bars. The Texas grocer keeps adding emerging brands at meaningful door counts.

CVS

Saint James Iced Tea launched at select stores. Jackson’s launched at select stores. Two brands are entering the pharmacy convenience channel.

Safeway

Smearcase launched at select stores. The cottage cheese ice cream brand expanding into conventional grocery.

Sam’s Club

Cuso’s launched at 216 stores — Dirt and Maple Bourbon seasonings. The creator-led seasoning brand is entering the club channel nationwide.

Vitamin Shoppe

DryWater launched storewide. The functional hydration brand is adding the specialty supplement channel.

Whole Foods

Laoban Lo Mein bowls exclusively. The dumpling brand is expanding into frozen meals.

Wegmans

SideDish launched. The Northeast premium grocer continues to add emerging brands.

Erewhon

PRIMA launched. The LA credibility stamp continues.

Sheetz

King’s Hawaiian Soft Pretzel Bites at 830+ locations. The iconic bread brand’s first convenience store snack.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Pat McAfee is investing in Jams with a creative strategy and media support. The most-watched sports media personality in America is turning his platform into a distribution channel for the brand that beat Uncrustables.

Paul and Melissa Meehan (NÜTRL founders, sold to AB InBev) are investing in Los Sundays tequila and Chilly Ones. Serial spirits operators deploying capital and expertise into the next generation.

Mara Roszak, celebrity hairstylist, gets L Catterton backing for RŌZ. Professional-grade haircare at Sephora, backed by institutional capital.

Chris Spencer (Keto Pints co-founder) is launching ‘ndulge protein ice cream bars at five major grocery chains.

Kurt Seidensticker (Vital Proteins founder) and Leslie Scofield are launching Be LOVE Clear Protein at Sprouts.

Prequel skincare launching at Space NK — from The Center incubator behind Naturium ($350M+ exit) and Phlur (TSG acquisition).

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

Danone just spent $2.55 billion on functional nutrition in one quarter. Huel for $1.15B. MADE for $1.4B. In three months.

Let me zoom out on what European food companies have spent on functional nutrition this year alone:

Danone: Huel ($1.15B) + MADE ($1.4B) = $2.55B
Nestlé: yfood (€450M / ~$500M)
Lactalis: Protein Works (undisclosed)
Unilever: Grüns ($1.2B, late 2025)

That’s over $4.25 billion in disclosed functional nutrition acquisitions from four European food companies in roughly six months. And Thorne at $4B would double that number.

The thesis is uniform across all four: traditional food categories are flat. Functional nutrition is growing in double digits. The consumer who used to drink milk, eat yogurt, and take a basic multivitamin now drinks protein shakes, eats functional bars, takes personalized supplements, and mixes greens powder every morning. The daily routine changed. The food giants are buying the brands that own the new routine.

Meanwhile, Sazerac stopped just acquiring RTD brands and started building its own. Three new canned cocktail brands from scratch. The company that scaled BuzzBallz 65% post-acquisition, that took equity in 818 and SIPMARGS, that bid $15B for Brown-Forman — now using its distribution infrastructure to incubate house brands. That’s the natural evolution: acquire brands to prove the machine works, then use the machine to build brands you own 100%.

Bacardi took full ownership of Teeling after nine years of staged ownership. Coconut Cult is building a 300,000-square-foot factory — the largest manufacturing investment by an emerging brand this year. Pat McAfee bought into Jams and is turning his media empire into a distribution channel.

Every story this week is about control. Danone is buying full control of MADE and its Australian JV. Bacardi is taking full ownership of Teeling. Sazerac building brands it owns outright. Coconut Cult building manufacturing is controlled completely. The message is clear: minority positions and partnerships are stepping stones. Full ownership is the destination.

The brands and companies that control their production, their distribution, and their brand narrative are the ones pulling ahead. Everyone else is renting.

Build what you own. Own what you build.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Breaking down Danone’s $2.55B functional nutrition spending spree in one quarter. Thorne’s bidding war — Unilever, P&G, and Haleon all circling at $4B. Sazerac is building its own RTD brands after years of acquiring them. Bacardi is taking full control of Teeling. Coconut Cult’s 300,000-square-foot factory. Pat McAfee is turning media into distribution for Jams. And why every story this week is about moving from minority positions to full ownership.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Danone’s deputy CEO called MADE Group “a mini Danone.” Protein yogurts. Plant-based products. Functional drinks. The same category map. Different hemisphere.

TPG Capital bought MADE. Held it for five years. Sold it to Danone for nearly $2 billion.

Five years. Two billion dollars. From a portfolio of functional nutrition brands in Australia that most CPG newsletters have never mentioned.

The boring platform play keeps winning. The functional nutrition thesis continues to be validated. And the European food giants keep writing billion-dollar checks because the consumer permanently changed what they eat and drink every single day.

Build accordingly. The buyers have never had more money or more urgency.

