For years, I never really understood the hype behind Uncrustables. If you hate crust that much, just eat around it. Making a PB&J is arguably one of the easiest foods to make. Are we really so crunched for time that we need it frozen and packaged up?

And yet, every year Uncrustables grew and grew and grew. How has such a simple concept become such a stronghold in lunchboxes (and locker rooms) across America?

The Sealed Crustless Sandwich

Uncrustables was the brainchild of two dads, David Geske and Len Kretchman, who in 1995 began producing and selling their creation to local Midwest schools.

Before long, they caught the attention of Smucker’s, which bought the brand in 1998 for $1 million and patented the sealed crustless sandwich, a patent and brand identity they would go on to defend tirelessly.

Smucker’s first grew the brand through school lunch programs, expanding 25 to 30% annually despite supply challenges. By 2017, the brand had surpassed $200 million in sales and posted a 17% five-year CAGR, fueled by a strategic reformulation that removed high fructose corn syrup, transitioned to non-GMO ingredients, and, most importantly, opened a production facility capable of producing 2 million sandwiches a day.

The COVID era poured gasoline on an already extraordinary growth rate. Lunch was being served at home, and Uncrustables were on the menu. But the brand also expanded well beyond kids, attracting athletes (see NFL consumption below), adult snackers, and TikTok trend followers. Sales reached $650 million in 2023 and $800 million in 2024.

A Game of Supply & Demand

Despite being around for more than 25 years, the brand has spent much of its existence capacity constrained. It seems they simply can’t make enough.

It’s easy to think of Uncrustables as a simple product. From a manufacturing standpoint, it’s anything but. Bread is baked onsite daily. Filling and crimping require specialized equipment. Then there’s freezing, which adds another layer of complexity.

It took Smucker’s three custom-built facilities and more than $1 billion in CAPEX to build the capacity they needed. At their rate of growth, they simply couldn’t build fast enough.

For years, because supply was so tight, Smucker’s barely advertised or meaningfully promoted the brand. They were constantly at risk of selling out.

How do you grow a brand and keep competition out when your shelves keep running empty?

The Best Offense Is a Good Defense

While I can only speculate, I imagine the sentiment inside Smucker’s during this era was something along the lines of: “If you can’t score, you’d better make sure your competition can’t reach the goal either.”

The first defensive play was protecting their patent and becoming champions of the good old-fashioned cease and desist letter.

Interestingly enough, Uncrustables hasn’t actually spent much time in court. And when Smucker’s did challenge patent infringement, they lost. It turns out crimped sandwiches were considered similar enough to ravioli that the patent wasn’t particularly defensible. Functionally, it lost much of its strength in the mid-2000s despite not formally expiring until 2017.

Instead, Smucker’s relied on a quieter but highly effective tool: cease and desist letters. Since most never become public, it’s impossible to know how many were sent. But any good lawyer will tell you your intellectual property is only as strong as your willingness to defend, or threaten to defend, it.

The most public example came when Smucker’s took legal action against up-and-comer Chubby Snacks.

Chubby launched in 2020 as a better-for-you crustless PB&J. It was round. Smucker’s sent a cease and desist over the shape, and Chubby did the reasonable thing. They pivoted, relaunched with a cloud shape, and moved on. That should have been the end of it.

But in 2024, Smucker’s sued them anyway. This time, the complaint had nothing to do with shape. It centered on what Chubby had been saying. Years of Instagram and TikTok posts positioning itself as the healthier alternative. Smucker’s argued Chubby had “waged a relentless assault on the fame and goodwill” of its brand. The case settled in July 2025. Chubby was already out of business by then.

Whether the lawsuit was the nail in the coffin is hard to say. But the exchange proved there was something worth fighting for in frozen PB&J, and Uncrustables wasn’t going down without a fight.

The New Battleground

Perhaps competitors became savvier. Or perhaps they simply weren’t deterred by the limited success of Uncrustables’ legal battles and the rapidly expanding market. Either way, the category has since flooded with alternatives from startups and legacy players alike.

JAMS is perhaps the most notable. Rectangle instead of round. Higher protein. Clean label positioning. Backing from NFL athletes and Olympians. Food they’d eat at halftime themselves and serve to their kids. National distribution at Walmart and Target. And under the leadership of the former CFO, COO, and co-founder of LesserEvil, now CEO of parent company Dropout, they’re a force to be reckoned with.

But JAMS isn’t alone. Rudi’s makes a clean-label PB&J featuring Justin’s, available in both traditional and gluten-free bread. SunButter is targeting the school-friendly, allergen-safe market. And Mid-Day Squares brought its Breadless PB&J to the refrigerated aisle, quickly selling out across Target stores.

On the other side, the big players are showing up too. Lunchables launched a thawed, ready-to-eat PB&J in 2024, and Welch’s has announced its own entry with a larger, higher-protein option. Trader Joe’s took a swing so close to Smucker’s that the two ended up in court. That outcome is still pending.

The moat around manufacturing capabilities and protectable assets has seemingly broken. Will rising tides lift all PB&J boats?

When They Zig, You Zag

What fascinates me about this category is how much upside still appears to exist.

In 2023, Uncrustables household penetration was just 7%. Three years later, in Smucker’s latest financial results, the brand reported household penetration had reached 27%. It’s hard to contextualize how impressive that jump is. While published HHP data is hard to come by, by way of comparison, Oreos is a reported 42% share after 114 years on the market. 

Even with Uncrustables surpassing $1 billion in sales and competition pouring into the category, it still feels like we haven’t found the ceiling.

For a frozen brand, it’s notable that my own first trial came from a refrigerated case. No thawing required. It was ready to eat. Then I started seeing it in bodega refrigerators. At convenience stores in small towns. Ready to grab and go. I wondered whether Smucker’s had quietly reformulated the product or introduced a refrigerated version.

Then, buried in a CAGNY presentation, I found the answer. Smucker’s had solved the category’s biggest barrier to trial: thaw time. Beginning this July, the entire product line transitions to a new formulation that stays “fridge fresh” for up to five days.

Now the product shifts from planned to impulse. From at-home consumption to on-the-go occasions. Convenience store sales tripled last year, making Uncrustables one of the fastest-growing brands in the channel.

While competitors have been focused on taking a bite out of Smucker’s current pie, they may have missed where the company was headed next.

The defensive era is over, and honestly, it should be. Twenty-five years of trademark threats bought Smucker’s time. Now the gloves are off. It’s time to see who wins the next era of the PB&J games.

Edit: For all my in-app readers, less than an hour after publishing this piece it was announced that Lunchly (of influencers-take-on-Lunchables fame) also launched a PB&J. To make things spicier, founder of JAMS, Connor Blakely, commented “I was hoping they were going to try.” — looks like the gloves are in fact off!

