Y’all know I love a good vertical integration story.

On these pages, I’ve written about unfair advantages that come from a built-in audience, IP, access to a key ingredient or a proprietary process. Of those, the last one is probably my favorite.

It’s not as sexy as being a celebrity brand or having some breakthrough technology. But it’s tried and true: control something your competitors need, and you may have a moat.

Beepop might be my favorite new product I discovered at Newtopia— because the product tastes so damn good — it’s also not overselling a functional promise, but is clean label and low sugar (7g per can).

Let’s dive into this new launch and the founder who owns the honey business, too.

Start with the asset

Matthew Bine came to honey from healthcare. His background is in regenerative medicine, wellness and medical spas.

He is also very tall

During COVID, he acquired Georgia Honey Farm, an established honey business with existing distribution, including Costco in Georgia.

Then he started drinking kombucha.

He liked the idea of a fermented beverage but didn’t love the sugar content of some of the products he was drinking. So he started experimenting with a brewer friend, using green tea and honey instead of the traditional black tea and cane sugar.

Vertical integration gets thrown around a lot in CPG

Owning a manufacturing facility isn’t automatically a moat if someone else can replicate the same thing by writing a check.

Beepop’s integration is more interesting:

• An established honey business

• Relationships with honey suppliers and beekeepers

• Access to different regional varieties of American honey

• Existing retail distribution

• An existing consumer base

• Its own beverage manufacturing and canning

• And now, a branded product that creates another use for the ingredient

The ingredient is part of the flavor architecture

Beepop uses different regional honeys in different flavors.

Orange blossom honey goes into the peach flavor. Clover honey is used in the tropical flavor. Tupelo goes into citrus. Wildflower rounds out another flavor.

Initially, the regional sourcing was partly about creating local relevance.

But as they developed the recipes, they realized something important: different honeys actually taste different.

Clover has a warmer, almost apple-spice profile that works beautifully with tropical fruit. Orange blossom complements peach.

So the supply-side story became a product-development advantage.

And then there’s the product

Here’s where Beepop really won me over.

There were a LOT of beverages at the trade show, and a lot using honey. Each one had some sort of compromise: a weird aftertaste, too many grams of sugar, or infused with a mood-altering substance.

Beepop’s proposition is refreshingly simple:

It tastes good. And it’s better for you.

It’s fermented green tea and honey, with 4 grams of fiber and roughly 45–50 calories. It has about 10mg of caffeine from the green tea.

Matthew calls the internal goal making it “crushable.”

I love that. He’s not trying to turn it into a science project. He wants people to drink it like soda.

His stated ambition is to replace some of the Diet Cokes and Diet Dr Peppers people drink every day. That’s a much bigger opportunity than “another kombucha.”

And, importantly, the product actually tastes like something you’d want to drink again.

The customer

Georgia Honey Farm sells large jars of honey through Costco in Georgia.

Matthew estimates more than 100,000 households already shop the parent company. That means Beepop can launch in Georgia with an existing consumer relationship instead of having to build one from scratch.

Eventually, the Georgia connection may matter less as the brand expands nationally. But for an early-stage brand, deep loyalty is everything.

Shelf stable in bev

One of Poppi’s early advantages over Olipop was ambient over refrigerated. Beepop is also ambient — which is huge because, for one, refrigerated fermented beverages can continue changing after production and become increasingly acidic or vinegary.

But it’s also a business decision.

Shelf stable means:

• No cold chain

• Broader distribution options

• Broader merchandising options

Is honey actually the moat?

Not by itself. If Coca-Cola decides it wants to launch a honey-sweetened soda tomorrow, it can probably find honey.

It’s the combination of:

Honey business + supplier relationships + consumer awareness + retail distribution + manufacturing + product development + brand.

The hard part starts now

Of course, this is still a very young brand. Now comes the part every CPG eventually has to face:

Velocity

• Can Beepop earn enough turns at retail to justify more distribution?

• Can it create repeat purchase?

• Can the brand move beyond its Georgia roots?

• Can the economics hold up as it scales?

I’ll be watching!

All my best,

Jennifer

If you didn’t read Part 1, go back here.

In this post you will learn:

• what are Codex standards?

• how products labled 100% avocado oil can fail Codex testing

• how to know if you’re buying fake avo oil

• what to do about it

For a list of resources and references on who to talk to, see the end of this post.

Let’s go.

Since I don’t think food companies are knowingly procuring adulterated avocado oil, I dug deeper into the supply chain. What I learned is sort of crazy pants.

First, a little context.

The standardization of food ingredients is a highly structured, science-based process that involves global cooperation. Codex Alimentarius Commission, established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) is the body that does this.

The Codex standard for avocado oil was established in 2024, spurred by landmark purity research from a UC Davis 2020 study that exposed widespread adulteration in the market, proving that up to 82% of commercial bottled avocado oils were oxidized or adulterated with cheap seed oils — one of the most expensive products in that study — labeled extra virgin avocado oil, and sold at a health-food co-op — was 100% refined soybean oil (!)

Four years seems like a long time to come up with something, but trying to establish an international standard that accommodates all the global varieties took a lot of debate. What resulted as the Codex standard covers a pretty broad range of legitimate avocado oils. And here’s the thing — the current standard breadth is exactly what makes it exploitable.

When you're developing a Codex standard, it's international guidance — it doesn't have any enforceable power, but it's supposed to cover global production. And, according to the people I spoke with, developing separate standards for crude, extra virgin, and refined avocado oil would have required more data, more time, and more resources.

[For comparison, developing the full spectrum of Codex standards for olive oil has been a continuous, 56-year evolutionary process that is constantly updated to fight evolving, hyper-sophisticated food fraud.]

You could ask AI to make a perfect blend: X% of this, Y% of that, and it would meet the fatty acid profile perfectly

This is how an oil that contains other vegetable oil could potentially still look like avocado oil on a lab report. The current commercial practice is to just test fatty acid. So a COA coming over with an in-spec fatty acid looks like it passes, and everyone thinks it’s legit.

But no.

It’s mad that you can have a COA on file and still not have a very good answer to the question, “Is this actually avocado oil?” That’s why Codex requires two chemical measurements.

Avocado oil has a characteristic fatty acid profile. It also has a characteristic sterol profile. It’s hard to manipulate both. So a blend can potentially be engineered to look right on one measurement while still looking wrong on another. But most commercial adulteration, per everyone I talked to, isn’t that surgical. It’s a refiner cutting oil to save money, not a chemist trying to beat a two-marker Codex test.

But because the ranges of chemical measurement on both fatty acid and sterol are so broad, Codex still leaves room to hide a blend — and people get greedy and add more and more cheaper oil.

High-oleic sunflower oil — the oil most commonly used to cut avocado oil can be ~25% blended in and still pass Codex.

But a lot more than 25% substituted oil is being cut in — and the market is rife with this stuff!

A COA isn’t the same thing as verification

A Certificate of Analysis tells you what someone tested and what the result was. It doesn’t necessarily tell you how the sample was selected or what methods were used. Third-party testing gives you an independent opinion.

Primal Kitchen and Chosen Foods, for example, have historically relied on their own internal testing and have put "100% pure" claims on their packaging. Not that you shouldn't test your own ingredients — but when the claim is in the hot seat independent verification is a different level of assurance.

Retailers are increasingly interested in certification!

The next wave of scrutiny may not come from the FDA. It may come from retailer quality-assurance teams. Several people I spoke with have had calls with Costco, Whole Foods and Walmart interested in verified products.

Retailers already require independent certification for claims like organic, regenerative and non-GMO. It’s not crazy the same thing could happen with premium-oil claims as retailers realize how difficult they are to verify.

How to independently verify

Seed Oil Free Alliance, which certifies products and independently tests the oils and fats used in them, not only tests both fatty-acid and sterol profiles in avocado oil, they also look at additional markers (cis-vaccenic acid) and patterns that can help identify adulteration. Their approach is to look at the entire chemical profile rather than declare an oil authentic or inauthentic based on one number.

What does this look like for a small CPG company using a co-manufacturer?

Let’s say you make avocado-oil potato chips and your co-manufacturer buys the oil.

1. Put this requirement in your co-man agreement:

We agree to use only the approved avocado oil supplier, specification and ingredient. We will notify the brand before changing the supplier, source, specification or processing of the oil.

The Seed Oil Free Alliance uses a version of this approach: the brand is responsible for communicating the requirement to its co-man, and the co-man is responsible for notifying the brand of ingredient changes—particularly oil changes.

2. Qualify the oil

At minimum, have an independent lab test the actual oil being used against your requirements. The Seed Oil Free Alliance’s program tests each distinct oil/supplier annually and requires another test if the supplier changes.

3. Don’t stop at the supplier’s COA

Ask for the supplier’s historical testing data, and know exactly what the test covers. At minimum, you’re looking at the fatty-acid and sterol profiles that underpin the Codex standard. But if authenticity is an important part of your product claim, consider additional markers and analytical interpretation rather than simply asking, “Does it meet Codex?”

4. Add finished-product surveillance

The oil can be authentic when it enters the co-man and you can still have a traceability problem later. Periodically testing the finished product gives you a second check: Is the oil we’re claiming on the package actually the oil that ended up in the product?

The goal isn’t to test everything, every time. It’s to build enough independent verification into the system that everyone in the chain knows the ingredient is actually being watched.

Then there is the price

One of the people I spoke with gave me current pricing benchmarks for crude and refined avocado oil and made a simple point: if the economics don’t work, it might be adulterated.

Even though there are legitimate differences in origin, grade, processing, contracts, scale and timing — I don’t think enough brands ask if the price they are paying makes sense for the ingredient they are being told they are purchasing.

If authentic refined avocado oil costs materially more to produce than the price you’re being quoted, you should probably understand why before sending the PO.

What else can you do?

If you can't verify a claim, change the claim. This isn't a radical idea — it's exactly what happened across the industry when sesame became a labeled allergen: instead of guaranteeing an allergen-free line, plenty of brands simply added "may contain sesame" to be safe. The avocado oil equivalent exists too. If your product tests inconsistent and you can't trace why, you can soften "100% pure avocado oil" to "made with avocado oil," or even add "and other vegetable oils" to the ingredient deck rather than make a claim your supply chain can't back up. It's also a lot cheaper than ruining your brand’s reputation.

The avocado oil industry is in early days

Olive oil went through decades of standard-setting, testing, enforcement and industry development. A new industry group, the Avocado Oil Manufacturers Association, is trying to accelerate that process. AOMA is working to build a larger database of authentic avocado oils and is developing a third-party authenticity program.

And this brings me back to —

I don’t think the lesson is that food companies are lying to consumers.

Demand for avocado oil has exploded and the supply chain has gotten ahead of the systems needed to verify it.

Brands want to reformulate. Consumers want to see “avocado oil” on the front of the package. Suppliers are trying to meet that demand. But the infrastructure for proving that the oil hasn’t necessarily kept up.

I’m going to keep digging into this, as I have not yet been able to reach Sesajal (Chosen Foods) and I plan to talk to Adams Group (Marianne’s) soon.

Thank you to: Dr. Selina Wang, UC Davis; Enrique Garcia, Miraj Shah, Lia Bijnsdorp, Avocado Oil Manufacturers Association; Scott Riefler, CCO, Source Technologies; Jonathan Rubin, Seed Oil Free Association; and several annonymous sources with years in quality programs inside major CPGs.

AOMA is hosting the first International Avocado Oil Congress in Seville from October 29 to 31, 2026, bringing together the entire supply chain to share knowledge, collectively address areas for improvement, and lay the foundations for a more robust and transparent global industry. Register here.

More to come.

All my best,

Jennifer

I would not have started with salmon cakes.

The premise of this show is OK —> it’s cheaper to eat in than out, it’s healthier, and cooking is not that hard. But they lost me. I don’t even make salmon cakes and I have the time and like to cook. Too many bowls, ingredients, and you have to cook twice — first the fish, then the patty. It really undermines the message when the comms team is this out of touch (or RFK is this stubborn). They did mention using tinned fish (Fishwife!) which they just should have done in the first place.