Until next Sunday,
Jonathan Deeter
Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. — HOPWTR collaborated with Good Girl Snacks on a Pickle Lemonade Sparkling Hop Water. The pickle industrial complex now spans: lip balm (e.l.f., Burt’s Bees), hydration packs (Liquid I.V.), beer (PBR), shots (Rally), hot sauce butter (Grillo’s x PopUp Bagels), and now hop water (HOPWTR x Good Girl Snacks). At this point, pickles are the Marvel Cinematic Universe of CPG. Every brand exists in the same pickle universe, and they keep crossing over into each other’s categories. Phase 4 is probably pickle protein powder. Don’t test me.

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🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Prestige Consumer Healthcare just paid over $1 billion for Breathe Right and a handful of adjacent brands. Two hundred million in revenue. Ninety-five million in EBITDA. A nasal strip brand that’s grown over 60% year-over-year since 2022. A billion dollars for the thing you stick on your nose at night. The boring-problem thesis keeps producing the biggest checks — last week it was a $325M stain remover, this week it’s a billion-dollar nasal strip.

Meanwhile, L’Oréal acquired a majority stake in an Indian beauty company because the world’s largest beauty company is betting its next growth wave comes from the world’s largest young population. Jake Paul and Geoffrey Woo raised $100M for Anti Fund — the growth fund backing OLIPOP, Happy Dad, Ketone-IQ, and Khloud. Glossier secured $45M in debt from Tiger Finance. The SmartSweets founder is back with Snackish at Target. The Yasso founders are back with Snack Buddies. And Good Culture is building a dedicated production facility after nearly quadrupling sales and being acquired by L Catterton at $500M+.

The theme this week is founders coming back. Tara Bosch sold SmartSweets for $360M and returned with Snackish. The Yasso founders sold to Unilever at a $300M pace and returned with Snack Buddies. Andrew Strife helped sell LesserEvil to Hershey for $750M and just became CEO of Dropout Companies (Jams, Bronco). The best operators don’t retire after exits. They take the playbook and run it again. Let’s dig in.

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🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Prestige Consumer Healthcare Acquires Breathe Right for $1B+ — The Boring-Problem Thesis Continues

Prestige Consumer Healthcare completed its acquisition of Breathe Right and several other brands for just over $1 billion. The portfolio generates $200M in revenue and $95M in EBITDA annually. Breathe Right, created in the 1990s, is a leader in nasal strips and has grown by over 60% year over year since 2022.

A nasal strip. A billion dollars. Ninety-five million in EBITDA. That’s a 47.5% EBITDA margin — even higher than Miss Mouth’s 35% margin that earned a $325M check from Church & Dwight last week. The roughly 5x revenue and 10.5x EBITDA multiples reflect the premium for a dominant brand in a niche category with exceptional margins and accelerating growth.

Breathe Right growing 60%+ year-over-year since 2022 is a data point that deserves attention. A decades-old nasal strip brand is growing faster than most venture-backed startups. Why? The sleep wellness movement. The consumer obsession with sleep quality, breathing optimization, and recovery. Mouth-taping became a TikTok trend. Sleep trackers became mainstream. And suddenly, the nasal strip that your dad used in 1997 is the hottest product in the sleep aisle.

Two consecutive weeks. Two boring-problem acquisitions. Miss Mouth’s at $325M for stain removal. Breathe Right at $1B+ for nasal strips. Combined: over $1.3 billion for products that remove stains and help you breathe at night. The exits don’t come from the categories that trend on social media. They come from categories where consumers buy the product every week without thinking.

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L’Oréal Acquires Majority Stake in Innovist — Betting on India

L’Oréal acquired a majority stake in Innovist, a fast-growing Indian beauty and personal care company. Founded in 2019 by Rohit Chawla, Sifat Khurana, and Vimal Bhola. Innovist owns Bare Anatomy, Chemist at Play, and SunScoop. The founding team remains as minority shareholders.

The world’s largest beauty company is making its move in the world’s largest young population. India’s beauty and personal care market is expected to be one of the fastest-growing globally over the next decade. L’Oréal’s acquisition of a portfolio of Indian-born brands, rather than exporting its own, signals a strategy of authenticity — meeting the Indian consumer where she is rather than imposing Western beauty standards.

Innovist’s portfolio is smart: Bare Anatomy for personalized haircare, Chemist at Play for active-ingredient skincare, SunScoop for sun protection. Three brands addressing three daily routines. The founding team staying on as minority shareholders ensures continuity. Unilever already sold Anomaly (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) to Reliance Retail, India’s largest retailer. Now L’Oréal is buying directly. The battle for India’s beauty consumer is accelerating.

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JAB Exits Keurig Dr Pepper — End of an Era

JAB sold its remaining 4.3% stake in Keurig Dr. Pepper through a block trade of 59 million shares. JAB has been divesting its KDP position over several years.

The European investment firm that assembled the Keurig-Dr Pepper mega merger is now fully out. JAB’s involvement in KDP was one of the most significant beverage M&A stories of the last decade — combining Keurig’s single-serve coffee dominance with Dr. Pepper’s iconic soda portfolio. The full exit signals JAB sees more attractive capital allocation opportunities elsewhere. For KDP, a cleaner shareholder base with no large strategic overhang. The stock can now trade purely on operating fundamentals.