Back in 2016, a craze swept freezers across America. The idea that you could have your cake and eat it too, in the form of 240 to 360 calories per pint. People lost their minds. Truly.

Halo Top went from about $66 million in sales in 2016 to roughly $373 million in 2017, turning from a niche better-for-you brand into the hottest pint in the store in about a year. They opened new facilities to keep up with demand. It became the top-selling pint in grocery by 2017. Rumors swirled that they were up for a $2B sale. And then, just as quickly, the shine wore off. By 2021, sales had fallen to about $211 million, down 43% from the peak. Quietly acquired for an undisclosed amount. Then, slowly, it became a memory.

Permissible Indulgence

Halo Top was founded by Justin Woolverton in 2012 after tinkering with recipes in his kitchen for a lower-sugar, higher-protein ice cream. Breaking into the $8B+ ice cream market is no small feat. Woolverton dropped his law gig to go all in on ice cream.

He believed in the vision before the first pint. He sold the initial product at almost cost and drove himself into debt doing so. Eventually he took on funding from friends and family, then sold equity on the CircleUp platform in 2013 and again in 2015 to unlock growth.

Let me set the scene in 2015 that primed Halo Top for growth:

The froyo era of 2012 had mostly faded, leaving behind a market that still wanted a lighter version of ice cream but was no longer satisfied with frozen yogurt as the answer.

Fitspo had found its pocket on Instagram, pushing the idea that health was not just something you did, it was something you performed. Meals, workouts, macros, hacks, all of it became content.

Permissible indulgence was finding its home across the grocery store. Quest took the cake here, proving that consumers would happily accept protein + low sugar + indulgent flavor without asking too many questions about the “how.”

Restate the Solution

Halo Top was not the only brand to sense the tides turning. Arctic Zero launched in 2010. Enlightened in 2013. Halo Top had loyal fans and some core retailers like Whole Foods, but it was not clearly telling the story of what made it different. In fact, it looked so similar to the rest of the set that the brand received a cease-and-desist, which pushed the team to rethink the packaging and sharpen the proposition.

And it needed to.

Halo Top was communicating a lot. Protein, calories, net carbs, all natural, light, good source of protein, and eventually, somewhere in there, flavor. It was trying to say everything and, in the process, taking the fun out of ice cream.

Halo Top was light enough that you could eat the whole pint. So why not just say that?

That is where the rebrand clicked. Calories per pint, right up front and center. The pack stopped overexplaining and started selling the dream. Ice cream had been solved and now came in a pint cute enough for Instagram.

LinkedIn loves to reduce brand strategy and execution to packaging in posts like these, as if one cleaner label suddenly created a rocket ship. But there is always more to be learned when you double click.

In this case, the pack mattered because it crystallized an idea consumers were already primed to want.

If I were going to boil the whole thing down to a single image, though, I might pick a different one.

A 2016 GQ article, “What It’s Like To Eat Nothing but This Magical, Healthy Ice Cream for 10 Days,” put Halo Top on the map. And yes, 2016 was a very different media landscape than today, but a single GQ story still does not make or break a business. What it did do was amplify exactly what Woolverton had been preaching, and what the new packaging shouted, ditch the bowl, dig right in.

The author ended up semi-averse to ice cream by day 10, but he also wrote about how good it tasted, how he lost weight, and how he went back and ordered more Halo Top anyway as his ongoing dessert.

It was the perfect ad for permissible indulgence.

CircleUp later called out the GQ piece as a key spark in kickstarting the Halo Top mania in the Consumer Reach Index below:

The Higher You Go, the Further You Fall

As fast as Halo Top rose, it also fell.

Halo Top left open two major holes that competitors were more than happy to fill, especially once shelves were getting wiped and the category looked like free money.

First, product quality. The product was meaningfully better than earlier light players like Arctic Zero, but it still left something to be desired on taste and texture. Trial was driven by the proposition yet many first triers never returned. Sold a dream that didn’t deliver. At the same time, the big guys had decades of ice cream experience and Halo Top’s formula to work off. It did not take long for them to catch up and then surpass Halo Top on quality.

Second, the proposition was limiting. Calories were a brilliant hook, but they also boxed the brand in. Halo Top became tightly coded as a calorie-conscious food. When a product is bought primarily for permission rather than craveability, the whole trial and repeat structure gets fragile fast.

The brand did not just plateau. It plummeted. Sales dropped to about $211 million by 2021, down 43% from the 2017 peak. The story continues under Wells (the owner of Blue Bunny) ownership, but it is pretty clear the original consumer promise could not hold up against the hype forever.

Dessert as the Testing Ground

Someone asked me recently what I thought about protein ice cream and I replied, “Meh, not sold. It’s giving Halo Top 2.0,” which, in hindsight, was an unbaked take.

Dessert has always been an interesting occasion to watch as trends shift. It is the perfect place to test a new food belief system.

Why? Because dessert is where consumers feel the most guilt, the most permission-seeking, and the least tolerance for disappointment. If a trend can survive in dessert, it usually means the trend has real cultural force. If it is in and out in a reset cycle, it might have just been the packaging.

Halo Top was interesting because it made dessert feel less sinful, pun intended. But that was still a very specific kind of sell. It was dessert with fewer consequences.

Today, the category is splitting in a few different directions.

Some brands are leaning harder into indulgence and flavor, the classic Ben & Jerry’s and Salt & Straw end of the spectrum. Some are minimizing guilt with better ingredients, but not trying to erase it altogether, think Alec’s or Ice Cream for Bears. And some are doing something different entirely, making dessert feel productive, where the point is not just indulgence with less downside, but indulgence that seems to do something for you. Think Protein Pints.

That last group is where things start to change.

This Time Around, the Landscape Is Structurally Different

Halo Top was built for the calorie-counting era. It won by turning dessert into a single numerical choice.

Today’s protein dessert set is doing something different. It is not asking consumers to feel less bad about dessert. It is asking them to feel like dessert is adding to their goals, not subtracting from it.

Low-calorie indulgence always had a slightly apologetic feel to it. It lived in the language of cutting back, getting away with something, making the “better” bad choice. Protein lives somewhere else. It signals building, fueling, optimizing. It can make the most indulgent of categories feel like a health choice.

That is why protein ice cream is not just Halo Top 2.0.

The consumer and occasion are broader now. The signal is stronger now. Protein is not a niche diet culture, it’s everywhere.