We may never know the source of cyclospora in the lettuce,

but what we do know is pre-cut produce is associated with a significantly higher frequency of wide-scale contamination and foodborne illness compared to whole produce. So if your Aunt stopped eating fruits and vegetables, please tell her it’s ok, maybe not at Chipotle (again), but wash and chop them herself. A senior health official in CA was heard saying that workers “just need to wash their hands”. I’d say that’s an oversimplification, but yes, food safety inside fresh food facilities is no joke.

IFT endorses HHS Food Policy

They like it. Marion Nestle was unimpressed, according to Food Navigator

I talked to Alison Cayne on In the Sauce about ingredient procurement and manufacturing. We talk scaling up and the difficulty and solutions to:

- Securing multiple manufacturers

- Identifing multiple sources of ingredients and run trials

- Unique packaging materials and sizes

On that last point, not backing down on a one-size fits all co-man solution. COGS will be high for a while. By-and-large your per ounce costs are not your biggest concern.

Your biggest concern is fulfilling orders.

Talk to your advisors and investors about days of inventory you plan to have on hand. It’s about measured risk. There is a risk tradeoff between having extra inventory, which sits on the balance sheet as a non-cash asset, vs having the cash.

Good luck scaling everybody!

All my best,

Jennifer

I promise.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about read last week’s post here

And while I’m not an investigative journalist, I do have a rolodex of people who know things I don’t. So I’m cashing in favors to answer what everyone’s really asking: if you’re a startup without a procurement team or QA department, how do you actually verify that your [instert hot ingredient] is what it says it is?

I hope to tell you what broke with avocado oil if I can. But more than that I want to hand you a roadmap — what to ask, where to look, and why this keeps happening.

Hang tight.

Read of the Week: What Happened to Talenti?

NYT Wirecutter dug into Talenti post-Unilever, and I have two hot takes.

First — this is the same movie where BigFood acquires a premium brand, starts optimizing for cost, and consumers can tell the magic has left the building.

Ergo, formulation changes:

But that’s nothing new.

The second thing that happened at Talenti is the thing you can’t afford — packaging problems.

The Wirecutter piece spills a lot of ink on Talenti’s impossible-to-open lids. And here’s the thing, large companies can absorb repeated packaging failures because they have enormous distribution, brand equity, and financial resources. For startups, packaging failures are often existential. One or two major issues can consume precious cash, damage retailer relationships, and permanently erode consumer trust.

I learned this the hard way, almost immediately, when a Barney Butter customer called to say our tamper seal wasn’t sealing. Within hours every jar I owned was on my desk, I was hunting down new lids, wrestling supplier consolidation, and almond butter sales had officially become my least important problem.

New founders obsess over the logo. Veterans obsess over everything else.

This is why I teach testing via small retail rollouts vs going nationwide. Sounds contradictory to what I said a couple weeks ago about speed, but it’s not. It’s the iteration cycle that has to go fast. Don’t skip the feeback loop for the sake of speed! You don’t want one bad component to take the whole business down.

NYC approved public grocery stores

New York City wants to open publicly-backed grocery stores run like military commissaries — here’s the vision plan, and FoodNavigator’s take of what it could mean for CPG brands:

These publicly-funded grocery stores will sell core basket items, such as fresh produce, milk, eggs and milk at a 30% discount, with prices remaining fixed for a month before resetting. Non-core items will be priced competitively, according to the proposal.

The discount will be available to shoppers regardless of income, including those using nutrition assistance programs like SNAP and WIC…

I think we can look at this under a variety of lenses. I tend to look at what it means for agriculture.

First of all, consumers increasingly want government to ensure that food is safe, transparent and trustworthy. That’s an upstream expectation. People generally support government setting the rules of the game—food safety standards, labeling, environmental protections, fraud prevention.

They are even in favor of regulating Ultra Processed Food

source: The New Consumer

That’s different from government becoming a downstream market participant that expresses those values through purchasing decisions.

Consumer demand has always been ag’s market maker. We wanted kale, farmers planted kale. We wanted almond milk, almond acreage exploded. We fell for avocados, and whole supply chains rearranged themselves around us. Right now whey economics are shifting because protein demand is pulling whey away from cheese.

Millions of people voting with their grocery carts, every single day — that’s the system we all know.

The NYC proposal floats a different engine: procurement as the market maker. If a purchasing framework prioritizes sustainability, labor standards, or whatever public values get baked in, who decides which values win? Do you regulate everyone upstream, or build preferred markets downstream through who gets to sell? What happens to founder innovation once procurement eligibility matters as much as consumer taste? And if the pilot works, what does this look like in five or ten years — well beyond New York?

I’ll be following for when procurment policies might reach farms, food startups, processors and manufacturers.

I hope you are staying cool this August! Ping me if you’re headed to Newtopia Aug 19 - 20th so we can meet up!

All my best,

Jennifer

🥑 Here are some of the products that did not pass authenticity testing for avocado oil —

The full list of products tested and limitations are found here. The published study is here

Five years ago UC Davis found that many retail avocado oils were mislabeled, adulterated, or already oxidized. They’ve taken it a step further, finding the problem is rampant in food ingredients as well.

I, like you, buy these chips, dressings and condiments. I don’t believe these brands are knowingly passing off fake avocado oil. So, what is going on?

I think the problem lies way upstream in supply chain. But I have some work to do to bring you that part of the story.

This will be a 2-part series.

Part 1

What was found

The study shows:

48 of 54 avocado oil-labeled products (89%) were compositionally inconsistent with authentic avocado oil, while only 1 of 20 olive oil-labeled products showed the same issue.

By purchasing commercial products from retail shelves—chips, tortilla chips, dressings, mayonnaise, etc.—and chemically analyzing whether they matched Codex standards using fatty acid and sterol markers, UC Davis just moved the avocado oil conversation from the bottle aisle to the ingredient deck.

Since many brands advertise avocado oil on the front of the package, consumers will want to know if the ingredient claims hold up chemically—not just for bottled oil, but for finished foods.

Some companies whose bottled avocado oil previously demonstrated purity now have processed foods that were identified in the new study as compositionally inconsistent with authentic avocado oil. We don’t know whether the inconsistency arose because these products are co-packed using different oil suppliers, formulations, manufacturing, or another point in the supply chain.

I'll be speaking with the lead researcher to understand the story behind the research, what prompted it, what surprised the team, and what it means for food companies relying on avocado oil. If there are questions you'd like me to ask, send them my way.

If you’re on the innovation side of a commercially viable new ingredient, follow it all the way to the end

I recently cited Bob’s Red Mill high protein oats as an example of a successful plant breeding commercializtion project. To get a large category leader like Bob’s Red Mill to brand and market a new type of oat is a home run for any B2B commodity player.

I cited this exmple with so much enthusiasm I later wondered how well the product is doing, so I read the reviews:

It seems hulls from the field are slipping through the processing and people don’t like it.

Similar reviews on Sam’s Club.

“its so gross to bite into a hard hull every other bite.”

Here’s a photo:

Bob’s Red Mill Protein Oats, powered by Bay State Milling’s SowNaked oats, have been engineered for higher protein and sustainability, however the quality standards for percent hulls is either too lax, or the processor is not meeting the standard and product is being released nonetheless. Some reviewers speculate the hull inclusion is intentional because the extra protein is found in the hulls (I doubt this).

With 6/10 people giving less than 5 stars they are likely losing a majority of first trial consumers, and I wonder how much longer Bob’s is going to put up with this before the item gets discontinued.

You can do all the research and innovation testing in the world, but things will fall apart if processing consistency does not meet quality standards

Ensuring success in value-added ingredients is mastering consistency of product quality. Nothing trumps this. Not cost, transparancy, or sustainability. The ability to ship a consistent product day in and day out is not easy and it’s where many fail. To be clear, I’m not talking about variances in crop attributes from year to year due to acts of god or water supply. I’m taking about what you can control on the product spec by how you handle the inputs, the way it’s manufactured, the freshness, storage and transport.

If you’re on the innovation side of a commercially viable new ingredient, do not pass off the development of specs to a downstream partner. Build product standards into the agreement and hand hold all the way to first ship!

This instant sourdough starter will change your life

Even though I work from home it’s been a real struggle to keep my sourdough starter, Margaux, alive. She is a hungry bi*ch and I’m wasting so much nice flour keeping her going. Over the weekend I tested out a dried sourdough starter packet from Leaven Foods. The founders claim to have “created a mix of non-GMO sourdough yeast and bacteria (the good kind!) in an easy-to-use powder that requires zero feeding or care and stays ready in your cupboard for whenever you are.”

I was skeptical. This seemed too easy.

But it worked! The crust was absolutely beautiful. I used the Neopolitan recipe from the website, but swapped King Arthur’s Bread flour for the 00 flour because that’s what I had.

Leaven fermented sourdough starter has changed by life, and it can change yours too.

In other new product taste test news, I tried Cedar’s new Spanakopita and Falafel dips. Cedar’s is a leader in the Mediterranean foods category. The dips are quite tasty and the ingredients are the same as homemade :)

Enjoy the last days of July!

All my best,

Jennifer

Speed = ability to test → learn → adjust → ship → sell faster than others.

And you know what stops you dead in your tracks? A food safety problem. Lost sales. Missed opportunities. And worse, if something does go out —> voluntary recall: lost reputation and potential legal action.

I’ve written about food safety over a dozen times on this substack. Search my page for “FSMA”. I’ve specifically discussed FSMA 204, the Food Traceability Final Rule.

Most of you reading this don’t produce/procure fresh produce so you might think a cyclospora-style outbreak damage could never happen to you.

Think again!

When things go wrong in food safety, the longer it takes to trace, the faster it can take you down. Complying with the law is not enough.

I’ve been witness to pathogens causing delays in raw material release causing OOS — that’s small potatoes stuff compared to 7k + people falling ill over a period of weeks with no confirmed root cause.

Remember the tara flour incident with Daily Harvest a few years ago? That took FOREVER to suss out.

FSMA 204 would’ve significantly shortened the trajectory of the cyclospora incident by accelerating the investigation, and even though it would not have prevented the contamination itself, it would have limited the damage.

However, because Congress and the FDA officially extended the enforcement deadline to July 20, 2028, Taylor Farms and its supply chain were not legally bound by its strictest data requirements during this outbreak.

Traceability: from checkbox to competitive advantage

➡️ Who this affects: All food manufacturers, especially those without in-house regulatory leadership

FSMA 204 turns traceability from a compliance checkbox into a competitive advantage. Digitized records, faster recall response, and real visibility into your supply chain won’t just get you through audits—they’ll become selling points to retailers, distributors, and partners operating in a recall-heavy environment.

What You Need to Do Now

1. Digitize your paperwork now. Orgs that digitize now have a leg up.

2. Map your entire supply chain. You need real visibility, not just one tier deep. When recalls happen, speed matters.

3. Make traceability a selling point. In a recall-heavy environment, demonstrating faster response capability is a competitive differentiator.

The most effective and inexpensive tool:

I’m not being paid to advertise, and this is not as expensive as you think. I encourage brands to get their co-mans to sign on — I love this tagline

How to move from chaos to confidence.

Modern food safety programs rely on systems, not heroes.

Get in touch now.

All my best,

Jennifer

1. What to make of the news about egg price manipulation and the egg producer settlement

2. What producers who weren’t in it think,

3. and what’s to come for egg prices

But first, have you ever wondered what goes on with produce genetics? And why there are only 1-2 varieties of fruit available at the grocery store?

My friend Seana, CEO of Dave Wilson Nursery, the nation's largest bareroot supplier of fruit and nut trees (famous for exclusive stone fruit like the Flavor King Pluot and pioneering the Independence Almond), shared some test varieties with me.