Cedar Crest Acquired by Hoffmann Family of Companies

Wisconsin-based ice cream manufacturer Cedar Crest, founded in 1976 in Cedarburg, was acquired by the family-owned PE firm that also owns Oberweis Dairy. Cedar Crest produces ice cream, sherbets, sorbets, and custards.

The ice cream M&A cycle continues. Salt & Straw exploring $200M. Blackstone circling the Unilever spinoff at €8B+. David is selling protein ice cream for $90. And now Cedar Crest is going to a family-owned dairy PE firm. Hoffmann's addition of Cedar Crest to the Oberweis portfolio creates a Midwest dairy and frozen dessert platform with manufacturing infrastructure.

Dropout Companies Hires LesserEvil’s Andrew Strife as CEO

Dropout Companies, parent of Jams and Bronco, added Andrew Strife as CEO. Strife helped scale LesserEvil Snacks as COO and CFO until its $750M acquisition by Hershey last April. He’ll lead the next phase of growth as Jams and Bronco challenge Uncrustables and Jimmy Dean.

The operator upgrade cycle continues. Strife took LesserEvil from emerging brand to $750M Hershey acquisition. Now he’s applying that exact playbook to Jams — the brand that beat Uncrustables at Target, landed the NFLPA, and has JJ Watt and Caleb Williams on the cap table. Bringing a $750M exit operator into the CEO chair of the brand outselling Smucker’s icon is a statement of intent. Dropout isn’t building a snack brand. It’s building for a Hershey-level outcome.

Good Culture Opens Dedicated Production Facility

Good Culture partnered with Michigan Milk Producers Association (MMPA) to invest in a dedicated production facility in Remus, Michigan. MMPA is farmer-owned and the 9th largest dairy cooperative in the U.S. Good Culture nearly quadrupled sales over the past three years and helped drive almost 60% growth in the cottage cheese category. L Catterton acquired a majority stake at a valuation north of $500M in January.

The cottage cheese category winner is building manufacturing infrastructure to match demand. Nearly quadrupling sales while driving 60% category growth — Good Culture isn’t riding the cottage cheese trend, it IS the cottage cheese trend. L Catterton is paying $500M+ and the brand is now investing in dedicated production, signaling that growth isn’t slowing. When your demand outpaces your manufacturing capacity, building a dedicated facility with the 9th largest dairy cooperative in America is the move. The MMPA partnership gives Good Culture a farmer-direct supply chain, quality control, and the capacity to keep scaling without co-packer constraints.

💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Anti Fund — $100M Debut Growth Fund

Anti Fund raised $100M for its debut growth fund, co-founded by Jake Paul and Geoffrey Woo. Primarily invests in tech but has backed consumer brands including OLIPOP, Happy Dad, Ketone-IQ, Khloud, SipMargs, Sesh, and others.

Jake Paul and Geoffrey Woo (former Hvmn CEO / Ketone-IQ founder) assembling $100M signals where creator capital is heading. The consumer portfolio reads like a curated CPG index fund: OLIPOP (walking away from Coca-Cola, raising $200M), Happy Dad (Nelk Boys’ hard seltzer), Ketone-IQ (now in 9,200 doors), Khloud (29,000 doors with the Poppi president). Anti Fund’s thesis — backing brands with built-in audiences and distribution velocity — bridges the gap between creator economy and institutional investing. $100M in a debut fund is significant. The consumer brands in the portfolio are performing.

Glossier — $45M Line of Credit from Tiger Finance

Glossier secured $45M in flexible debt from Tiger Finance. Colin Walsh, former OUAI CEO, took the helm as Glossier’s CEO in October 2025.

Debt, not equity. That’s the signal. Glossier isn’t raising a dilutive round — it’s accessing growth capital through debt, which means the business generates enough predictable revenue to service it. Colin Walsh running the company after building OUAI (sold to P&G) brings operator credibility to a brand that’s been through multiple leadership transitions. $45M in debt to fund growth under a CEO who already sold a beauty brand to P&G. The exit playbook is familiar.

Snackish — Tara Bosch Returns at Target

Tara Bosch, who sold SmartSweets for $360M, is

back with Snackish — protein-and-fiber chips launching at Target. The brand owns a 65,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.

A serial founder with a $360M exit returning with owned manufacturing from day one. Bosch learned from SmartSweets that co-packing at scale creates margin and quality constraints. Snackish owning its factory immediately gives it the vertical integration most brands spend years building toward. Target, as the launch retailer, signals the retail relationships from SmartSweets carried over. When a founder with a nine-figure exit returns with owned manufacturing and Target distribution on day one, the velocity curve starts from a different place entirely.

Gleezy — $2M Seed from Old Tom Capital

North Carolina-based premium hot dog brand closed $2M. Founded by Bryce Rech three years ago. Double-smoked beef brisket hot dogs at Target, Harris Teeter, Food City, and foodservice. Old Tom Capital led.