You can see it in the freezer set. Yasso has moved from bars into pints, promising protein without the chalky texture or artificial sweetener baggage that dragged the first wave down. David is extending from bars into the freezer aisle with their own protein ice cream. Protein Pints has been rumored to have hit over $20m in sales in 2025 in about a year’s time on shelf. Even Blue Bell, an OG, has a protein ice cream.

That is what makes dessert worth watching.

It is easy to slap function onto a bar. Easy to sell a better version of you in a shake. The compromise is often accepted, if not expected.

Dessert is different. Dessert is where the whole thing gets stress-tested. If the product tastes like compromise, consumers never think about it again. If the proposition is too narrow, consumers opt out. If the trend is mostly marketing with decent timing, it’s just simply not going to sustain in dessert.

The question isn’t if consumers want a protein ice cream that does all the things – they objectively do – it’s if any of the brands have finally nailed the taste, texture and proposition trifecta.

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Author’s Note: For someone who just wrote a lot of words about ice cream, you may be shocked to learn I’m not a consumer of the category and have never had Halo Top or a protein ice cream so please let me know if there’s a lead horse in the protein ice cream wars out there!

It’s hard to believe there was a time that caffeine and stimulants slowed us down, instead of speeding us up. And yet, a quick hop across the pond, you’ll find that the culture of slowing down to enjoy the ritual of coffee, tea or even a smoke break is very much alive and well.

We no longer consume stimulants for the pleasure of the experience. They are tools to maintain output and maximize our productivity. After all, they do say America Runs On Dunkin.

Normalizing Being Wired

Roughly 85–90% of Americans consume caffeine daily. While caffeine has been a ritual and routine of humans across the world for millennia, consumption has climbed steadily over the past decade.

What changed?

A third of adults are chronically short on sleep. Work has spilled out of the office and onto our smartphones, requiring many to be “always on.” Parents are spending significantly more time with their children. The density of output per hour has increased.

Stimulants are, in many ways, a survival tool. The necessary sidekick to anyone who replies “busy” when asked how things have been.

Those who abstain are considered outliers and gawked at.

Answering the Call

At the same time, brands have responded to the call. The caffeine set has exploded with new formats, ingredients, and delivery mechanisms.

Walking the halls of Expo West, the largest natural food convention in the country, in search of an afternoon jolt proved to be an overwhelming endeavor.

Did I want a probiotic soda as my caffeine source (~35 mg)? Perhaps Liquid I.V.’s energy powder sticks (~100 mg)? Yerba mate for a more “natural” buzz (~150 mg)? A trendy matcha drink (~70 mg)? A tried and true La Colombe Cold Brew (~200 mg)?

Or maybe the moment called for something positioned as a caffeine alternative altogether. Ryze Mushroom “Coffee” (~48 mg) has crossed $300M+ in sales as a gentler substitute. Kim Kardashian recently backed UPDATE, a caffeine-free energy drink promising alertness without the stimulant.

While the how is wildly variable, the what is exactly the same: More energy.

The Rise of Caffeine Density

Serving sizes have long been a messy proxy for how people actually eat and drink. The gap got so obvious that products like pints of ice cream and large bottled beverages were eventually required to show both per serving and per container nutrition, a more honest reflection of what people were actually consuming in one sitting.

Caffeine has moved in the opposite direction.

There are rules about soda. The FDA caps caffeine in cola beverages at 0.02%, roughly 70 mg in a 12 oz can. But beyond that narrow category, there is effectively no federal limit on how much caffeine can be added to most beverages.

You legally do not even have to disclose how much caffeine is in a drink.

The package size may look familiar, but the stimulant amount inside it has changed dramatically. In many cases, brands are now squeezing the caffeine equivalent of multiple traditional servings into the same can or cup. A Celsius delivers 200 mg, roughly six Cokes. Bang pushes closer to 300 mg. A large Panera Charged Lemonade could get you near 400 mg in one go.

The can or cup may look standard but the energy per ounce is wildly different.

When The Risk Catches Up

Energy drinks went from a negligible slice of the beverage landscape to a meaningful share of the pie over the past decade, becoming the stimulant of choice for younger consumers. Numerator recently reported that QSR coffee is now under pressure as buyers shift spend toward energy drinks.

Of course they are.

An average cup of coffee contains roughly 120 mg of caffeine. The modern energy drink often delivers 180–200 mg, sometimes 300 mg.

Same goal. Less friction.

But efficiency cuts both ways.

The FDA considers 400 mg per day a generally safe intake level for healthy adults, yet many products now put consumers within striking distance of that threshold in a single serving. Panera’s Charged Lemonade was linked to multiple lawsuits after deaths and cardiac events. Consumers have reported hospitalizations after drinking several high-caffeine beverages in a short period of time.

The regulatory framework around caffeine was built for a different era.

Back when soda had 35 mg of caffeine, coffee was consumed slowly, and the natural stopping point was when the cup was empty.

Today’s stimulants are engineered differently. Portable. Iced. Designed to remove friction from the equation.

The ritual is gone. The utility remains. We didn’t just normalize caffeine. We built an entire culture that depends on it.

Lawmakers are trying to play catch up. To limit consumption or sale of energy drinks to anyone under 18, to require ID to purchase, to post warnings about the risks.

Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive drug but we certainly don’t treat it that way. When does the responsibility shift from consumer to manufacturer to regulator?

A Useful Signal

For founders, operators and conscious consumers, caffeine is a useful category to watch.

It shows how quickly a need can intensify once the market finds a more efficient way to serve it.

Coffee was once a cup. Then it became a thermos. Then a drive-thru. Then a cold brew can with two cups worth of caffeine inside. Then a powder stick. Then a shot.

Same need. Increasing density.

That pattern shows up everywhere in consumer products. A behavior starts as a ritual. The market removes friction. The dose increases. The format gets faster. The market responds.

And eventually the category stops being about enjoyment and starts being a means to an end.

Caffeine just got there first. Is protein next?

I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, and so most of the category, as it existed in that era, was just too saccharin for me. If you did happen to catch me eating cereal, it was the more “puritanical” approach — Frosted Flakes or Honey Nut Cheerios, dry. Hold the milk.

Funny enough, while my approach was seen then and now as quite odd, it’s actually how the inventor of cereal had hoped his product would be enjoyed — devoid of any joy.

Before there were colorful boxes and animated characters, the cereal segment was run by a sect of religious outsiders and former sanitarium visitors. Yes, you read that right.

Setting the Scene

Let’s go back to 1863. America is in a civil war. The Gettysburg Address is read. And in upstate New York, at a sanitarium, cereal is being invented by Caleb James Jackson.