These breeds were out of this world, but Seana explained they will likely never make it past the test block because the color and acid levels probably aren’t right for what the packers want right now. She said maybe the golden saucer will make it to the home garden market because it’s unique.

The business of retail produce is so specific, and archaic, that only a few new varieties get selected to be patented and marketed.

Egg prices have plummeted

Wholesale breakers are hovering near historic lows — a dramatic plunge—nearly 96% lower than their previous highs—due to a massive oversupply in the U.S. flock.

Egg producers that lost herds have now repopulated, and if you’re buying eggs as an ingredient, this glut is your window.

But why they got to be so expensive has two narratives.

We’ve been through three major egg supply crisis this century due to avian flu. The latest was the worst.

$10 eggs at the supermarket is what’s made news and that three of the country’s largest egg producers — Cal-Maine, Versova, and Hickman’s — schemed to manipulate the benchmark most wholesale egg contracts are priced off of.

If you want all the deets, Matt Stoller laid them out well: the complaint alleges these three companies flooded the exchange with bids timed to move the index, then executed trades at inflated prices to make it stick — all while avian flu was providing a convenient cover story.

The penalty was a joke: $3 million combined, 53 million eggs donated to food banks, no admission of wrongdoing, no criminal charges.

I wanted to know what egg producers who weren’t part of this actually think, because the press has mostly been “greedy cartel vs. innocent consumer,” and that’s not the whole story.

What producers outside the lawsuit are saying

I talked to two people. One is an owner of one of the largest egg producers in the west — that wasn’t part of the settlement. The other is an independent egg supplier, also not part of it.

The second one put it simply:

“There was no price fixing in my view. The market lost 10% of the birds. Supply goes down that much, you’ll see prices multiple higher.”

That’s not crazy — you don’t need a conspiracy to explain a price spike when you’ve lost a tenth of your production capacity to a disease outbreak.

My producer friend’s take is more layered. He thinks the accused were sloppy and incompetent, and will have real civil claims coming their way, because operators like his own company were buyers in that market at the time. He expects a wave of class actions. But his real argument is that the price-fixing story isn’t the main story — it’s downstream retail pricing that’s the bigger, less examined issue.

Egg producers don’t set the retail price

A handful of grocery chains hold enormous buying power — and staples like eggs get treated differently than everything else on the shelf. Staples like eggs, milk, and bread never carry the kind of markup you’d see elsewhere; but when producer prices fell over the last six months, he says retailers kept shelf prices high anyway. His words: the DOJ should have gone after the stores.

Here’s how retail pricing actually works

Retail price has almost nothing to do with what a product costs the retailer and almost everything to do with what that price needs to do for the store’s overall P&L. Known Value Items — the staples shoppers actually track, eggs very much among them — get priced defensively to protect the value perception of the whole store, even when that means eating margin. Everything else gets priced to make up the difference. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a blended-margin system that’s opaque by design, and it means the same commodity can show up on shelf at wildly different prices depending on what job that particular SKU is doing for that particular retailer’s business model — a dynamic I described in almonds in my last sourcing piece.

Growers and producers — in nuts, in eggs, in most ag commodities — routinely assume retailers are the ones manipulating prices against them. Mostly, that’s a misunderstanding of a confusing system. But in this specific case, the complaint is a little different: it’s not that retailers are manipulating anything, it’s that they’re simply slow to pass falling input costs back to the shelf, and nobody at DOJ went looking at that.

Then the bottom fell out

The part that didn’t make the news is after this settlement hit, egg prices totally collapsed. Producer prices went from around $5 last fall to essentially giving eggs away within six months. Producers couldn’t even subsidize their own production costs and food banks absorbing donated eggs ironically makes things worse.

Why the whiplash? Two structural things happened at once, both on the supply side.

Herds are fresh, and fresh herds don’t die as much. When a facility gets wiped out by disease and rebuilt, the flock that comes back online is young. Younger flocks simply have less disease-related attrition than the older, more exposed herds they replaced — so production comes back not just to where it was, but running cleaner than it was before the crisis hit.

Biosecurity got a real upgrade, not just a patch. The dairy-adjacent HPAI strain of avian flu that tore through herds is gone from a lot of operations now, and the industry made changes in response — eliminating wild bird exposure and tightening protocols.

This combination — fresh herds plus the biosecurity fix — with adding somewhere around 5-6% to production is why we have an oversupply.

However, the flu is not solved. A new strain of HPAI is spreading again as of this writing, but because that biosecurity fix is now in place. we don’t expect it to be nearly as damaging this time around.

Why this is good news if you’re a food company

Liquid eggs are running at max capacity for a lot of producers, and that supply pressure is pushing ingredient pricing down hard. The bulk of the market (shell eggs) have also recovered, just with more volatility on the way down than I think anyone expected.

Where this goes from here

Eggs are going to see-saw between very inexpensive and moderately expensive for the next two to three years. This isn’t a return to stable pricing — it’s a new normal of oscillation.

For CPG buyers and foodservice operators, that means the sourcing playbook is: contract ahead where you can, don’t panic-buy at the top or panic-abandon eggs at what looks like a permanent low, and understand that the retail shelf price you see is not a reliable signal of where your ingredient cost is actually headed.

One more thing on the M&A side

The timing of Cal-Maine using its settlement-era cash pile to buy Van’s Waffles and other prepared-food assets doesn’t have great optics. It’s a producer moving downstream into value-added product — and however you want to think about it, that direction tends to work. What doesn’t tend to work, is the reverse: a processor or retailer trying to reach upstream into actually running a farm. Costco’s chicken program has had its fair share of problems, and the business model as a loss leader gets mixed reviews.

All my best,

Jennifer

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Everyone seems to care and appears to be trying to help, but answers are trapped.

Let’s say this has to do with a production run and the elusive question is — when can this product get released? Someone should own this but between a bunch of well-intentioned people, it’s not coming together.

You finally have to really spell it out:

You begin to ask yourself, how can they be SQF certified with such bad QA?

I feel you. You're not asking for more testing, you’re not disputing the lab results or changing the requirements, you’re simply asking your manufacturing partner to provide the document they had already agreed to provide and follow the steps.

Having an SQF cert and having a functioning QA culture are two different things

They’ve passed with the governing body. And you’ve built a release protocol that includes a COA format, documentation standards, sampling process, and positive release requirements. But none of this means they have an operating system that works for you.

The information is not a burden on a good manufacturer. A good manufacturer already has all of it. You’re just asking them to share it. So the first order of business is you have to have your s*it together before you can ask them to meet your expectations.

What having your documentation together actually means

Before your first production run, your manufacturer should have a signed raw material specification that spells out exactly what you’re buying: size, color, moisture, micro limits, sensory standards, etc. A COA template so there’s no ambiguity about what gets reported. A positive release protocol — meaning nothing ships until you say it’s approved, in writing. Lot coding requirements so everything that leaves their dock is traceable back to a specific production run. And an environmental monitoring expectation, so that if something goes sideways, and they say it wasn’t them, it comes with paper behind it.

The difference between a co-man problem and an operating system problem

I’ve spent enough years around startups to know that we love to diagnose people: bad vendor, unresponsive buyer, terrible rep, lazy employee. Sometimes those things are true, but a lot of the time good people are trapped inside poorly designed systems.

Here’s what to do:

Instead of escalating through another email thread, pick up the phone and call the top person at the co-man. Ask if they see what you’re seeing. Suggest to get your teams together.

Do not: blame or ask that person to intervene.

What is happening is they have a QA system that works for every other customer and not for you. You’re not asking them to fix anything, but to do something different for you.

The goal is to remove the friction and sell them on why you are worth it.

Share your key milestones, where your brand is headed and why you want them to be part of the success story.

Resist escalating to have it fixed one time

Because two months later it’ll happen again. Getting the team together and encouraging a system change is better than training their org to rely on executive intervention.

If every meaningful problem eventually lands on the CEO’s desk, the operating system hasn’t improved.

You want operational excellence. Get it by fostering a culture of excellence between your two teams.

All my best,

Jennifer

Better soil health isn't a value proposition that sells food

Sarah Mock wrote a masterful piece this week on the supply-side headwinds to regenerative agriculture adoption and scale. Sarah explains that most farmers don't have (and can't cheaply acquire) the craft to do it. Which compliments so much of what I've written over the years on the demand-side — that even when farmers do build it, there's no meaningful (read: contracted) buyer willing to pay for the "value".

Sarah makes the case that real regenerative mastery takes decades to build and most growers can't simply "buy less and do more" their way into it, no matter the grant size. It's an argument from the production side about why supply hasn't scaled, and it's worth your time to read! Read here

So today let’s put this all together with my argument that —

The last beacon of hope for the regenerative movement is to prove a human health benefit

🥬 The Regenerative Organic Alliance set out to prove that food made with regenerative organic crops are healthier for people, and The Nutrient Density Initiative has its own Regen Nutrition Project running in parallel. And I think this is the right move.

How it’s going

The Regenerative Organic Alliance and Edacious are four years into testing over 200 ROC-certified products against organic and conventional equivalents, and early results in their public Data Explorer show regeneratively produced samples coming in with a better fat profile, a better Omega balance, more protein, and no detectable heavy metals versus conventional. Here are the results on proteins

Alexandre Family Farm just released a year of monthly Edacious testing across five farms. Their 100% grass-fed milk came back with roughly a 1:1 Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio.

Conventional dairy omega-6 to omega-3 ratios typically range from 5:1 to 6:1. (We want less Omega -6 and more Omega -3 since the typical American consumption pattern runs 10:1 to 20:1 and is out of balance for optimal health).

Alexandre quality milk costs anywhere from double to triple what a private label conventional milk will cost at a mass retailer.

And that’s my point: A cheap jug of milk is what many health-goers purchase to then mix expensive powders to supplement what they feel is missing.

And those powders are ultra-processed, by their very nature.

I’m curious about future results from other crop and production testing, because if proof positive, demand for regen may proliferate, as consumption of whole, real foods and budget spending aligns to this value.

Because without the health aspect, most people do not support paying more

Support for regenerative agriculture adoption is lower when the cost is passed to consumers via higher prices or taxes. Only 6% feel they themselves should fund regenerative.

“42% of consumers believe it should be the government’s responsibility to fund regenerative. This reveals an interesting dissonance given that government funds come from consumers in the form of tax dollars.” Link to study

Case study updates: Remember Neutral Milk?

I interviewed Neutral a few years ago on The Future of Agriculture podcast —
Neutral was doing everything right: a Life Cycle Assessment identifying that 72% of dairy-related carbon emissions originate on farms, direct grants ($2,000–$40,000 per project) to lower the cost of farmer transition, and a deliberate emphasis on co-benefits (milk yield, animal welfare, soil health) rather than asking farmers to absorb cost for a certificate alone — which is the Alexandre model.

They even tried to avoid relying purely on offsets, and yet the brand appears to have gone dark — I don’t see product on shelves, or press or social activity since 2024.

Which tells me even a company doing the supply-side work correctly has trouble sustaining visibility or distribution with a carbon-first positioning and product benefit.

Which is why the nutrient density data is the first thing in years I'd call a real experiment instead of a marketing campaign. Soil health was never going to be the hook. Health might be.

All my best,

Jennifer

I’ve been very interested in why we can’t get better nutrition into underserved situations like hospitals and cancer centers. Every senior nutrition startup of the last decade has found the same underserved niche. Almost none of them have found a way in. Here’s what two years of trying to get free, healthy snacks into cancer centers taught me about why that keeps happening:

• An underserved demographic is not the same thing as an addressable market.

• The gatekeeper who blocks you usually has no incentive to say yes — and no penalty for saying no. (Institutional and clinical channels)

• “Free” doesn’t matter. (Most institutions can’t approve anything novel)

• Senior-coded branding is a double edged sword

• The startups that crack this find a gatekeeper who already needs someone to say yes to — and even then, it can take over a decade to turn that into an exit.