Premium hot dogs at Target. The premiumization thesis applied to one of the most commodity products in the grocery store. Gleezy’s double-smoked beef brisket positioning does for hot dogs what Chomps did for meat sticks, and Applegate did for deli meat — takes a product consumers buy by default and gives them a reason to trade up.

Mitsoh — 7-Figure Growth Equity from Raven Indigenous Capital PartnersA

Canadian dried meat snack and traditional pemmican brand closed a 7-figure round led by Raven Indigenous Capital Partners. Founded by Cree entrepreneur Ian Gladue roughly a decade ago. Angels include Mike Fata, Dror Balshine, and Josh Morrissey.

Indigenous-founded, Indigenous-funded. Raven Indigenous Capital Partners' leadership is significant — purpose-aligned capital backing a founder who’s been building for a decade. Pemmican is one of the original high-protein, shelf-stable snack formats. Mitsoh is modernizing traditional Indigenous foods for the contemporary protein-snacking consumer.

Folc — £900K Crowdfunded on Republic

English rosé brand raised nearly £900K from 110 investors on Republic. Founded by Tom Cannon in 2019. Available at Fortnum & Mason, Michelin-starred restaurants, and hospitality groups.

Crowdfunding a rosé brand through Republic. 110 investors, with an average of roughly £8K per investor, suggest a consumer community willing to put money behind the brand they drink. Fortnum & Mason and Michelin-starred placements position Folc as an ultra-premium English wine.

Neutonic — Extends $6M Round with Second Sight Ventures

Neutonic extended its round and added Second Sight Ventures, which previously backed Poppi, Lemme, Willie’s Remedy+, and Tally Health.

Second Sight’s portfolio — Poppi ($2B exit), Lemme (Kardashian wellness scaling at Target), and now Neutonic — gives the productivity beverage brand access to a network that’s produced some of the most significant consumer exits of the decade. At a $60M valuation and a $25M revenue trajectory, Neutonic continues to add strategic investors.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus

Snack Buddies from the Yasso Founders

Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington, co-founders of Yasso (acquired by Unilever in 2023 at a $300M revenue pace), launched Snack Buddies. Mini muffins with 5g protein, sneaky veggies, half the sugar, and twice the fiber. Four flavors with excellent branding.

The Yasso founders are back. They built a frozen yogurt brand to $300M pace and sold to Unilever. Now they’re applying the same playbook to kids’ snacking: take a format kids already love (mini muffins), make it meaningfully better nutritionally (protein, veggies, fiber), and don’t sacrifice the taste. The “sneaky veggies” positioning solves the hardest problem in kids’ nutrition — getting kids to eat vegetables without them knowing. Serial founders with billion-dollar acquirer relationships returning to kids’ snacking is a strong signal about where the next big exits are.

e.l.f. Moves Into Haircare Under $10

e.l.f. Beauty launched six haircare SKUs priced under $10. Shampoo, conditioner, treatment oil, styling spray, and two more. Available on TikTok Shop now, Target online next week.

e.l.f. applying its under-$10 mass beauty playbook to haircare. TikTok Shop first, Target next — the channel strategy prioritizes the digital-native consumer before mass retail. After acquiring Rhode (Hailey Bieber) and Naturium (Susan Yara’s $350M+ exit), e.l.f. now owns prestige skincare and mass beauty. Haircare under $10 extends the namesake brand into an adjacent category where the same value-conscious consumer shops.

Campbell’s x Banza Gluten-Free Soup

Campbell’s partnered with Banza on a co-branded gluten-free condensed soup — Chicken Noodle Soup with Banza’s chickpea penne. Available on Amazon, heading to retail.

A 155-year-old soup brand is collaborating with a gluten-free pasta startup. Campbell’s gets gluten-free credibility it can’t build organically. Banza gets Campbell’s distribution infrastructure and brand trust. The co-branded format is smart — neither brand could make this product as effectively on its own.

SPYLT Brand Refresh

SPYLT, the caffeinated chocolate milk brand co-founded by Josh Mendenhall and BUILT Bar founder Nick Greer, unveiled a bold new look. Vertical logo, clearer callouts, flavor-forward color system. Available at Albertsons, H-E-B, Kroger, Target, Circle K, and others.

The refresh is designed for the retail cooler, not the pitch deck. Nostalgia-forward packaging that will pop on the shelf. When your brand is already in Albertsons, Kroger, Target, and convenience, the packaging refresh is about converting the shopper walking past the cooler — not the investor reading the deck.

More Launches Worth Watching

Rocky’s Matcha single-serve sachets are launching online and at select retailers. Beautifully packaged ceremonial-grade matcha for on-the-go.

Touchland Performance Body Spray — hydrating hair and body mist, reformulated for longer-lasting odor elimination. The hand sanitizer brand that Church & Dwight acquired keeps expanding formats.