A few years later, John Kellogg, a student of Jackson, borrowed the concept of cereal as a tool in his own sanitarium. He believed that bland food, eaten slowly, preferably cold, could control lust and encourage purity.

He popularized this concept in Battle Creek, Michigan, which would later become the cereal capital of the world. It’s also home to the Seventh-day Adventists, a religious sect with the explicit goal of suppressing sexual desire.

What better way to suppress pleasure than some dry, tasteless corn flakes.

Family Drama

Some of our great businesses are the result of family drama. Aldi Nord vs Aldi Süd. Adidas vs Puma. Kellogg vs Kellogg.

After accidentally discovering that overcooked wheat and corn could produce a flaked, scalable breakfast solution, the Kellogg brothers were not on the same page about what to do next. One brother, John, wanted to keep it dry and tasteless for the health marketplace. The other, Will, wanted to add sugar and package it up for America.

Will added sugar. John lost his mind. John sued. Will won.

And in that moment, cereal stopped being medicine and became a business.

Friendly, Neighborly Competition

It seems like in this era, everyone went into a sanitarium and came out a cereal entrepreneur. Add C.W. Post to the list.

A former Kellogg patient and businessman, Post suffered several mental breakdowns and found himself under John’s care. He couldn’t afford the room and board at the sanitarium, so he worked in the kitchen. Turns out he walked away with more than just free accommodations. He allegedly took several processes and recipes with him on his way to starting the Post Company.

In the words of historian Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Post’s visit to the sanitarium “did wonders for his health and his wealth.”

Competition was no longer about purity. It was about preference.

Beyond Michigan

With cereal companies popping up left and right, they now needed to turn their easy-to-digest, shelf-stable product into something consumers across the United States actually wanted to eat every morning.

Step one. Add a touch of sugar.

The cereals of this era already looked different from the original flakes meant as medicine. Sugar made them more pleasant. More repeatable. Something you reached for instead of endured.

Step two. Distribute widely.

As rail expanded and packaged goods began moving across the country, cereal benefited from perfect timing. It was light. It traveled well. It didn’t spoil. Breakfast could now come in a box.

Step three. Promise everything.

Cereal could cure indigestion. Improve vitality. Make a better wife. Be the easiest breakfast a gal could ask for. Claims were loose. Regulation was light. Optimism was high.

When Sugar, and Competition, Changed the Game

It wasn’t until 1949 that the category fully crossed the line.

Post launched Sugar Crisp. Kellogg’s followed with Sugar Corn Pops. Then came Sugar Frosted Flakes. Sugar Smacks. Sugar Jets. Trix.

They weren’t hiding it. They were advertising it.

Sugar wasn’t just an ingredient. It was the headline.

The cereal wars had begun, and children were the prize.

Children are biologically wired to prefer sweet flavors. It’s not a parenting failure. It’s physiology. Sweetness signals calories. Calories signal energy. Energy signals safety.

Cereal companies figured out something important. While moms were the shoppers, kids were the consumers and, increasingly, the decision makers. A six-year-old might not have a wallet, but they had veto power.

Once you see that, the rest of the category’s behavior makes sense.

“They’re GR-R-REAT!”

Tony the Tiger was not an accident.

Created in the early 1950s, Tony reframed sugar as strength. Frosted Flakes weren’t sweet, they were energizing. They didn’t rot teeth, they made you great.

He opened the door for an entire cast of characters designed to make breakfast feel like play. Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Lucky. Toucan Sam. The cereal aisle became a cartoon lineup.

Saturday morning television and cereal advertising formed a tight loop. Cereal funded the shows. The shows trained the audience. The audience demanded the cereal.

By the time adults began asking questions, the behavior was already baked in.

Pushback, Then Pause

In the late 1970s, the FTC attempted to regulate advertising to children. Not because cereal was sugary, but because kids were being marketed to in ways regulators felt they couldn’t reasonably defend against.

The industry pushed back hard. Political support collapsed. The effort died quietly.

Cereal didn’t change. It reframed.

Sugar stayed. Characters stayed. The language shifted. Fortification. Whole grain. “Part of a complete breakfast.”

The Category Today

The modern cereal aisle feels conflicted.

Consumption is flat or declining. Younger consumers skip breakfast or replace it with bars, shakes, eggs, yogurt. Legacy brands lean on nostalgia and price. They’ve come under fire for artificial colors and sweeteners. Reformulation happens slowly, usually only when it has to. There was an era of recreation of the colors and flavors but with cleaner ingredients with cultural shakers like Magic Spoon.

And now, a different kind of cereal brand has carved out space.

Brands like Seven Sundays aren’t trying to out-cartoon the aisle or shock it into health. They’re also not trying to recreate the joyless version that started this whole thing.

They take a quieter approach.

Seven Sundays sells cereal as food. Recognizable ingredients. Familiar flavors. A breakfast that fits into your morning instead of demanding to be the main character. Kids can eat it. Adults don’t feel strange buying it. No mascots yelling at you from the shelf. No promises that breakfast will change your life.

It’s counter to almost everything that created the category we know today but its rise in baskets is reflective of an evolving landscape across grocery.

A Final Thought

The rise of cereal is uncomfortable because it worked.

Sugar worked. Characters worked. Convenience worked. The category grew by pulling levers that made sense at the time and paid off quickly.

But cereal is also a reminder that we don’t sell widgets. We sell food.

Food behaves differently. Its effects compound quietly. A tactic that improves the business today can show up years later in ways no P&L captures. Blood sugar spikes. Poor sources of energy. Habits learned young and carried forward without much questioning.

For founders and operators, that’s the takeaway worth holding onto. Just because something grows the business today doesn’t mean it’s the right decision for consumers or the business in the long run. In food, the consequences tend to show up later, often in the next generation.

The opportunity now isn’t to rewrite cereal’s past. It’s to build with a little more awareness of what food does once it leaves the shelf.

Because growth is easy to track. Impact takes longer. And food has a longer memory than most are willing to admit.

Not values. Not positioning. Personality.

Is this brand more Kristen Stewart or Will Arnett? If it were a person, what would their apartment look like? What kind of shoes would they wear? What would they be doing at 3pm on a Thursday?

When there is no modern founder face to borrow from, brand managers are left constructing answers to those questions from scratch. They define what the brand believes, how it behaves, and how every activation reinforces that personality. It is slow, expensive, and rarely clean.

Which raises the obvious question — what if you didn’t have to invent it?

If you have looked online lately, it is impossible to miss the wave of celebrities and internet celebrities licensing their personal brands into packaged goods. The appeal is obvious. A fully formed personality, already understood by millions, dropped directly onto a shelf.