I learned the first three of these the hard way, watching my mom go through chemo. What Kate Farms learned is the reason they’re the rare example worth studying.

So let’s get into it.

Two years ago I was sitting next to my mom in an infusion chair at El Camino Health in Mountain View, watching the hours of chemo crawl by the way they do, when I noticed the snack cart the nurses wheeled around. It was candy. Chips. The kind of stuff you’d get out of a vending machine at a rest stop. Here were patients fighting for their lives, immunocompromised, often nauseated, often told by their own oncologists to eat more protein and less sugar — and the only free food in the building was working against every piece of advice they’d just been given.

Being in the business of healthy snacks, I started donating better options from brands I worked with — Wildwonder, KiZE, Love & Chew, Daily Crunch, Ugly Fruit, LMNT — and donating them straight to the cart. It felt obvious and easy.

After my mom passed, I wanted to turn that into something bigger than one cart at one hospital. I started a nonprofit, Positively Good Snacks, ran a fundraiser, raised real donations, and set out to institutionalize the program — give emerging better-for-you brands a way to get product into cancer centers with a captive, deserving audience, at scale, across more than one hospital.

What I didn’t account for was the actual hardest part of the whole thing. It wasn’t sourcing product. It wasn’t raising money. It was getting a hospital to say yes.

Every medical center is run differently, with different procurement structures, different committees, different definitions of who’s even allowed to make a decision like this. You’d think free would be an easy yes. It is not. Many medical centers simply cannot operate outside their pre-determined process — on anything, even something that costs them nothing and visibly improves the patient experience. Finding the decision-maker, and then finding the person who could actually approve something novel, took far longer and was far harder than building the program itself.

The lesson I learned trying to get snacks into cancer centers is part of the lesson of why senior-nutrition startups haven’t broken into medical institutional channels.

In January, Lucille Health launched a “better-for-you” nutrition shake aimed squarely at Boost and Ensure

Lucille Health, founded by Jess Haghani — Harvard MBA, ex-KKR — built it after watching her 92-year-old grandmother get handed the same processed, joyless shakes that have barely changed their formulas since the 1970s. The product is better, clean, ergonomic, and formulated with input from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It’s raised real money from Iris Ventures and others, and the pitch deck line is straight forward: older adults are turning 65 in record numbers, this cohort holds an outsized share of consumer spending power, and senior nutrition is “a large, underpenetrated market ready for disruption.”

That sentence could have been lifted verbatim from a 2019 Fast Company piece on a startup called Perennial, founded by a former Beyond Meat exec. Same observation — Ensure and Boost haven’t innovated since the Carter administration, older adults are the fastest-growing demographic, only 1% of food innovation and 10% of marketing spend targets people over 50. Same conclusion: huge whitespace, go build the clean alternative.

Perennial raised a few million dollars, launched direct-to-consumer because, in the company’s own words, their customers “may not be shopping in the adult nutrition section,” and then suddenly disappeared from the market not long after launch.

That spending-power pitch is not wrong — older households really do control an outsized share of U.S. wealth. The problem is what founders assume it implies. Money in a demographic’s pocket doesn’t tell you anything about whether you can reach that demographic, especially when the channel that matters most is institutional, not retail, and has nothing to do with who’s holding the wallet. I learned that lesson with a snack cart, not a shake — but it’s the exact same lesson.

I don’t bring this up to dunk on Lucille — it’s early, the team has clearly absorbed some of the right lessons, and I very much hope it works. I bring it up because the pitch hasn’t changed at all in seven years, even though the market handed us a fairly clean experiment already.

The barrier isn’t the niche. It’s the door.

Finding an underserved audience is the part everyone gets right. What takes the insight is mapping who actually controls access to that audience, and whether that gatekeeper has any structural reason to let you in.

I leaned on a conversation with a colleague who tried to build a company in senior nutrition and got far enough to see exactly where it breaks. Lay her experience next to mine and the pattern is identical, just at different scales.

The thing standing between you and the customer usually isn’t price or quality. It’s a gatekeeper who has no incentive to say yes.

In my case, it was hospital procurement and whatever committee approves a “new program.” In senior nutrition, the equivalent gatekeeper is hospital and assisted-living procurement, and the incumbents — Ensure and Boost — own that relationship. They’ve spent tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical data nobody else has, and they price low on purpose, because the institutional placement is what drives retail pull-through later. You can’t out-data them and you can’t out-price them as a venture-backed startup with a Series A. And the patient isn’t the one choosing the product.

It cannot be overstated how much old or sick people do not want to be marketed to as such.

Even when you get past the gatekeeper, the person on the other end doesn’t want to be identified by the need that got you through the door. This is the same mechanic you see in beauty: a woman in her 60s doesn’t want a moisturizer labeled “for mature skin,” she wants the contemporary brand that happens to work on her skin. Older adults want the same thing from a shake. In actual customer discovery, people overwhelmingly did one of two things: stuck with Boost or Ensure because they believed it was doctor-recommended, or defected to brands that were never positioned as senior products in the first place — Premier Protein, Core Power, Muscle Milk. Nobody says, “finally, a shake made for people my age.”

The moment you de-position away from “senior,” you’re not in a senior category anymore — you’re in the protein-shake category.

And that category now includes Orgain and a dozen other clean-label competitors with more retail presence and lower customer acquisition costs than you.

Kate Farms worked — because the door was already open

The strongest counterexample either of us could point to is Kate Farms. They started with a single child who couldn’t tolerate any standard tube-feeding formula — a problem hospitals already knew they had no good answer for. Kate Farms didn’t just find an underserved audience, they found a gatekeeper who was already motivated to say yes, because the alternative was a patient with no good option at all. Clinical adoption inside that narrow wedge came first. The broader platform — and eventually general senior and everyday nutrition — came only after that door was already open. Danone acquired them in 2025 after they’d raised ~ $170 million.

It’s worth sitting with the timeline, though. Kate Farms was founded in 2012 and didn’t exit until 2025. Thirteen years, and a lot of the capital came in during the zero-rate era, so it’s not obvious every investor in every round actually cleared a good return. Finding the openable door doesn’t make this fast. It just makes it possible.

What I think is interesting about Lucille, and the reason I’m watching it is that it’s not repeating Perennial’s DTC-only mistake. It launched simultaneously through assisted living and foodservice distributors, Amazon, and DTC, and hired a Director of Foodservice Sales specifically to chase the institutional channel. But I’m cautious about the broad, “aging adults, general frailty and muscle loss” pitch, rather than the narrow, hard-to-refuse clinical case Kate Farms had. Whether a broad pitch is enough to get the same yes from the same kind of gatekeeper that, in my experience, says no to free things on principle, is the question. I’d want to see actual reorder rates inside assisted living before I’d call it.

So how do you actually tell?

If you’re sitting on a senior or medical nutrition concept right now, here’s the questions, in this order, to have answers to.

1. Who, specifically, has to say yes — and what happens to them if they say no? If it’s “a committee” or “procurement” or “whoever’s in charge that quarter,” and nothing bad happens to that person for maintaining the status quo, you don’t have a sales motion yet. You have a hope. Kate Farms’ answer was a clinician staring at a patient with no formula that worked — saying no had a real cost. Lucille’s answer, right now, is a foodservice and assisted-living sales process it’s still building. Perennial’s answer was nobody, because it never tried to walk through an institutional door at all.

2. Does your gatekeeper need a yes, or are you asking them to want one? Needing and wanting are different, and if your best argument is that your product is better, cleaner, or more dignified, you’re selling want. If your best argument is that the institution currently has no acceptable option for a defined patient population, you’re selling need.

3. Can you describe your initial customer in one narrow, clinical sentence — or does it take a paragraph about a generation? “Patients who can’t tolerate standard tube-feeding formulas” is one sentence and it’s a referral source’s whole job. “Older adults who deserve better than what the senior aisle currently offers” is a worldview, and worldviews don’t get requisitioned by a hospital purchasing department. If your one-sentence answer requires the word “aging,” “Boomer,” or “seniors” as the noun rather than a specific clinical or functional need, you’re still describing an audience, not a wedge.

4. If your product disappeared tomorrow, would your channel partner have to scramble — or would they just reorder from Abbott or Nestlé without anyone noticing? This is the only question that tells you whether you’ve actually displaced an incumbent or just been tolerated alongside one. Test it honestly, even pre-launch: would a hospital dietitian, a discharge planner, or a foodservice buyer be inconvenienced by your absence, or relieved to not have to manage one more vendor?

If you can answer all four confidently, you have something akin to what Kate Farms had. If you’re still answering in terms of market size, generational wealth, or how much better your ingredient list is, you have something closer to what I had with a snack cart that took months to place in a single hospital — true, good, and not yet a business.

All my best,

Jennifer

Do not take tax advice from me — consult your legal tax advisor

Quick backgrounder:

Early-stage C corps raising money via SAFEs, issuing stock options, and compensating advisors or early team members with equity should understand Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) rules. Under Section 1202, investors and certain equity holders may be able to exclude up to 100% of their capital gains from federal taxes when they sell — and that gain is also exempt from the alternative minimum tax. The benefits just got better under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (signed July 4, 2025):

• gains can now be tax-free up to $15M or more per person (used to be $10M)

• held for at least 3 years to receive phased exclusion: 50% at 3 years, 75% at 4, 100% at 5+

• the 83(b) election lets early equity recipients start the QSBS clock earlier — file within 30 days of grant date, no exceptions

• stock must be acquired in an original issuance from the C corp — secondary market purchases don’t qualify

[Note: Not every business qualifies. For my food and CPG readers, pay attention: restaurants, farming, and oil and gas are explicitly excluded. So are personal service businesses — health, law, consulting, and more. Most product-based CPG companies are fine, but if you’re operating a restaurant concept or an ag services business, your stock likely doesn’t qualify.]

**NEW** The stacking play

Because the exclusion applies per taxpayer, some founders are transferring QSBS into irrevocable nongrantor trusts for each family member. Each trust counts as a separate taxpayer, each gets its own exclusion cap. A founder with four kids could theoretically shelter up to $75M in gains ($15M x 5 taxpayers including themselves). The IRS is actively scrutinizing these arrangements — particularly schemes involving multiple trusts with overlapping beneficiaries — and tax pros expect formal anti-stacking guidance to come. If someone’s pitching you this strategy, make sure you have serious tax counsel involved, not just an enthusiastic advisor.

Happy investing!

Father’s Day Gift Guide: For the Dad Who Eats Well

Here are three things worth giving — all founder-built and things I’ve tried —

FOND Regenerative Bone Broth (and Duck Fat, and Tallow)

FOND Regenerative started as a farmers market stand in 2015. Founder Alysa Seeland built something real: artisan bone broths, animal fats, and demi-glace, sourced from over 580 U.S. family farms. Every product is the first in its category to carry regenerative verification.

This is how they talk about it:

The brand nearly didn’t make it — a facility fire in 2022 wiped out close to $3M in inventory and raw goods. Alysa rebuilt anyway, slowly, profitably. Today FOND is in over 4,000 stores including Whole Foods, where their ROC bone broths have outperformed every forecast. The tallow has become a top seller in the natural channel’s oil and vinegar category, with retailers asking to carry it rather than the other way around.

I made a chuck roast in the slow cooker with one of the beef broths and it was so easy and fantastic. The products feel homemade. The duck fat has become a regular in my potato rotation — extra crispy outside, creamy inside.

Get this and you won’t regret it!

Bittman’s Sourdough - the Knicks are not the only thing winning in NYC

Mark Bittman — longtime NYT food columnist, How to Cook Everything author, and arguably the person most responsible for convincing a generation of home cooks that simple is better — just launched Bittman’s, a subscription-based, bake-from-frozen, organic whole grain sourdough delivery service.