Alo is expanding into skincare — Hypochlorous Clarity Mist ($16) and BIO NAD+ Recovery Eye Masks ($55 launching July 9th). The yoga apparel brand going deeper into beauty.

Arrae launched MB-1 Max — an advanced metabolic support supplement. The brand, backed by Vanterra Ventures and Selva Ventures, keeps expanding its supplement range.

Phorm Energy two non-carbonated flavors — Lemonade Summer and Pink Smash. The non-carbonated energy drink trend we flagged last July continues to build.

Spacegoods launched an RTD mushroom coffee — Oat Mushroom Latte with 1,500mg adaptogens. UK functional mushroom supplements entering the ready-to-drink format.

Olive Young opened its second U.S. store at Westfield Century City in LA. The Korean beauty retailer bringing 2,700 square feet of K-beauty discovery to the West Coast after its Pasadena debut last month.

Amouage is expanding its U.S. retail presence with an LA outpost.

📊 THE DATA DIGEST

Numbers that matter

Breathe Right: $200M Revenue, $95M EBITDA, $1B+ Exit

47.5% EBITDA margin. 60%+ growth year-over-year since 2022. Acquired for roughly 5x revenue and 10.5x EBITDA. The sleep wellness movement turned a 1990s nasal strip into the hottest OTC brand in America.

Garage Beer: #3 Growth Brand, Dollar Sales Up 61%

Travis Kelce-backed light beer is the #3 growth brand in NIQ scans over the past three weeks, trailing only Pacifico and Michelob Ultra. Dollar sales up over 61%. The celebrity beer brand that’s actually working — because it’s a light beer that competes on taste, not just the name on the can.

Garrison Brothers: Q1 Retail Sales Up 32%

Texas craft whiskey delivered 32% increase in retail dollar sales and 21% volume growth in Q1. Texas retail dollar sales jumped 47%. Regional craft spirits growing faster than most national brands.

Ketone-IQ: 9,200 Doors, Up 53% Since January

The functional energy brand is now in 9,200 doors across the U.S. — a 53% increase since the beginning of the year. Expanding across conventional, natural, club (Costco), and convenience (Casey’s). The distribution velocity keeps compounding.

ALOHA: On Pace for $200M

The plant-based protein bar brand is reportedly on track to reach $200M in revenue this year. Another quiet compounder building scale without headlines.

Good Culture: Nearly Quadrupled Sales, 60% Category Growth

L Catterton acquired at a $500M+ valuation. Now building dedicated production. The cottage cheese category winner is driving 60% of the category’s growth.

🏪 DISTRIBUTION DOMINATION

Everyone’s everywhere

Publix

Khloud debuted. Khloe Kardashian’s functional snack brand adds the Southeast’s most important grocer to a roster that already includes Target, Walmart, Sprouts, and Starbucks. Approaching 30,000+ doors.

H-E-B

Big Mozz launched. Mozzarella sticks entering Texas through the most important regional grocer for emerging food brands.

Walmart

Wip launched at 330+ Fuel Centers. The convenience format within Walmart’s gas station network — a channel most emerging brands don’t think about but moves meaningful volume.

Fresh Market

Wild Fox Foods launched. The East Coast specialty grocer keeps adding emerging brands.

Vitamin Shoppe

Oats Overnight debuted. The overnight oats brand entering the specialty supplement channel.

Erewhon

Tart launched. The LA credibility stamp for premium wellness brands.

Kroger

Nello launched. Kroger keeps giving emerging brands shelf space at scale.

CVS

SkyPop rolled out. The convenience and pharmacy channel is adding functional snacking.

Albertsons

Blue Zones launched. The longevity-inspired brand is entering one of the largest conventional grocers.

Target

Snackish launching — Tara Bosch’s return. e.l.f. Haircare is launching online next week. Target continues to be the most important retail launchpad in CPG.

👋 PEOPLE MOVES

Andrew Strife, former LesserEvil COO and CFO (scaled to $750M Hershey acquisition), was named CEO of Dropout Companies (Jams, Bronco). A $750M exit operator now running the brand that beat Uncrustables and landed the NFLPA. The most significant operator hire in emerging CPG this month.

Alexandre Ruberti appointed CEO of Zevia, replacing Amy Taylor, who’s departing for Angel City Football Club. Ruberti has served on Zevia’s board since 2024 and spent 16 years at Red Bull. A Red Bull lifer running a zero-sugar soda company brings beverage distribution expertise from the most successful energy drink company in history.

Colin Walsh, former OUAI CEO (sold to P&G), continues building at Glossier after taking the helm in October 2025. The $45M credit facility gives him growth capital to execute.

Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington, Yasso co-founders (sold to Unilever), return with Snack Buddies. Serial founders with a $300M-pace exit coming back to kids’ snacking.

Tara Bosch, SmartSweets founder ($360M exit), returns to Target with Snackish, with owned manufacturing. The serial founder cycle in full effect.

🔥 THE HOT TAKE

My unfiltered opinion on this week’s madness

The serial founders are coming back. And they’re coming back armed.