Creators tend to do this best. They post constantly and consistently. Their routines are predictable. There is no meeting to debate what they do at 3pm on a Thursday. We already know. Their audience knows where they shop, how they eat, what their apartment looks like, what they drink after a workout. Because of that, it is not hard to imagine what kind of product would make sense coming from them.

Traditional celebrities bring a different asset. Reach. Their fame gives an enormous day-one kick to whatever they attach themselves to. The tradeoff is distance. Protecting privacy beyond press tours often makes it hard to connect the dots between the face on screen and the habits that would naturally translate into a product.

Then there is the very powerful hybrid. A celebrity who has given the public more access through podcasts, documentaries, reality TV, or their own media platforms. We may not know everything, but we have a working model of who they are. We could probably guess what kind of milk they take in their coffee. Somewhere between Meghan Markle and the Kardashians.

This is where the difference starts to matter.

When licensing a personal brand into packaged goods, I would weight clarity of personality more heavily than follower count or pure fame. The question is not who is most famous. It is who is most clear to their audience.

To make things easy, I broke this idea down into a *very* scientific formula:

CPG Readiness = Personality Clarity × Behavioral Visibility × Trust Continuity

Personality clarity is how easily the audience can describe the person without thinking. If you asked fifty followers what kind of person this is, would you get the same answer? Consistent aesthetics, legible values, predictable taste. Or a persona that shifts by campaign and feels polished but hollow.

Behavioral visibility is how much real life has been made observable over time. Not necessarily oversharing but pattern exposure. Repeated routines. Known preferences. Familiar environments. The audience can guess tomorrow’s post and usually be right. The opposite is episodic access, press-cycle appearances, a life that mostly exists off camera. Great for protecting your peace, not as great for creating a monetizable personal brand.

Trust continuity is whether the product feels like a continuation of the person, not just a pay day. Trust continuity depends as much on the product choice as the person selling it. High continuity products fit pre-existing habits and feel obvious in hindsight. Low continuity requires explanation. A launch that reads like a business decision instead of a lifestyle extension. A choice that feels like it was plucked from a trend report instead of a consistent perspective.

One important caveat. The product itself still has to make sense. No amount of personality clarity can compensate for a product that conflicts with the habits, values, or daily reality the audience has already observed. The formula only works when the product is a natural expression of the life being documented, not a departure from it.

So when we ask ourselves which personality is ready for retail, the better question is not “who can post and move the most units on day one?” Instead ask, “who already makes sense when tied to this product and aisle?”

Packaged goods reward familiarity. The fastest path to trust is when a product feels like it was always there, just quietly waiting to be released to the world. That usually has less to do with reach and more to do with how much of someone’s life has been made available over time.

That is what this formula is trying to capture. I love an example so let’s take Hannah Neeleman, better known by her username Ballerina Farm.

For my non-chronically online readers, Ballerina Farm is a massively followed lifestyle brand (10M+ on Instagram and TikTok respectively) built around a Utah-based family documenting daily life on a working farm. The content centers on cooking from scratch, raising children, tending animals, and focusing on domestic labor as skilled, meaningful work. Over time, that documentation expanded into selling products like organic farm flour, various beef products, “farmer” protein powder, and kitchen goods that mirror what already appeared regularly in the content.

It is also one of the most polarizing lifestyle brands on the internet. Which is part of why it works.

CPG Readiness in Practice: Ballerina Farm

Start with personality.

Ballerina Farm is not subtle, but it is consistent. There is a clear worldview and it does not shake. Domestic work as skilled labor. Food as something you make, not source. Tradition, aestheticized but operational. You may agree or disagree with it, but you do not misunderstand it. That alone puts it ahead of most celebrity brands.

Then look at behavior.

The advantage compounds through repetition. Cooking again. Baking again. Feeding the family again. Using the same tools, the same ingredients, the same rhythms. Over time, the audience stops watching and starts learning. They know what gets used. They know what matters. They know what runs out.

By the time a product appears, it does not feel introduced. It feels surfaced.

Because of that, the trust transfer is clean. Selling flour or meat does not require a story arc or a new identity. The products are already embedded in the narrative. The ability to buy simply formalizes what was previously implied.

The takeaway here is not that Ballerina Farm discovered demand. It is that she documented a life clearly enough that demand created itself. The audience did not need to be convinced the brand should exist. They begged for it.

Note: Being a polarizing figure does not come without backlash, recently consumers started to push back over this $260 cutting board. At the same time, my algorithm fed me a delighted consumer making sourdough from the same starter, “Willia”, as Hannah uses. If you want more controversy, this NYT piece on Ballerina Farm created quite the stir in 2024.

Throughout all of this I keep coming back to this Seth Godin quote:

The same logic applies here. Strong brands, personal or product, can move cleanly across environments. A grocery aisle or digital shelf should feel like another natural expression of a personality that already makes sense.

The celebrity CPG brands that struggle are not short on awareness. They are short on continuity. And as more personalities try to jump the gap from screen to shelf, that distinction is only going to matter more.

If you are not famous yet, there is still a path. It just looks less like licensing and more like building in public. More on that another day.

When movies fell out of my routine, Nerds gummies disappeared with them. Until, years later, I started seeing a close cousin everywhere. Nerds Gummy Clusters. Teens were snacking on them. Runners were treating them like fuel. They showed up in places that had nothing to do with movie theaters or nostalgia.

My first reaction was not excitement. It was confusion. Had these always existed? Had I somehow missed them?

My confusion is a tell in some ways. When a line extension is truly great, it does not feel like a launch. It feels like a quiet correction to history.

The real job, not the category one

At its core, a great line extension succeeds because it understands the real job the product is hired to do. Not the abstract category job, but the lived one. Jobs theory gets overcomplicated quickly, but the useful version is simple. Consumers are not looking for more choice. They are looking for fewer compromises.

Nerds Gummy Clusters did not create a new candy occasion. They resolved a long-standing tension. People liked the crunch of Nerds and the chew of gummies, but the formats forced tradeoffs. Too messy. Too sticky. Too awkward to eat anywhere other than stationary. The cluster format removed friction without announcing itself as innovation. It simply worked better, $500M in revenue better.

This is why the best line extensions feel obvious in hindsight. They do not introduce new jobs. They clarify existing ones. If a product needs explanation, it is usually because the job was invented in a conference room, not observed in the wild.

What behavior actually changes

You see this pattern across categories when you stop looking at SKUs and start looking at behavior.

Dawn Powerwash did not teach people how to wash dishes. It acknowledged that most people resent soaking and scrubbing and built a product around speed and immediacy. The job was not “clean dishes.” It was “get this done without derailing my night.”