The premise is straightforward: bread made with organic flour, water, salt, and time. Fermented naturally, baked, frozen at peak freshness, and shipped to you for a 20-minute finish at home. The lineup includes whole wheat boules, demi baguettes, ciabatta flats, focaccia, a rye loaf, cinnamon walnut raisin, a corn boule, croissants, and pastured butter (salted and unsalted). Subscriptions start at $89.

I keep a sourdough starter. I use it for pizza dough — loaf-making still intimidates me — so I know what good fermentation tastes like and what corners-cut bread tastes like. Bittman’s is the real thing. We’ve now tasted the full lineup and it’s consistently impressive: deep flavor, good chew, easy digestion. This gift is indulgent and considered.

It’s not a random food box. It’s a point of view on bread!

Dirty Gut Chocolate

I got a cold email from Daniel Berlin: “I just graduated college and am taking my chocolate company, Dirty Gut, full time.”

Normally I ignore these. This one I didn’t, partly because the Boston Globe had already covered it and partly because the pitch was so un-pitched — just a kid who launched a chocolate brand with live probiotics, added fiber, and less sugar while still at Babson, got into 60+ stores, built 40K Instagram followers, and decided to go all in.

So we tried it.

If you didn’t know there were probiotics and extra fiber in there, you wouldn’t guess. All the flavors taste like good chocolate. The Rich Dark is actually dark. Everything comes individually wrapped, which is practical for gifting. This is the one for the dad with a sweet tooth who’s been told to eat better. He won’t feel like he’s eating better. That’s the point.

Happy Father’s Day and feed your dad something worth eating!

All my best,

Jennifer

My takeaway: coconut water has been around for a long time, the taste is polarizing, and household penetration hovering at 15- 20% is likely not gaining quickly. I’d attribute Vita Coco’s blowout Q1 sales and earnings to a Walmart shelf reset — 27,000 new points of distribution and better placement — generating trial, not repeat. An ex-CEO of Harmless Harvest said coconut water is a commodity with no barrier to entry and that doubling the category “will take a long, long time.”

An investor thesis put together by Robert Simkus, UVA finance student, goes deeper than category skepticism. He models COGS margin compression heading into 2027 from a probable El Niño-driven coconut price spike — the same cycle that crushed margins last time around. He maps the private label supply chain retailer by retailer and finds very little white space left for Vita Coco to win new customers. He also exposes the KDP (Keurig Dr. Pepper) distribution agreement expiring this month as a potential renegotiation that could hurt pricing and reach. Taken together: slower revenue growth, compressed margins, a rerate. He’s targeting 40% downside.

But there is still this —

[Chart: NIQ Total US MULO+ W/C Dollar % Change vs. Prior Year, Last 13 Weeks ending 3/29/26. Source: Robert Simkus, Vita Coco short thesis, June 2026.]

Coconut water is up 31.3% — more than double energy drinks. hmmm.

Then Tom Brady launched a coconut water this week with Go Puff, touting single origin, organic coconuts from Vietnam.

Maybe I’m wrong

If coconut water is exploding, lets talk about brand positioning and sourcing as a strategy

Here’s how the top two category players are positioned:

Vita Coco (47% share) — Multi-country, asset-light, deliberately diversified. Philippines and Brazil primarily, with Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia as backup across 17 contract factories. The pitch is scale and supply flexibility. No single-origin story; the moat is logistics and volume, not terroir. Value priced ($0.13/oz)

Harmless Harvest (11% share)— Single-origin, single varietal. Thailand’s Nam Hom coconut, a sweeter, smaller variety whose seeds are protected from export — meaning it cannot be replicated elsewhere. Processed in Thailand using HPP instead of heat pasteurization. Two hundred of their 300 employees live in rural Thailand. The occasional pink color that appears naturally became a cult brand signal rather than something they hid. Premium priced. ($0.31/oz)

Good Nut sources from Vietnam, same as brand Real Coco

Real Coco — Single-origin, bottled at source. Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, multi-generational family farms, naturally irrigated year-round. The region’s distinct sweetness means no additives, stabilizers, or sugar needed. USDA Organic, minimal processing. Jeff Kung built this brand around a sourcing story before it was a celebrity talking point. Value priced ($0.14/oz)

Good Nut (Tom Brady x Gopuff) — Single-origin, organic, Vietnam. Same geography as Real Coco, no added sugars or sweeteners, sleek 11.8 oz can, available exclusively on Gopuff, which says coconut water sales on their platform are up 115% year over year. The differentiator is mostly Brady. Premium priced ($0.25/oz)

Why is everyone except Vita Coco racing toward a single-origin, sustainability story?

I wrote about this before: a sourcing story only matters to a certain segment of consumers, and in volatile markets — tariffs, El Niño, port disruptions — publicly promising a specific origin is less a brand asset than a liability. The brands that get into trouble are the ones whose identity is married to a single supplier or region. When that supply breaks, they have to choose between breaking the promise or missing a production run.

What actually builds long-term trust is traceability — verified inputs, supplier qualification, ongoing testing, documented oversight — not transparency for its own sake. The investor advice is: source wherever you want. Just don’t promise where.

Vita Coco, for all its structural problems that Robert identifies, has actually solved for this. Their multi-country, asset-light model is exactly what investors now want.

I think the structural bear case on Vita Coco the stock may still be right (this is not investment advice). But the category, and the sourcing race it’s spawned, tells me something real is happening with consumer demand. Whether any of these brands — including the one that’s mostly Tom Brady — can survive their own origin promises when the next El Niño hits is the more interesting question.

All my best,

Jennifer

Today I’m going to get into:

• Retail pricing mechanics

• Why the grower-to-shelf price gap is a structural feature

• Three sourcing mistakes

• What the 2026/27 supply outlook means for your planning

• Why value-add processing is the only real answer to the industry’s margin problem

The commodity trap

Understand that the price tag on a bag of nuts is not a reflection of what those nuts cost. It’s a reflection of what that retailer needs that bag to do for their business.

Errol Schweizer ran grocery buying at Whole Foods for many years — he’s the buyer who brought Barney Butter nationwide back in 2009. He describes the retail nut aisle perfectly in this recent post: three bags of nuts, same certifications, same shelf, different brands, different prices. What the customer doesn’t see is that all three bags may have come from the same harvest, the same supplier, the same lot. One brand defends market share against discounters, one holds margin, and one grows units at a lower price point. Same commodity, three business objectives, three price tags. Retailers are running a tiered margin blending game across thousands of SKUs. Nuts are just one piece of it.

I’m going to talk about almonds a lot in this post but it’s the same for pistachios and walnuts. I discussed this chart in a previous post — Almond Prices Make No Sense. Retail prices up, grower returns down — makes no sense because it tells an incomplete story. The market price layer sitting between grower and shelf is opaque by design. Almond prices are not publicly traded on any U.S. exchange. There is no governing body that regulates them. About 30% of the market operates on a “call” basis, where growers trigger when to sell through their broker. It sounds like control. It’s really just timing a market that runs on sentiment. Growers are frustrated, but looking at the wrong part of the system.

True story: an almond handler once sold short at a price higher than the Costco retail price. So he bought out all the Costco inventory and resold it at a profit. That is how opaque this market is.

And nuts, it turns out, are among the least price-sensitive categories in the grocery store. Sure, customers will pantry load when they go on sale — but those units move at lower dollars, pulling forward purchases that would have happened anyway. Promotional pricing doesn't grow the nut category. It just removes dollars from it.

What brands get wrong about sourcing

These are the expensive mistakes I see brands making when procuring nuts and nut ingredients.

They buy on spot instead of contracting. Most brands purchase on an as-needed basis, reacting to inventory rather than planning ahead. The smarter move is contracting volumes tied to harvest cycles over flexible timeframes. It requires knowing your own demand well enough to commit — which is hard for early-stage brands — but it’s the difference between paying market price and paying panic price.

They think they deserve cost-plus pricing. I once heard that in the early growth years at KIND, Daniel Lubetzky, the founder, asked a grower-processor I know for below-market pricing on almonds because, “you don’t need to make so much money.” (!) This attitude — that ingredient suppliers should subsidize brand growth (without equity) — fundamentally misunderstands what it costs to grow almonds in California. Water, labor, regulation, input costs — these are not abstractions. Brands that approach sourcing with a cost-plus entitlement mindset damage supplier relationships and leave themselves exposed when the market shifts.

They contract when they’re desperate. Reaching out to a handler when you’re two weeks from running out of inventory is the worst possible negotiating position. The market knows you need it. You will pay for that. The brands that source well build relationships before they need them and contract with enough lead time to have options.

The ingredient opportunity

It’s tough for almonds to be the primary ingredient when they cost more than say, rice. But when one of the most recognized almond brands in the country builds a flagship snack product that doesn’t lead with almonds, it leaves room for a huge opportunity.

I blame this on the industry being so caught up in the commodity cycle — trying to extract more value from the whole nut — it’s hard to take a chance and invest in the ingredient.

Simple Mills built a real following on almond flour as a hero ingredient. Fewer of their SKUs center on it now, and the pressure will only continue following their acquisition by Flowers Foods. The pull toward conventional cost structures is relentless once institutional capital is involved.

Meanwhile a new generation of brands are doing something different

Pictured: Fresh Vintage Farms Almond Mayo, A Little Nutty Almond Flour Crackers, Good Journey Low Glycemic Cookies, Wellious Almond Protein Powder, Bitchin’ Almond Oil chips, Mighty Me Extruded Puffs, Lexington Bakes Protein Cookie

A Little Nutty makes a true almond flour-first cracker. Fresh Vintage Farms makes almond oil mayo. Wellious leads with almond protein powder. These are not almond-adjacent products. The almond is the point. And consumers demanding cleaner, more functional ingredients are creating real pull for what these brands are selling.

This is the flywheel. Almond manufacturers that invest in higher-value ingredient forms — butter, flour, defatted protein powder, oil — can supply CPG brands at stable, longer-term better margins, than commodity whole nuts. Brands that market the ingredient story authentically build consumer loyalty that private label can’t replicate. The value gets created and shared across the chain rather than competed away at the shelf.

I know something about this because I built Barney Butter a decade ago. The almond was never invisible in that product. It was the whole story. And it’s lasted.

What the supply picture means for your planning

The most recent USDA Subjective Forecast validates what industry observers were already expecting: a forward crop consensus around 2.65 to 2.7 billion pounds, roughly flat to slightly below this year’s harvest. Handlers are comfortable, targeting a carry forward of around 550 million pounds, and there’s no pressure to overextend commitments.

Global buyers — India, China, the Middle East — are purchasing hand to mouth, which could create some volatility exposure. But real demand from those regions means handlers have steady interest through summer. The near-term outlook is stable to modestly firming.

For brands and procurement teams, this is actually good news. A stable supply consensus makes input cost planning more tractable than it’s been in recent years. This is the window to get your contracting in order — before the next disruption, not after.

The question is who captures the value

The almond industry has the ingredient story, the health credentials, the scale, and the infrastructure. California grows the overwhelming majority of the world’s almonds, and increasingly more pistachios. The global demand for clean, functional, non-UPF ingredients is real and growing.

What the whole nut retail channel cannot do is solve the margin problem for growers, brands, or anyone else in the chain. The commodity trap is structural. The only way out is up.

The brands getting this right are building real businesses. The manufacturers getting this right are getting better margins. The investors getting this right are funding the insurgents, not the legacy players still trying to win a shelf pricing game that was never designed for them to win.

The industry has everything it needs. The question is how much of the value chain it’s willing to own.

All my best,

Jennifer

In anticipation of that conversation, I was researching the tailwinds for a product like his right now — with the supply problem in dairy based protein powder.

In this post I’m going to break down:

• Why the whey protein shortage is real — and why the obvious fix (pea protein, soy) runs into a wall

• Two emerging real-food plant protein brands doing something more interesting

• How to actually read a protein label — what PDCAAS is, why it matters, and why almost no one talks about it

• A side-by-side macro and price-per-gram comparison of both products (the price gap surprised me)

• What published research says about the formula logic behind one of them

• What all of this means for CPG founders thinking about the protein opportunity right now

Hi 👋 I’m Jennifer Barney and I built the almond butter brand Barney Butter before founder-led brands were cool. Here’s where I share how to do it. I work with people that grow, process, and package food, and understand what’s going on upstream from the grocery shelf.