Tara Bosch sold SmartSweets for $360M. She returned with Snackish — and this time she owns a 65,000-square-foot factory. She learned that co-packing at scale kills margins. She’s not making that mistake twice.

Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington sold Yasso to Unilever at a $300M revenue pace. They returned with Snack Buddies — mini muffins with protein, sneaky veggies, and half the sugar. They learned what Unilever needs in a kids’ snack brand. Now they’re building exactly that.

Andrew Strife helped sell LesserEvil to Hershey for $750M. He just became CEO of Dropout Companies — the parent of Jams and Bronco. He learned the Hershey acquisition playbook from the inside. Now he’s applying it to a brand that’s already beating Uncrustables at Target.

This is the serial founder advantage. The first company teaches you what to build. The exit teaches you what acquirers want. And the second company starts from a completely different position — with relationships, operational knowledge, manufacturing infrastructure, and the credibility that comes from a nine-figure outcome.

Every first-time founder is figuring it out as they go. Every serial founder with an exit is running a playbook they’ve already validated. Bosch knows Target buyers. Klane and Harrington are familiar with Unilever’s diligence process. Strife knows what a Hershey-ready P&L looks like. That knowledge is worth more than any seed check.

Meanwhile, Prestige Consumer Healthcare paid over a billion dollars for nasal strips. Breathe Right. 47.5% EBITDA margin. Growing 60%+ since 2022 because the sleep wellness movement turned a decades-old product into the hottest brand in OTC. Two weeks in a row: Miss Mouth’s at $325M for stain removal. Breathe Right at $1B+ for nasal strips. Over $1.3 billion for boring products that solve boring problems.

The boring problems produce the biggest checks. And the serial founders produce the best companies. Both truths were on full display this week.

Build accordingly. And if you’ve already built and exited — build again.

🎙️ COMING TUESDAY

Unpackaged Goods Episode

Breaking down Breathe Right’s billion-dollar exit and why the boring-problem thesis just doubled down. Serial founders returning: Tara Bosch with Snackish, Yasso founders with Snack Buddies, and Andrew Strife running Jams. L’Oréal is acquiring in India. Anti Fund’s $100M debut with OLIPOP and Khloud in the portfolio. Glossier’s $45M debt under the OUAI founder. Good Culture is building a factory after quadrupling sales. And why the second company is always better than the first.

🥫 ONE MORE THING...

Before you close this tab

Tara Bosch built SmartSweets. Sold it for $360M. Came back with Snackish. This time with a 65,000-square-foot factory.

Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington built Yasso. Sold it to Unilever. Came back with Snack Buddies. This time with the knowledge of exactly what Unilever wants.

Andrew Strife helped scale LesserEvil. Sold it to Hershey for $750M. Took the CEO chair at Dropout (Jams, Bronco). This time with a Hershey-ready playbook.

The first company teaches you how to build. The exit teaches you what to build for. The second company starts where the first one ended.

Until next Sunday,
Jonathan Deeter
Your CPG-Obsessed Friend

P.S. — Campbell’s collaborated with Banza on a gluten-free Chicken Noodle Soup. A 155-year-old soup company is working with a chickpea pasta startup. Meanwhile, Anti Fund — co-founded by Jake Paul — has raised $100M and includes OLIPOP in its portfolio. Jake Paul is now in the same investor roster as OLIPOP. The timeline we’re living in continues to be absolutely unhinged. The simulation is no longer even trying to be subtle.

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This newsletter is finished with Trophy Wife Finishing Salts - elevating every bite since 2025

Issue #33 | June 15, 2026

🥄 FIRST BITE

The appetizer before we dive in

Welcome back. Second Nature Brands just acquired Tillamook Country Smoker — $175M+ in sales, two manufacturing facilities, and nearly 50 years of meat snacking heritage. The PE firm that bought Voortman for $305M and Sahale Snacks for $34M is quietly building one of the largest snack platforms in America while everyone debates celebrity brands.

Meanwhile, Smucker’s stock jumped 12% after Q4 net sales rose 6% and earnings beat estimates by 20%. The same company we covered hiring Goldman Sachs for a portfolio review is suddenly delivering. Remedy Skincare landed a Series A from L Catterton less than 18 months after founding. Stars + Honey raised $24M from VMG after growing 300% and projecting $50M this year. AG1 launched AG1 Pro — creatine-infused greens — because apparently one daily habit isn’t enough. And the FDA approved the first new sunscreen ingredient since the 1990s.

The theme this week is layers. Brands are layering new products onto existing habits (AG1 Pro). Platforms are layering acquisitions onto existing portfolios (Second Nature, Mammoth). And founders are layering velocity onto velocity (Stars + Honey, Remedy). The brands and platforms adding layers the fastest are the ones pulling ahead. Let’s dig in.

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🍊 THE MAIN COURSE

This week’s biggest CPG moves

Second Nature Brands Acquires Tillamook Country Smoker — The Quiet Snack Empire Grows

Second Nature Brands acquired Tillamook Country Smoker for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 1975, Tillamook operates two manufacturing facilities in Oregon with sales north of $175M. Sellers: Insignia Capital Group and family shareholders. SNB has acquired Voortman ($305M), Sahale Snacks ($34M), and Brownie Brittle since 2022.