Reese’s Minis were not about eating less Reese’s, they were about permission. They removed tension and guilt of unwrapping one too many cups and replaced it with the ease of a “lighter” sweet treat.

Chobani Flip understood that yogurt was drifting out of relevance as a standalone meal. That consumers were already “band-aiding” the situation with their own granola add-ins. By separating the mix-ins, it reframed yogurt as something interactive, closer to a snack (or sometimes permission indulgence quasi dessert) ritual than a nutrition chore.

They didn’t change what people wanted. They changed how easily they could get it.

Incrementality lives outside the brand

This is where most brands get line extensions wrong. They chase difference instead of incrementality. Internally, the question becomes “what’s the incrementality rate?” Externally, the only question that matters is “what does this actually replace?”

Incremental growth does not come from giving your existing buyer another option on the shelf. It comes from replacing something that already exists in their life, usually something they were tolerating (or hacking) rather than loving.

This is where most line extensions quietly fail. Internally, teams ask whether the product is distinct enough from the core. Externally, consumers are making a simpler calculation. What does this let me stop doing?

With Nerds Gummy Clusters, the answer was not “buy a different Nerds.” It was “stop dealing with the mess, awkwardness, and situational limits of existing candy formats.” That distinction matters. The growth did not come from stealing trips from classic Nerds. It came from showing up in moments where Nerds never realistically competed before. I can all but guarantee that traditional Nerds never found itself as a marathon fuel hack before Clusters.

What is notable is that this was not fully visible in early testing. As Katie Duffy, vice president of global brands at Ferrara, has said about the launch, early concept feedback did not clearly predict what ultimately happened. The real understanding came only after watching how consumers actually used the product once it was in market.

That detail is important. Incrementality rarely reveals itself in a scorecard. It shows up in behavior. New buyers. New use cases. New occasions that were previously owned by something else entirely.

When a line extension becomes a brand

You see the same logic play out elsewhere. Dawn Powerwash did not meaningfully cannibalize Dawn Original. It replaced soaking, scrubbing, and paper towels. Diet Coke did not replace Coke. It created a parallel daily habit with a different emotional logic. Fairlife did not win by being better milk. It stepped into the job once held by protein shakes and lactose workarounds.

This is how brands actually grow. Not by stretching the core thinner, but by identifying adjacent jobs they are already close enough to solve. The best line extensions borrow trust from the parent brand, then earn their growth by displacing something outside it.

When incrementality is real, the extension does not weaken the brand. It expands the category the brand meaningfully participates in.

On rare occasions, the extension clears an even higher bar. It stops behaving like a SKU and starts behaving like a brand.

Powerwash is no longer “a Dawn format.” It’s a platform.

Gatorade Zero has its own buyer, its own cultural permission, and its own usage logic.

Red Bull Sugar Free operates as a parallel universe, not a compromise.

At that point, continuing to manage the product as an accessory to the core is a mistake. When consumers form independent habits, the organization needs to follow.

The discipline behind “obvious”

Most line extensions never get close to this. They fail quietly because they are internally coherent and externally unnecessary. Their valuable shelf space is replaced with the next-up line extension in the following reset.

They sound smart in decks and feel irrelevant in real life. They explain themselves into existence instead of resolving a true problem.

If a line extension needs a “story” to justify why it exists, the consumer has already said no.

Obvious, or not?

Looking back, Nerds Gummy Clusters feel obvious. That is misleading.

They did not test as a guaranteed hit. Early feedback was mixed. The format was unfamiliar enough to confuse people before it clicked. From the inside, this did not look like inevitability. It looked like a bet. A bet that behavior would matter more than scores, and that once people experienced the product in the right context, the logic would reveal itself.

Ferrara did not just fix friction and wait. They put weight behind it. They amplified it. They let culture do its work once the product earned the right to show up. Social media, visibility, and scale mattered. The product still had to be seen to be understood.

That does not contradict the story. It completes it.

Great line extensions are rarely obvious at launch. They become obvious after consumers have lived with them long enough to forget there was ever another way. The clarity shows up in hindsight, not in concept tests.

Nerds Gummy Clusters did not win by expanding what the brand stood for. They won by tightening the answer to a job Nerds was already close to solving. The marketing accelerated it. The product sustained it.

That distinction matters.

The art of a great line extension is not chasing novelty or betting blindly on creativity. It is having the judgment to place a bet where friction is real, behavior is waiting, and the brand is already more than half-qualified to show up.

I am back after a holiday hiatus! I love keeping a running list of topics that inspire me. If you’ve got one to add, drop me a line!

• “Did you know that more people have air fryers at home than coffee makers?”

• “Yes! Over 2/3 of Americans have air fryers!”

• “It’s like witnessing the invention of the microwave!”

(I promise I’m fun to have at a dinner party.)

An air fryer hater will tell you it’s just a small convection oven. Fine. But there’s something more emotional about the role air fryers are playing in our homes. Why do we love the air fryer so much?

The Original Convenience Appliance

Before we investigate the growth of the air fryer, it’s relevant to explore its older sibling: the microwave. Invented in 1945, microwaves are now in 90% of American households. There are full categories of the grocery store that can only be enjoyed utilizing a microwave, and the idea of living without one breaks the brain.

The earliest versions of residential microwaves that rolled out in 1967 were a whopping $494 ($4,791 today), down from predecessor versions that clocked in around $5,000. Despite the cost, by 1975, the Amana Radarange became more common in homes than gas-powered ovens.

Now, microwaves are the most common U.S. appliance and for many food products, they are the primary, or only, prep instruction. Why?

• It’s quick, often requiring less than five minutes cook time.

• It’s omnipresent, in gas stations, break rooms, and homes.

• It’s uniform (enough), allowing for tight ranges of cook times and temps based on watts to deliver consistent outcomes.

Truly microwave-native products showed up when penetration was still in the low-to-mid teens, then the category explosion happened once microwaves became near-standard equipment (80%+).

First came ACT II microwave popcorn and handhelds like Hot Pockets in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, the microwave was a default, and segments like single-serve frozen meals, cup meals, and microwavable sides and snacks exploded. Finally, by the early 2000s, we saw true innovation that found the sweet spot of speed + simplicity + saturation. Ready Rice in under 90 seconds. Bird’s Eye Steamfresh took the freezer by storm. Kraft Easy Mac cups cut prep and meal time in half and allowed it to shift to on-the-go.

Once microwaves were basically universal, innovation shifted from “microwavable” as an option to “microwave” as the central design constraint, better outcomes with fewer steps and less time to hit the table.