Let’s go.

The whey problem

Food Dive reported that whey protein concentrate — once a cheap byproduct of cheese manufacturing — is now so in demand that some suppliers are sold out for the rest of the year. Standard whey powder prices are up more than 50% since January. Whey protein isolate (the more concentrated version) is sitting in the $12-per-pound spot price range. BellRing Brands, which owns Premier Protein and Dymatize, called it “historic highs” on their last earnings call.

The reason is obvious: 70% of Americans now say they want more protein in their diet, up from 59% four years ago. GLP-1 use is adding fuel to that fire — and so protein has infiltrated Pop-Tarts, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and Doritos (which is progress?).

The dairy industry is trying to add $11 billion in new capacity, but scaling whey production takes time.

The fix — switch to food tech alts — gets floated every time there’s a dairy squeeze. But here’s the thing. That fix runs directly into a wall that has been building for several years.

The UPF problem that food tech alt-protein never solved

Consumers are not just looking for protein — they are specifically looking for protein that doesn’t come with a long explanation. The UPF (ultra-processed food) backlash has been real and durable, and it has been especially brutal for food tech alt-proteins.

The precision fermentation and cultivated protein space that was going to save the world has been losing ground for a few years now, because people don’t want to eat that and VCs are tired of deals that require massive energy cost and overhead to turn a profit.

What’s rising instead is a return to recognizable sources: real food, real ingredients, real processes. The question for CPG right now is: are there plant-based protein sources that can actually perform at the functional level — solubility, nutrient density, taste — without the fermentation backstory?

That’s what makes this moment interesting for brands like Wellious and another brand I came across EatScoops, a new peanut protein powder I learned about from my friends at Express Checkout.

Two products, same problem, different approaches

I did a label-level comparison of both products, and while both are incomplete proteins on their own — meaning they’re missing or low in certain essential amino acids — both are competitive with, and in some ways better than, what most people are putting in their bodies from conventional whey-based products when you factor in what else comes with the serving.

First, a note on protein quality

I’ve written before about why communicating protein quality matters and how most brands completely drop the ball on it. The metric that matters is PDCAAS — Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score. A score of 1.0 is ideal. Whey scores a 1.0. Eggs score a 1.0. Most single-source plant proteins score between 0.5 and 0.8.

Neither Wellious nor EatScoops publishes a PDCAAS score — but here’s what the label tells us about their amino acid story.

Wellious uses almond protein and chickpea protein together. This is not an accident — it’s a scientifically validated pairing. This paper confirms that almonds alone have a PDCAAS of roughly 0.44–0.48 after digestibility correction — severely limited by lysine. The same paper notes explicitly that blending almonds with complementary protein sources like pulses can substantially enhance the final amino acid score of the product.

The math on why this works: chickpeas are strong in lysine, which is the amino acid almonds are most short on. Add chickpea protein, and the score climbs. The combination, depending on the formula ratio, can reach an estimated PDCAAS of 0.70–0.80 — meaningfully better than either ingredient alone, and at the right formulation ratio it qualifies for a regulated US “good source of protein” claim.

EatScoops uses a peanut protein isolate. Peanuts are technically legumes — high in arginine, solid on protein density — but they have two gaps: methionine/cysteine and lysine. So EatScoops has a wider amino acid gap than Wellious, estimated PDCAAS 0.60–0.70, but makes up for it in sheer volume per serving. Most people don’t want to consume more calories just to get the macros (that’s why David bars exist).

The fix for both is simple: mix with dairy milk, add Greek yogurt, throw in a tablespoon of hemp seeds. Any of those close the loop. The interesting thing is that if you use both products together, they actually complement each other — Wellious brings the chickpea lysine that EatScoops is missing.

Now the macros

I was totally surprised about this part.

EatScoops wins on raw protein volume. 27 grams is a serious number. But here’s where I need to explain something, because I expected the gap to be bigger.

EatScoops uses a peanut protein isolate. An isolate is different from a concentrate or a whole-food ingredient. When you isolate a protein, you’re putting the source — in this case peanuts — through a process that strips away most of the fat, carbs, and fiber, leaving behind a highly concentrated protein fraction that is typically 90%+ protein by weight. It’s a meaningful processing step. It’s why a peanut, which is about 26% protein by weight in its natural form, can become a powder that’s 60% protein by weight.

Wellious, by contrast, uses defatted almond flour — not an isolate. Defatting removes oil but retains fiber, some residual fat, and carbohydrates. It’s less refined. That’s actually a feature, not a bug — it’s why Wellious ends up with 8 grams of fiber per serving, which is genuinely unusual for a protein powder and a real selling point.

So I expected the isolate to blow the non-isolate out of the water. And the honest answer is: not as much as you’d think.

The price per gram conversation

This is where it gets interesting for founders thinking about positioning.

Wellious: $25 pouch / 340g → 10 servings → 180g total protein → $0.14 per gram of protein, or $2.50 per serving.

EatScoops: $9.99 pouch / 298g → ~6.6 servings → ~179g total protein → $0.06 per gram of protein, or $1.51 per serving.

Wellious is about 2.5x more expensive per gram of protein.

That’s a real difference. And it’s the kind of number that should inform how each brand talks about itself.

EatScoops has a value story and a retail story — it’s at Target, it’s affordable, and the protein density is legitimate. That’s a clear lane. The brand that figures out how to communicate protein isolate quality + real food credentials + accessible price in a single sentence is going to win with a mainstream consumer who is newly protein-aware but not deeply educated.

Wellious has a different story: it’s cleaner (no xantham gum), higher in fiber, for the consumer who reads labels. The subscription model makes sense for that buyer. The 4-ingredient promise is the moat. But at $2.50 a serving, Wellious needs to make the case for what you’re not getting (gums, additives, complexity) as much as what you are. And right now, most protein powder consumers don’t know to ask those questions yet.

Which brings me back to what I’ve said before about communicating protein quality. If you are a plant-based protein brand right now and you are not talking about PDCAAS, amino acid profiles, and what complementary pairings do to your protein quality — you are leaving the most powerful consumer education opportunity on the table.

What this means for CPG right now

The whey shortage is a real supply constraint that will drive reformulation conversations across the industry. The options on the table are usually pea protein (functional, not that tasty, but familiar), soy (effective, politically complicated), or fermentation-derived alternatives (impressive, UPF-adjacent in consumer perception).

What’s less discussed is the lane for real-food plant proteins — almond, peanut, chickpea, hemp — that are already performing at a meaningful level, already have recognizable sourcing stories, and can command premium positioning with the right communication strategy.

The consumer tailwind is real. The question is whether the brands in this space will get out of their own way and tell that story clearly.

I’ll report back after I talk to Sean!

All my best,

Jennifer

Sources: Food Dive, “Protein powder shortage threatens America’s biggest food craze,” May 7, 2026 · The Atlantic, May 2026 · Express Checkout on EatScoops · House, J.D., Nosworthy, M.G., et al. “Determination of the protein quality of almonds as assessed by in vitro and in vivo methodologies.”

Hi 👋 a lot of you just joined. Welcome! I’m Jennifer Barney and I built the almond butter brand Barney Butter before founder-led brands were cool. Here’s where I share how to do it. I can speak to this after working with and talking to dozens of founders doing it today.

I also want to tell you —

💥 This isn’t another place for hot takes and vibes

I work with people that grow, process, and package food, and understand what’s going on upstream from the grocery shelf.

Let’s talk about a major vulnerability staring every food CPG founder in the face: your ingredient deck.

Your additive ingredient could be fully FDA approved. It can solve an absolute nightmare of a functional problem for your supply chain, your shelf life, or your margins. But if it gets crossways with the internet court of public opinion, none of those facts will save you. A perfectly legal, highly effective ingredient can be entirely misunderstood, falsely represented, and maligned by the public until it literally alters your business trajectory.

That’s what happened to Apeel Sciences.

The rumors around Apeel show how quickly internet narratives can outrun documented policy. RFK Jr. has publicly criticized the FDA’s GRAS loophole and ultra-processed foods, but there is no evidence he specifically called for a ban on Apeel. Online speculation largely merged those broader policy positions with existing anxiety around food technology and produce coatings.

If you’ve been following the ag-tech space, you know Apeel was the darling of venture capital. They scaled rapidly, hitting a $2 billion valuation with an incredibly smart, plant-based produce coating designed to fight global food waste.

Chemically, their primary conventional formulation (Edipeel) is made of mono- and diglycerides. If you know food science, you know these are just common lipids—the natural byproducts of fat digestion found in the pulp and skins of fruits. They function well as a breathable barrier to block oxygen and lock in moisture.

They are Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) by the FDA. In Europe, the European Food Safety Authority handles them under code E 471. But the EU applies a logical, strict boundary: they ban them on fruits with edible skins (like apples) to limit consumer ingestion, but fully approve them on fruits with inedible rinds (like avocados or citrus). It is a calculated, functional compromise to reduce food waste.

But in the US? The internet didn’t care about nuances or EFSA guidelines.

A massive wave of online misinformation conflated Apeel’s plant-derived glycerides with an industrial chemical sanitizer. Watchdog groups like the Cornucopia Institute dug into their organic formulation (Organipeel), exposing a regulatory loophole where Apeel registered the product with the EPA as a “fungicide” to get around USDA National List restrictions on post-harvest coatings.

The result? Absolute chaos for the brand.

Natural grocers like Whole Foods pulled back under heavy consumer pushback. The founder, James Rogers, had to step down as CEO, handing the reins to an ag-industry commercial veteran, while Rogers shifted his focus to fighting online disinformation campaigns. Apeel eventually had to discontinue its organic version entirely. An FDA-approved, food-waste-fighting miracle tech was fundamentally crippled in the US market because of consumer sentiment and a lack of transparency.

This brings back a lot of memories for me.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was developing Barney Butter, I faced my own version of this puzzle. My objective was clear: I wanted to make a natural, yet stable almond butter that would not get oily. Nobody likes opening a jar of nut butter and dealing with two inches of oil separation at the top.

My first major retailer was Whole Foods. Because their Quality Standards strictly banned trans fats, I needed to stay far away from partially hydrogenated oils—the conventional stabilizer everyone used at the time.

I opted for palm oil. It worked beautifully as a stabilizer once it was fractionated. But when you really get down into the science of fractionation, it’s a heavy chemical processing step that pushes the boundaries of what a consumer thinks of as “natural.”

Because there was—and still is—no official, rigid FDA standard for the word “natural,” palm oil became the darling additive of the natural and organic food industry. It solved a massive functional problem for brands like mine. But today? Palm oil carries a massive burden regarding environmental sentiment and sourcing ethics. If I were launching today, that ingredient choice would require a vastly different narrative and defense strategy.

Which brings us to the ultimate takeaway for founders.

When you look upstream at your sourcing and formulation, you cannot just look at safety data sheets and regulatory approvals. You have to look through the lens of reputation risk.

When the tide turns or a TikTok algorithm decides to weaponize a line item on your ingredient panel, it’s too late to start figuring out your communications plan. It isn’t just about food safety anymore; it’s about active reputation management.

You need a crisis PR playbook ready to deploy the second a narrative spins out of control. If you are using a functional additive that requires a scientific explanation, you need to own that narrative before an influencer with a smartphone reinterprets it for you.

Your ingredient deck isn’t just science—it’s brand equity. Treat it like it.

If you found this breakdown useful, let’s keep the conversation going:

• Are you currently evaluating an ingredient that feels like a regulatory win but a potential PR risk?

• Do you want to look at how other brands successfully navigated a clean-label transition without losing shelf life?

Let me know what challenges you are facing upstream, and we can tackle them in the next post!