This is the snack platform story nobody’s talking about. While the media covers celebrity brands and billion-dollar exits, Second Nature Brands is systematically building one of the largest independent snack portfolios in America through disciplined M&A. Voortman (cookies and wafers, $305M). Sahale (premium trail mix, $34M). Brownie Brittle. And now Tillamook Country Smoker ($175M+ in meat snacks with owned manufacturing).

The manufacturing angle is the strategic play within the deal. Two production facilities in Oregon give SNB vertical integration in meat snacks — margin control, quality control, and supply chain security. In a category where Chomps is approaching $900M and Archer is approaching $500M, owning manufacturing at scale is a competitive advantage most insurgent brands don’t have.

SNB’s combined portfolio now spans cookies, crackers, trail mix, brownie snacks, and meat snacks. That’s a diversified snack platform with exposure to every major snacking occasion and every major retail channel. The boring platform-building thesis keeps producing the most defensible businesses in CPG.

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Smucker Q4: Stock Jumps 12% After Beating Estimates

J.M. Smucker reported Q4 net sales of $2.3B, up 6%. Adjusted EPS of $2.77, up 20% and beating Wall Street estimates. Shares jumped over 12%.

Three weeks ago, we covered Smucker hiring Goldman Sachs for a portfolio review, with Elliott pushing. This week, the company posts its best quarter in recent memory. The Q4 beat doesn’t change the Hostess structural problem — sweet baked snacks are still declining while coffee, frozen handhelds, and pet perform. But it buys Smucker time and negotiating leverage. When your stock jumps 12% and you’re beating estimates, the urgency of a fire sale diminishes. Smucker can now approach the Hostess situation from a position of operational strength rather than desperation. Whether that means a higher asking price for Hostess or a longer timeline for the carve-out remains to be seen.

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Remedy Lands Series A from L Catterton — $50M Expected This Year

Dermatologist-developed skincare brand Remedy closed a Series A led by L Catterton. Norwest and Sonoma Brands Capital also participated. Founded by Dr. Muneeb Shah in March 2024. Expects $50M in sales this year. Available on Amazon, TikTok Shop, DTC, and nationwide at Target.

March 2024 to $50M in 2026. Roughly two years from launch to nine-figure run rate trajectory. L Catterton leading at the Series A tells you everything — this is the firm shopping Thorne at $4B, backing Mars Men at $100M in 18 months, and building the CHAMP athlete-investor platform. When L Catterton invests in a skincare brand founded by the most influential dermatologist on social media, they see the same velocity-to-exit trajectory they’ve run across supplements and wellness.

Dr. Muneeb Shah is one of the most followed dermatologists on TikTok and Instagram. That audience converts directly to product sales — Remedy’s Amazon, TikTok Shop, and Target distribution captures the consumer wherever she shops. L Catterton bringing Norwest and Sonoma Brands into the round signals conviction that the velocity is real and sustainable, not just a creator spike.

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Mammoth Brands Hungry for More Acquisitions

According to CNBC, Mammoth Brands is eager for more acquisitions in personal care and wellness. In late 2025, Mammoth paid more than $1B in cash and stock for Coterie, a baby care brand with $200M+ in net revenue.

A company that wrote a billion-dollar check for baby care is publicly stating it wants more. Mammoth Brands is building a personal care and wellness platform through acquisition at the highest price points we’ve tracked. $1B+ for Coterie at roughly 5x revenue on $200M+ is a premium multiple that signals Mammoth sees significant growth and margin expansion potential. Their appetite for more deals means every personal care and wellness brand with real velocity and $50M+ in revenue should be taking the call. The acquirer pool for personal care keeps getting deeper — Mammoth, Church & Dwight, Unilever, L’Oréal, and Henkel are all actively buying.

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💰 THE FUNDING FRENZY

Big checks being written

Stars + Honey — $24M from VMG Partners

Flavor-forward protein bar brand secured $24M minority growth investment from VMG Partners. Founded by Daniel Rainey. Launched in 2023. Grew 300% in 2025. On pace for $50M in revenue by the end of 2026. Will use capital for a 60,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and national retail expansion.

VMG leading a protein bar brand at $24M after 300% growth is a major signal. VMG just led Brami’s $33M round for protein pasta. Now they’re backing Stars + Honey in protein bars. VMG is building a thesis around protein-forward food brands with exceptional velocity — and their exit track record (Bare Snacks to PepsiCo, Sun Bum to SC Johnson) means they’re backing brands they believe they can exit at significant multiples. Stars + Honey's building of its own 60,000-square-foot manufacturing facility follows the vertical integration trend we’ve tracked across WILDE (130K sq ft), Applied Nutrition (107K sq ft), and Crisp Power ($15M facility). When protein brands hit this growth rate, owning production becomes a strategic imperative.