History Doesn’t Repeat, It Rhymes

I share the story of the microwave because it’s an important history lesson for the moment we’re facing now as operators and consumers. The air fryer is close to reaching microwave status. However, it has a few important differences:

• Variation: Air fryers vary greatly, from square to circle to basket to tray, making it hard to build to a uniform spec.

• Speed: Air fryers are slower than microwaves but faster than ovens, making the key trade-up “faster than baking.”

• Health perception: Air fryers have a positive health halo, crispy outcomes come from convection heat, less oil, less fat.

• Quality: While slower than a microwave, consumers generally agree the output is oven-like in roughly half the time. No soggy leftovers.

Hot Pockets, an original darling of the microwave, was one of the first major players to make a move, removing the crisping sleeve after observing that people enjoyed the crispier crust that came from the air fryer. Anything breaded or “crispy” started to tout air fryer prep on front and back of pack. Tyson even trademarked “Air Fryer Ready™” as part of its Crispy Wing launch.

Their press release is telling. This is not a war on ovens or microwaves, it’s a war on takeout:

“When ordering takeout, many of us have experienced the disappointing bite of not-so-crispy wings. Knowing 75% of households in the U.S. have air fryers, Perdue saw an opportunity to create the first of its kind chicken wing uniquely made for the air fryer, conveniently delivering the crispiest wings in just 16-18 minutes,” says Cody Walter, senior marketing manager at Perdue Foods. “To end the takeout vs. at-home wing debate, we wanted to show wing lovers the best way to wing is at home, and with an air fryer.”

The Shortcut to “Everyone Gets What They Want”

I often think about Jeff Bezos’ line: focus less on what will change in ten years and more on what will not.

In retail, the “won’t change” list is obvious. People want better value. They want less friction. They want selection that feels personal.

CPG food is the same. Consumers will always want better value, not a higher price tag. They will always want dinner to require less effort, less cleanup, and less time. And they will always want meals that match the reality of their household: different tastes, different diets, different portions, different schedules.

That last one is the part most brands underwrite. “Variety” is not just more flavors on shelf. It is the ability to personalize a meal without turning dinner into a second job.

Why this matters for the air fryer:

• Better value. Eating out can cost roughly 4x more than eating at home, so households keep pulling occasions back into the kitchen. Circana reports consumers sourced more than 81% of dinners at home in 2024. When wallets get tight, shoppers get creative in making mealtime at home feel more special.

• Better, faster. The air fryer is a shortcut to a crisp, hot, finished product with minimal supervision. It cuts prep and cleanup, so the total cost of cooking drops, not just the minutes on the timer. The rise of air fryer liners is proof that “cleanup convenience” has become its own product lane.

• Variety that fits me, on my time. The air fryer makes variety operational. When you can cook multiple components quickly, from frozen, with predictable results, you can serve different options in the same dinner window. One person gets spicy, one gets gluten-free, one gets high-protein, one gets kid-friendly, and nobody has to compromise to the lowest common denominator.

The air fryer is the closest thing to takeout parity at home, not because it is fancy, but because it makes customization cheap.

The air fryer did not just speed up cooking, it lowered the cost of personalization.

The Frozen Aisle’s New Superpower

I’ve been hearing the phrase “frozen is back” a lot, but I’d offer a counter: the frozen aisle is playing an entirely new game. It’s no longer about reheating, the air fryer has unlocked fast, high-quality cooking.

The microwave era made frozen about access, heat this fast, anywhere, reliably. The air fryer era makes frozen about outcomes, crispy textures, restaurant cues, and “I can make this my way” without the skill, mess, or time.

That shift matters because it expands what frozen can credibly be. Not just a backup plan, but the fastest path to a dinner that still feels chosen, not conceded.

In the same way microwaves created iconic segments that only made sense once the appliance was everywhere, air fryers are doing the same. Brands that design for the air fryer, not as an afterthought instruction, but as the primary experience, are positioned to win this moment.

The brand posts a shiny new look on Instagram. The comments say “obsessed” and “so clean.” Internally everyone feels relieved the old pack is finally gone.

Then the next four weeks of scan data are suspiciously quiet. Before you know it, everyone is trying to explain away the “mysterious” sales drop.

A brand overhaul should not be a creative indulgence. You are actively messing with the shortcuts in your consumer’s very overstimulated brain. Get it right and you buy yourself another decade of relevance. Get it wrong and you are frantically trying to reverse course.

When a Makeover Ends Up Botched

Poor Tropicana. They did what many brand owners secretly want to do: erase the thing they are sick of looking at. Leave their mark on an iconic brand forever.

In 2009, the orange with the straw, the vertical logo, the slightly cheesy but very familiar look, all went out. In came a full carton shot with juice pouring, a cleaner logo, a new cap, a new layout. Almost every major element on the front of pack moved at once.

In a deck and in isolation, it made sense. More modern. More premium. More “pure juice.”

On shelf, it looked like a stranger squatting in Tropicana’s space.

The orange with the straw was not decoration. It was an important shortcut. Busy shoppers scanned a wall of orange juice and grabbed the orange with a straw because that meant “my favorite orange juice.”

Take away the shortcut, change the layout, and offer zero on pack help to connect old to new, and loyal buyers simply walk past you. Which is exactly what happened. Within months, Tropicana quietly rolled back.

The lesson is not “never rebrand.” The lesson is: if your makeover makes your loyal customer think “where did my usual bottle go,” you have not refreshed. You have effectively delisted yourself.

Training Before Transforming

On the other side, you have Chobani.

By the time they rebranded, Chobani was not desperate. They had built the Greek yogurt set and were still winning. The problem was that everyone else now looked like Chobani. A sea of white cups with bold flavors and “Greek” shouting from the front.

At the same time, the business was getting bigger than “Greek yogurt.” They wanted to be read as a broader, natural dairy and wellness brand, not boxed in.

So they went for a total reset. New wordmark. Matte cups. Painted fruit instead of glossy photography. Warmer colors. “Greek” dialed down massively. On paper, this was as dramatic as Tropicana’s shift.

Two key differences.

First, the rebrand was anchored in a clear job. Stand out again in a copied set and stretch beyond one category. This was not “we are bored” or “we are desperate.” It was “our old cues no longer serve the next chapter.”

Second, they trained shoppers before they flipped the switch. Under the lid of the existing cup, you got a peek at the new packaging and a small heads up that a change was coming. The brand used its current pack as the billboard for its future pack. The ran a full 360 campaign training and explaining.

So when a loyal Chobani buyer came back to the yogurt aisle, the new look was already familiar. Different enough to pop in a crowded set, familiar enough that the brain could file “this is still my yogurt.”

They changed almost everything. They just did not leave their customers behind while they did it.