All my best,

Jennifer

• What does this mean for brands?

• What if your products are coded as soda or candy?

• Early data shows there are behavioral shifts happening that may affect these categories in the long term.

  ---

Before we get into it — I’ve written about produce brands and produce retail marketing, which I still don’t totally get. But now Oishii is making $5 super premium strawberries and I like it—

I also got to sample their limited time preserves and they are out of this world. Great for Mother’s Day

🎯 Here’s an add-on to what I wrote about Target a few weeks ago. I am always learning something new from shopper marketer Veriti’s newsletter — and this one addresses retailer negotiations on slotting, with example: Target.

States are moving fast on SNAP restrictions

Twenty-two states have approved waivers. The largest soda-consuming states — Texas and Florida — are among them. And most operators are not paying attention at all. And I can understand why. The Coca-Cola Company just posted net revenue growth in Q1 2026.

Will growth in soda sustain if SNAP waivers continue across the U.S. unabated?

What even is ‘soda’?

Is POPWTR soda?

Here’s how to think about it.

First: Confirm whether you’re actually restricted

Before anything else — confirm your classification.

Many new beverages — functional sodas, healthy energy drinks, sparkling waters — may be categorized differently at the item-file level than you expect. What determines eligibility isn’t your marketing positioning. It’s UPC classification, retailer item setup, and how each state’s waiver defines the category.

A “healthy energy drink” might be classified as an energy drink (restricted), a carbonated beverage (also restricted), or a functional beverage (possibly not). Format often matters more than formulation.

Get confirmation from your retailer, distributor, or broker team.

The scale of what’s actually at stake

The U.S. soda category runs roughly $95–105 billion annually. Estimated SNAP-funded purchases represent $3–5 billion of that — about 3–5% of category sales. Soda appears in 20–25% of SNAP shopping trips.

That’s billions of dollars in habitual, repeat purchases.

But SNAP households in waiver states don’t stop buying soda. Many still buy it — with cash. And that changes behavior immediately.

When purchases shift to cash, shoppers optimize for cost per serving. That means fewer purchases, larger pack sizes, lower unit cost. So the category just restructures.

Ibotta tracked purchases across its full shopper base from late 2025 to early 2026 and compared data sets. Even though early data correlations are messy, what’s actually happening is something we’ve seen before, as shown in Ibotta’s State of Spend report.

What’s actually happening in the data

According to Ibotta, sugary beverage purchases fell roughly twice as fast in waiver states compared to non-waiver states. But total grocery spending stayed flat.

That’s because those dollars moved.

Early substitution patterns show growth specifically in powdered beverages. And increasingly, new powdered drinks solve the same problem soda solves: sweet flavor, hydration, low cost-per-serving, but with SNAP eligibility.

It’s a good time to be Fave right now, with the lower sugar profile and no-junk positioning —

And only about 40% of SNAP shoppers say they’d remain loyal to their preferred soda brand if it became ineligible. So, access beats loyalty when budgets are constrained.

Most brands don’t know their SNAP exposure — and that’s the first problem

This is common problem.

From ex-Ibotta insider Chloe Barney (yes, relation):

There's a lot of factors at play to really pinpoint why shopper trends might be changing. It seems better suited for a qualitative study, but to do that for only SNAP requires a lot of red tape and shoppers to self identify income which can get uncomfy.

The most direct path: ask your category manager or retail media team what percentage of category sales in your key regions are SNAP-funded. Most retailers can share directional data — not exact numbers, but enough to model risk.

If you have no data at all, use 3–5% as a placeholder for early scenario planning. But geography changes everything. Dollar channel-heavy markets, urban cores, and rural regions with high SNAP penetration can run 10–15% exposure in specific stores. Category averages could mislead you.

The policy rollout is messy

Advocacy groups have filed lawsuits challenging the waivers. Critics argue the program expanded too quickly without a controlled pilot, making it harder to isolate outcomes or measure unintended effects.

One real concern: restrictions may slow checkout lines, create confusion, and make benefit use more visible — changing how recipients feel about using SNAP at all.

Stigma changes behavior more than price, argues FoodFix writer and Forked podcaster Helena Bottemiller Evich.

When to act

If your SNAP exposure is small, your sales skew toward higher-income channels, and your core markets aren’t in waiver states you might want to hang back and monitor the situation.

But if your category is restricted, SNAP penetration is meaningful, and your core markets are waiver states — that could be a problem.

The signals worth tracking are operational and subtle. Slow rebalancing is harder to detect than a demand collapse, but dangerous to ignore.

• Velocity in waiver states vs. non-waiver states. This is your baseline signal. If velocity is diverging, that’s real. If it’s flat, hold.

• Pack size shifts. Larger packs gaining share is a cash-optimization signal, not a loyalty signal. It means shoppers are staying in the category but spending differently.

• Purchase frequency. Fewer trips with larger baskets tells a different story than fewer trips total. Know which one you’re seeing.

• Category substitution patterns. Are powdered beverages growing in your retail accounts? Are snack adjacents gaining? Follow the basket, not the SKU.

• Retailer feedback. Your category manager knows more than the data alone shows. Ask directly what they’re seeing in SNAP-heavy store clusters.

Don’t overreact

Reformulation is the instinct many brands reach for first. But eligibility is determined by category classification, not nutrition positioning. Reducing sugar doesn’t automatically change your item-file classification. Format often matters more than formulation.

Most brands don’t need to launch anything right now. But you do need visibility into whether demand is shifting in ways that will compound over time.

The question is…

What replaces soda — and should we sell that?

The winners in this shift won’t necessarily be health brands. They’ll be the brands already sitting inside the eligible space when the substitution window opens. Like Fave. The habits formed tend to stick and that’s the real strategic threat.

All my best,

Jennifer

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Onto alternative crops

The more I interview founders building regenerative brands, the more I come back to the same conclusion: farmers need a market giving them enough certainty to get into diversified crops at scale.

At Expo West, I interviewed Maddie Hamann, co-founder of PACHA, a buckwheat bread brand built around organic and regenerative sourcing. Later, I interviewed John Strohfus of Field Theory, the farmer and supply-chain builder helping PACHA access organic buckwheat and helping other brands source crops like sunflower, oats, hemp, and Kernza.

John has helped supply Simple Mills and Seven Sundays. In researching this piece what I kept coming back to is if Simple Mills can scale, get acquired by Flowers Foods for $795 million, and still not quickly transform what farmers grow at meaningful acreage, what does that tell us? (Flowers completed the acquisition in February 2025)

This is not a farming story. This is a market-design story.

So many of you can identify with starting a mission driven brand like PACHA. Maybe you’ve launched an alternative grain brand recently, or been scaling a single sourced regenerative brand for some years now.

PACHA is a frozen bread brand built around buckwheat—both as an ingredient and as an agricultural strategy. The company produces gluten-free sourdough-style breads, buns, and tortillas made primarily from sprouted buckwheat, and positions its growth as a way to expand demand for regenerative buckwheat production in the U.S. Unlike many brands that retrofit a sustainability story onto existing supply chains, PACHA built its product portfolio around a single crop it believes can support healthier soils and diversified rotations.

At Expo West this year, PACHA was showcasing an updated version of its sourdough buckwheat tortillas—

Field Theory Foods is a Midwest-based ingredient company founded by farmer John Strohfus to connect food brands with growers producing specialty and regenerative crops such as buckwheat, oats, sorghum, and sunflower. The company aggregates production across multiple farms, coordinates processing, and builds supply chains for crops that lack the infrastructure of major commodities. In practice, Field Theory operates in the space between farm and factory—the part of the food system where new crops either become viable at scale or fail to gain traction.

John is exactly the kind of person the regenerative movement needs more of. He speaks farmer. He understands processing. He knows that a brand story does not become a supply chain until someone contracts acres, cleans the crop, dehulls it, mills it, moves it, verifies it, and sells every fraction of the output.

And still, my conversation with John kept coming back to the same problem. The crops may be better for the rotation, easier to grow, may require fewer passes through the field and fit the regenerative story perfectly.

But if the market does not pay for them, farmers will not grow them at scale.

At Expo West, regenerative brands sell a beautiful story: better soil, better crops, better food, better farmer outcomes. But when you follow that story upstream, the farmer’s question is much less romantic: Who is buying this crop, at what price, for how many years?

John Strohfus has helped contracted farmers to grow 1,000 acres of organic buckwheat for Pacha, later doubling to 2,000 acres.

Alternative crops and end markets

Crops like corn, soy, wheat, and oats have infrastructure, buyers, pricing mechanisms, crop insurance familiarity, storage, processing, and end markets. Alternative crops like buckwheat may be cheaper to seed and require fewer passes, but every part of the crop has to have a market. If demand for finished products like flour is limited, the economics tighten quickly—and acreage stays small.

When I asked John who else is doing this work and what makes Field Theory different, he said they are the only supplier that does regenerative verification and identity preservation. When I asked what identity preservation means, he said—

From crop cultivation and aggregation to final ingredient processing, every step will be logged and linked to soil health metrics to support regenerative agriculture claims with verifiable data.

That kind of specificity is what consumers say they want. But specificity also creates exposure.

The more specific your sourcing story, the more exposed you become when the system behind it isn’t fully built. And regenerative brands are now stepping into that same accountability by promising better farming, not just better products.

As I wrote recently, the wellness movement changed consumer expectations. People want better food, better sourcing, better ingredients.

But expectations alone don’t scale crops. They scale because someone buys them—again, and again, and again.

All my best,

Jennifer

Hi 👋 a lot of you just joined. Welcome! I’m Jennifer Barney and I built the almond butter brand Barney Butter before founder-led brands were cool. Here’s where I share how to do it. I can speak to this after working with and talking to dozens of founders doing it today.

I also want to tell you —

💥 This isn’t another place for hot takes and vibes

I work with people that grow, process, and package food, and understand what’s going on upstream from the grocery shelf.

Commercialization costs money whether you budget for it or not

Protecting your gross margins keeps the investor convo from going south; but you run the risk of missing your gross margin numbers when you don’t properly budget for commercialization, as some folks recently learned.

A lot of you developed your products yourselves or hired a food scientist to create a formula, and that has kept R&D costs down.

DIY formula work is great, but almost never for commercialization. Because making a product commercially isn’t just about the recipe, it’s about developing a process that works at production scale.

These costs will hit your P&L, so start calling it process engineering.

Also, in a world where other things just happen that are not your fault and you can’t plan for, it’s nice to know that some things are pretty for sure —

[FYI, this post is not about Lottie’s meats. I’m just putting them here because they seem fun, are building something very cool, and I would love to meat meet them.]

What happens when you skip process development

Your coman may propose an upfront trial phase before running the first production, and there usually is a cost associated with that step. A lot of founders dismiss it, because they want all of it to be sellable product.

And that’s what happened to a brand I was helping get out of a mess. They believed paying for process testing was unnecessary overhead and chose a different co-man who was willing to move straight into production.

What happened was that first run had huge shrinkage and yielded little sellable product and they later discovered the reason — their product couldn’t be produced using a standard method and required an in-line piece of equipment the coman didn’t have.

That insight should have come from process trials instead of lost product.

The real cost

The failed production represented about 10% of their planned Year 1 volume.

So when those losses were spread across the remaining annual volume, it added $0.18 per unit to their cost of goods. That number gets baked into your margins.

Because they hadn’t planned for process development as a below-the-line expense, those costs showed up in the worst possible place—

COGS.

Which made their gross margins look worse than predicted.

When development costs show up in the wrong place on the P&L it creates real angst with investors.

Investors don’t give you much time to explain

You have to appreciate that when you don’t have a lot of time to explain why something happened, what investors will hear is that you didn’t meet your numbers.

Investors are generally tolerant of expenses that are clearly identified as one-time development costs, but when it comes to gross margin, the reaction is very different. Once confidence in your margins slips, it becomes harder to rebuild trust.