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Bawi — $6M from Brand Foundry Ventures

Sparkling agua fresca brand closed $6M led by Brand Foundry Ventures. Founded by Victor Guardiola in 2020. Strong presence in TX, CA, and the Midwest. Recently hired Erik Perkins as CCO (ex-Sysco, ex-Kraft Heinz) and Zackary Taylor for foodservice sales.

Agua fresca, as a packaged beverage category, continues to attract capital. Bawi’s strength in Texas and California — two of the largest Hispanic consumer markets in the U.S. — gives it a geographic foundation that national brands can’t easily replicate. The Sysco and Kraft Heinz hires signal the brand is building for foodservice and retail simultaneously. Brand Foundry Ventures is a firm with strong expertise in emerging brands and retail relationships.

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Animal Capital — Fund III at $33M

Founded in 2020 by Marshall Sandman. Portfolio includes Inkbox (exited) and Sundays for Dogs. Tech portfolio features three decacorns and four unicorns. $33M in commitments for Fund III.

Animal Capital’s track record blends consumer and tech investments with strong outcomes. Inkbox exiting gives the fund a realized consumer return. The mix of consumer brands and tech companies in the portfolio suggests Sandman sees technology-enabled consumer brands as the intersection where the best returns live. $33M for Fund III is meaningful for an emerging manager — suggests LPs are rewarding the track record.

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Rem3dy Health — $18M+ at $110M Valuation

UK-based 3D-printed gummy supplement brand raised $18M+ from Suntory, Hijos de Rivera, UPSA, Future Planet Capital, and others. Founded by CEO Melissa Snover. Revenue of £10.2M in 2025, up 61% year-over-year. Valuation just north of $110M.

3D-printed personalized gummy supplements. The technology allows customized vitamin combinations in a single gummy — each customer gets a formulation tailored to their needs. Suntory and Hijos de Rivera's investment brings a global beverage and consumer goods infrastructure. UPSA (pharmaceutical) adds credibility in healthcare. £10.2M in revenue, growing 61% at a $110M valuation, is roughly 10x revenue — a premium justified by the proprietary technology and personalization angle. If 3D printing can produce supplements at a commercial scale and cost, it would disrupt the entire one-size-fits-all supplement model.

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Diamond Brew — 7-Figure Pre-Seed

Chicago-based craft instant coffee pod brand closed a 7-figure pre-seed from G/7 Venture Studio, Beckett Industries, Habitat Partners’ Daniel Faierman, Charlie Walk, and others. Founded by Douglas Yu in late 2024.

Making instant coffee feel craft, premium, and startup-backed. The instant coffee category is massive globally, but has been dominated by legacy brands (Nescafé, Folgers) with minimal innovation. Diamond Brew targeting the consumer who wants convenience without sacrificing quality — the same consumer thesis that drove Cometeer’s frozen coffee pods. Habitat Partners’ involvement connects Diamond Brew to the same investor network backing other emerging CPG brands.

Fizzen — Launch at 1,900 Target Stores

Sparkling protein drink co-created by Kristin Cavallari and VO/D, the talent venture studio behind Frosh and 1UP Candy. 8g protein, collagen, real fruit juice, vitamins B12 and B6. Single-serve cans and multi-packs at 1,900 Target stores.

VO/D keeps producing brands at Target. Frosh kids’ juice boxes launched nationwide at Target two weeks ago. Now Fizzen protein soda at 1,900 Target doors. The venture studio model — pairing celebrity/influencer names with operational infrastructure — is producing consistent retail placements at massive scale. Cavallari brings the audience. VO/D brings the product development, retail relationships, and operational execution. 1,900 Target doors on launch is a significant commitment for a new protein soda brand.

AeroFarms — Acquired by Palm Ventures

Indoor vertical farming company acquired by Palm Ventures, a family office. AeroFarms is a leading supplier of fresh microgreens, but it has been on the brink of bankruptcy. The acquisition saves the company’s technology and production capabilities under new ownership.

Vertical farming continues its pattern of big vision, big capital, and operational struggle. AeroFarms raised hundreds of millions but couldn’t make the economics work on its own. Palm Ventures acquires out of distress, gets the technology and production at a discount. Whether a family office can succeed where venture-backed management couldn’t depends on a fundamentally different approach to scaling — patient capital versus growth-at-all-costs.

Tilray Sells Atwater Brewery Back to Founder

Tilray sold Detroit-based Atwater Brewery back to founder Mark Rieth. Atwater originally exited to Molson Coors in 2020, then Tilray acquired it in a bulk transaction in 2023. Terms undisclosed.

The founder buying back the brewery is a fascinating transaction. Rieth built it, sold it to Molson Coors, watched it get absorbed into Tilray’s portfolio, and now gets it back. Tilray is shedding non-core assets as it focuses its portfolio. For Rieth, getting the brewery back at a likely fraction of what Molson Coors originally paid is a second chance to build independently.

🆕 PRODUCT LAUNCHES & INNOVATION

This week’s innovation circus