The alternative: budget for process development upfront

Instead of skipping process work, if the founders paid $10,000 upfront for trials, over the 100,000 units, that cost becomes:

$0.10 per unit.

But the more important difference is that the cost would hit expenses, not COGS.

Gross margin is your credibility score

If I haven’t drilled this into you enough already, gross margin is shorthand for whether the business is viable.

So start thinking about commercialization, aka process engineering.

This is the work of translating your recipe into something that runs consistently on production equipment.

It includes:

• Running plant trials

• Documenting process parameters

• Developing SOPs

• Understanding how equipment changes product quality

This work happens whether you plan for it or not!

All my best,

Jennifer

Hi 👋 a lot of you just joined. Welcome! I’m Jennifer Barney and I built the almond butter brand Barney Butter before founder-led brands were cool. Here’s where I share how to do it. I can speak to this after working with and talking to dozens of founders doing it today.

I also want to tell you —

💥 This isn’t another place for hot takes and vibes

I work with people that grow, process, and package food, and understand what’s going on upstream from the grocery shelf.

Transparency didn’t disappear, it became risky to promise

I say this because I sit at the intersection of agriculture, ingredient sourcing, commercialization, and investor diligence.

I don’t think consumers stopped caring about sourcing, but because of volatile markets, operations broke — and with that the pressure to message about sourcing has lifted.

What got me thinking about this is what Elly Truesdell wrote on New Fare :

“There’s less emphasis on tracing ingredients back to their source, and more on how the food fits into a day, a routine, or a set of personal goals.”

I don’t think it’s an accident that this consumer shift has coincided with what is being discussed in boardrooms and investor meetings.

What was a trust builder is now seen as exposure

Consumers have wanted to know where their food comes from and brands have answered them with great stories. Many pains have gone into packaging and QR links to farm names, regions, partnerships and tons of photos of fields and families. And that’s gone a long way to build trust.

I’ve written before that when you let consumers into your sourcing — when you name names — it builds credibility. But it also creates exposure. Because once you tell people how something works, you’re accountable for what happens inside that system.

That accountability is manageable when systems are stable, but when they aren’t …

When supply chains broke, so did origin promises

It first started in post-Covid when ports shut down, available labor was scarce, and freight timelines extended to infinity.

Then everything leading to Liberation Day and its aftermath exposed a hard truth:

The more specific your sourcing story, the fewer degrees of freedom you have when things go wrong.

Brands that built their identity around narrow sourcing found themselves unable to produce, and some never recovered.

Investors noticed.

The investor lens is: Optionality wins

I’ve sat in investor conversations where founders were told something that would have sounded strange five years ago:

“Source wherever you want. Just don’t promise where.”

Not because origin doesn’t matter but because your brand identity to a specific supply narrative creates fragility.

Investors want supply security and cost flexibility so that you can scale quickly and recover margins.

Traceability vs Transparency = not the same thing

Here’s what I want you to know:

You can still have traceable supply chains.

You can have multiple suppliers with verified inputs and documented sourcing. That’s traceability. And it’s required under FSMA 204 for many ingredients.

But transparency — especially public-facing transparency — is different.

When you print origin details on packaging, build your brand around a single farm, or make sourcing the centerpiece of your identity, you’re doing more than telling a story; you’re narrowing your operating room.

What responsible transparency looks like

To do this you need infrastructure. A strong example comes from Serenity Kids.

When controversy surfaced around Alexandre Family Farm — one of their key suppliers — they didn’t flinch because they had the backup.

Their supplier qualification process included:

• on-site farm visits

• certification checks

• ingredient sampling and testing

• review of food safety records

• ongoing heavy metal testing

• formal quality agreements

This goes beyond paperwork.

If you are going to publicly spotlight suppliers, you need this kind of deep confidence.

Meanwhile, trust in certification started to fracture

At the same time supply chains were destabilizing, something else was happening upstream in agriculture in that certification alone started to feel insufficient. A lot of this started to surface within the ag industry where growers began to debate the meaning and definition of “Regenerative Agriculture”.

In my interview with Robby Sansom, CEO of Force of Nature, he talked about the structure he’s built where Force of Nature works with more than 700 farms and ranches and ~20 processing facilities. This is redundancy by design.

Robby has been open about skepticism toward relying purely on certifications. Many certification systems are based on documentation — affidavits, audits, paperwork. But meaningful verification often requires additional testing and ongoing oversight — multiple layers of validation.

The builders doing the hard work

I want to recognize many of you leaning into this reality instead of avoiding it. I think about Sarela, the founder of SIMPLi. I was able to take some time with her at Expo West, to discuss her business model and the ideology behind SIMPLi.

Her company is doing the heavy lifting that real transparency requires — building direct sourcing relationships, investing and working with those farmers, and locking in off-takes as a built in model.

All these logistics involve real expenses including travel, testing, education, and relationship management.

I have deep respect for what they’re building, and I’m especially excited to see the debut of their extra virgin avocado oil — a true cold pressed oil for culinary use.

But models like this require capital and discipline and time.

Which is why not every brand can — or should — build their identity around a single origin story.

What happened behind the scenes

Where transparency lived on packaging and in marketing materials, it’s now part of procurement workflows, supplier qualification, and contingency planning. The quickest scaling brands have multiple suppliers for everything.

And I’m gonna say the shift started as structural, and then became cultural.

It’s true that messaging has shifted toward routines, goals, and daily utility. And the cultural reasons behind that are all true: self care, food as medicine, personalization, etc. has all worked in favor of prioritizing food optionality.

The future is systems over stories

Given this new reality, brands that survive continued volatility will build redundancy and contingency plans.

How to get away from specific origin claims as identity would be to start talking about how suppliers are vetted, and how quality is verified — not just where something comes from.

All my best,

Jennifer

Spring is a good time to clean out your inbox. I’m not talking junk mail, I’m talking the noise.

Most of you are drowning in newsletters and still missing the few that actually help your operations.

In addition to this newsletter, here’s the list I’d keep if I had to unsubscribe from everything and start again.

• First, a list for CPG founders

• Next a list for agriculture leaders

The Ones That Make You Smarter About the Business

The Checkout — by Errol Schweizer (Grocery Nerd)

Errol was my buyer when he was National VP of Grocery at Whole Foods — he understands the system from the inside.

Read for essential demystification of pricing, supply chains, and value creation in grocery. Errol also unpacks:

• why margins look the way they do

• how retailers actually think about pricing

• where value gets captured (and lost) across the supply chain

Pricing Power — by Manoli Kulutbanis

Manoli is a CPG veteran and one of the few people writing specifically about price architecture, like a recent post on how price structures, value systems, and consumer behavior converge to define pricing power.

Especially valuable if you’re trying to understand:

• how pricing drives brand growth

• why structure matters more than discounting

• how value perception creates margin durability

Too many founders obsess over revenue growth and ignore price discipline — until margins collapse.

Term Sheet Pitfalls — by Daniel Faireman & Chuck Cotter

If you’re raising money, this is required reading.

Daniel and Chuck do what most founders desperately need: translate investor language into operator reality.

They break down:

• how deals are structured

• what clauses actually mean

• where founders get hurt (often unintentionally)

Most founders don’t lose companies because of bad products.
They lose them because of bad terms.

Making Cents - Drew Fallon

This is institutional-grade deal analysis on how serious capital evaluates businesses.

Especially for:

• finance leaders

• operators preparing for exits

• founders trying to understand valuation mechanics

The Brand Lab

Not everything here is CPG. The Brand Lab focuses on something many founders misunderstand:

The offer matters more than the product. They consistently highlight:

• how brands position themselves

• how messaging actually converts

• where brand clarity creates unfair advantage

For if you’re building a brand, not just a product.

The Food Stack — by Vincent Kuiper. A European POV on Food Innovation & Investing

Most U.S.-based founders read almost entirely U.S.-centric content but some of the most interesting work in food innovation, infrastructure, and early-stage investing is happening in Europe — often ahead of U.S. adoption cycles.

The Food Stack offers:

• a European investor’s view on food tech and ingredient innovation

• grounded thinking about early-stage food ventures

• perspective on how regulation, sustainability, and infrastructure shape innovation

The Ones That Help You Build Revenue

BYLDERS — Digital & Ecommerce Intelligence

Early-stage CPG founders obsess over two things:

• fundraising

• revenue curves that go up and to the right

If you sell online, this is worth reading. Can it can feel clickbait-y and a bit AI-assisted? You won’t mind because the info is so useful.

Digital marketing economics change fast, and staying current matters.

Especially helpful for:

• CAC trends

• ecommerce funnel benchmarks

• paid media

The New Consumer - by Dan Frommer

If you’re in BigFood and tired of Mintel et al, this will be refreshing.

They publish real data on consumer behavior, category growth, and emerging trends — the kind that strengthens your narrative when you’re doing internal selling.

The One That Helps You Build Teams (and Avoid Expensive Hiring Mistakes)

Leadership in CPG is one of the hardest roles to hire well, and one of the most expensive to get wrong.

CPG Talent Exchange — by Michael McGowan. Real Hiring Intelligence for CPG Sales Teams

Run by a recruiter with 25+ years placing sales and marketing leaders across consumer brands, this newsletter shares something most founders never get visibility into: What actually happens inside hiring markets.

Useful for:

• understanding what strong sales leaders really cost

• knowing when to hire brokers vs. direct sales

• identifying the profiles that succeed (and fail) in CPG growth roles

• avoiding common hiring mistakes that burn cash and momentum

The One That Keeps You Honest

Food Stuff — by Kevin Ryan (Malachite Strategy)

Kevin writes twice monthly and brings the rarest perspective from someone who has actually built inside Big Food and isn’t afraid to call BS.

He’s good at:

• separating signal from trend noise

• identifying where value is actually moving

• predicting what will scale versus what just photographs well

If you’re trying to understand which trends are durable, this is a strong voice to follow.

The Industry Must-Haves

BevNet/NOSH & New Hope Media

These are industry staples. But you don’t have time to read everything, so pick your topics and frequency selectively.

The News Roundups

Awareness tools for staying current on what’s released. Some founder interviews —

• Snaxshot — fast-moving snack industry intelligence

• Wholesome Goods — emerging brand visibility

• Express Checkout — launch news and brand highlights

For Ag Leaders and Ingredient Builders

The next wave of value creation in food isn’t just brands — it’s ingredients, infrastructure, and agriculture.

If you’re working anywhere upstream — ingredients, ag, supply chain, food tech — these are worth your time.

Deploy95 — by Trista Li. Selling Technology Into Legacy Industries

If you’re building ag tech, food tech, or anything with a physical footprint inside legacy industries, read this.

Deploy95 breaks down the real-world complexity of selling into:

• manufacturing

• agriculture

• industrial systems

• operationally complex enterprises

Their series progression is particularly useful:

• Part 1: The organizational gaps that kill deals before they close

• Part 2: How to qualify deals before wasting resources

• Part 3 (current): Navigating deals already in motion — deciding which ones deserve your next month of effort

If you’ve ever watched a promising deal die in procurement purgatory, this will feel painfully accurate.

TopSoil — by Ariel Patton

TopSoil is one of the best explainers for people who are ag-adjacent but not deeply embedded.

It helps you step back and see the system — not just the inputs.

Especially useful for:

• understanding structural forces in agriculture

• connecting technology shifts to real-world adoption

• getting out of the weeds and seeing the bigger picture

Think of it as forest-level thinking for an industry full of tree-level decisions.

Upstream Ag — Essential Reading for Agribusiness Leaders

If you’re anywhere near agriculture, ingredients, or supply chains, this is essential.

Upstream Ag consistently delivers:

• thoughtful analysis

• industry context

• forward-looking strategy

There you have it folks! Industry reading should do one of two things:

1. Challenge or support your point of view
2. Give you operational know-how

Everything else is entertainment, and entertainment doesn’t build businesses.

Happy Spring Cleaning 🌷

All my best,

Jennifer