What Brand Overhauls Are Actually For

Most “we are thinking about a rebrand” conversations start from a place of fatigue.

You are tired of the old logo. Your board thinks the pack feels “early stage.” Your designer has a new typeface they want to try. Sales have been soft without a clear explanation.

None of those are reasons to overhaul.

The real jobs a brand overhaul should do:

• Reclaim distinctiveness when everyone has started to look like you

• Reframe what game you are playing, category wise and role wise, for the next decade

• Clean up a messy system, where extensions now feel like clutter

If you cannot say which of those jobs you are doing in one sentence, you are not rebranding. You are serving the wrong purpose.

How To Change Without Erasing Yourself

1. Know what pays the bills
Your logo is not always your strongest asset. It might be a specific product visual, a color block, or a shape that makes you easy to spot from six feet away.

Before you start, list your distinctive assets and test them. If shoppers name “the orange with the straw” before they name the logo, you mess with that very carefully, if at all.

2. Do not break every variable in one go
On pack, you control three big levers: structure, identity, and visual storytelling.

If you change layout, logo treatment, and imagery all at once, you need a real transition plan. If you are not going to invest in education, then reconsider. For example, keep logo position and main color, modernize typography, and clean up claims. Or keep hierarchy and structure, but overhaul photography and illustration.

Give shoppers something stable to grab onto while you move other pieces.

3. Use your current pack to teach the new one

Most brands wait until the new packaging arrives to start explaining its arrival. At that point, it is too late for the shelf.

Use the months before a switch to run your own little training program.

A small “new look coming soon, same product” bug. A thumbnail of the new pack next to the old one. A line on the back panel about why it is changing. Leveraging omnichannel to clearly communicate the before and after.

Chobani’s under lid reveal and shelf-talkers were not a gimmick. It was reps for the brain.

4. Make the shelf easier to shop, not prettier in PPT

A real overhaul should simplify the way your brand shows up in the full set.

If you haven’t done a full mock-up on a real shelf, you’ve already underinvested in the change.

Cleaner ladders between good, better, best. Flavor cues that are consistent and obvious. Sub brands that actually help a shopper choose, instead of adding more logos.

If the only clear win from your new design is that it photographs better for social, you have missed the point.

The Quiet Question Behind Every Rebrand

The real question is not “do people like the new design.”

The real question is: will our current buyers reliably find us in three seconds or less in a chaotic grocery aisle on top of everything else they are juggling in their brains, and does this new system give us room to keep growing for the next ten years?

The job is not to impress other brands in a LinkedIn carousel or an internal townhall. The work is to evolve how you show up in the real world without breaking the silent agreement you already have with the shoppers who keep you on shelf.

Which of these recent-ish brand overhauls does the best job?

Want more like this?

I recently joined Adam Steinberg on The Shelf Help podcast and talked about rebrands and so much more about operating within CPG.

Take a listen to the podcast here or anywhere fine podcasts are available!

You might get your wellness advice from TikTok influencers and Substack posts, but back in the day, good old cable TV was the source of truth. In 1991, 60 Minutes ran a segment called “The French Paradox” with Morley Safer that investigated the lower rate of heart disease in France despite rich diets. They pointed to red wine as the possible explanation.

Within a year, red wine sales jumped over 40%. Underpinned by the idea that the resveratrol and polyphenols in red wine were supporting heart health, “good for your heart” became a quick reason to believe. Wine became a daily dinner supplement.

And yet, in 2025, wine is having an “existential” crisis. Sales are declining far faster than the rest of the alcoholic beverage category. Consumers are switching to pre-mixed drinks or leaving the alcohol segment altogether. What changed?

Post–French Paradox

With quasi-medical permission, red wine had the opportunity to become a daily drink. For wine companies and retailers, this was a gold mine. Wine moved from “occasional indulgence” and dinner party choice into a routine, nightly habit. At the same time, it encouraged premiumization. If you’re spending on a “medicine” for your heart, there’s a lot less guilt in buying the higher-quality bottle.

Doctors and researchers tried to temper the public’s perception following the 60 Minutes segment with lots of caveats. However, one 2001 medical journal called out: “Overall, even the most vociferous of critics agree that alcohol taken in light-to-moderate quantities, preferably regularly and with meals, appears to favourably affect ischaemic heart disease. There is little epidemiological evidence to confirm the original hypothesis that wine is more beneficial.”

In the mid-1990s, Wine Spectator put a physician on the cover with the headline “Toasting A Long Life,” leaning fully into the belief that wine and a long life belonged in the same frame.

The International Wine & Food Society recalls the fervor: “People in the California wine business still tell of how Americans went rushing out to buy bottles of red wine that Sunday night. The traditional toast ‘To your health’ suddenly had a new meaning. Red wine sales soared.”

WHO Knocks the Wind Out of the Sails

Health systems and universities spent years continuing to investigate the question “Is red wine good for your heart?” and publishing explainer after explainer about the benefits and skepticism, keeping the concept top of mind for consumers.

Mayo Clinic. Harvard. Cleveland Clinic. American Heart Association. They all highlight the upside of resveratrol and then, in the same breath, walk back the benefits.

It wasn’t until the World Health Organization (WHO) took a more solid stance, stating there is “no safe level” of alcohol, that the narrative really cracked. This was a dagger to an already struggling industry. The wine that was societally prescribed was now a Group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco and asbestos. Miles away from the belief that a glass of red was heart protection.

Younger Consumers Aren’t Buying It

Too young to be swayed by 60 Minutes and with endless access to health information, Gen Z as a cohort is largely not drinking or drinking rarely, citing health and wellness as a core reason for the decline. Overall, across all age segments, the share of adults who drink at all is at a 90-year low, with nearly half of Americans not partaking.

At the same time, non-alcoholic beverages are small but rapidly growing. NA beer is leading the charge and non-alcoholic and low-ABV wine is still trying to find its footing. Helped by Dry January, Sober October, and Oura and Whoop apps telling you your nightly routine is zapping your sleep score, non-alcoholic versions are claiming the ritual without the risk.

Wine increasingly competes not only with other alcohol, but with functional beverages, apoptogenic tonics, and cannabis drinks that claim to bring benefits (alas not heart health) without the health baggage.

What does the wine aisle do without the doctor’s orders?

With “good for your heart” effectively off the table, the category is pivoting to other reasons to believe:

• Do as your ancestors did: More focus on historical context and family vineyards with natural practices. Health adjacent, but framed as purity and simplicity of an age-old practice.

• Moderation and mindfulness: Smaller, single-serve formats, lower ABV, promoting a quality glass over a lower-quality bottle, “no sulfites = no headaches.” Nods to health benefits and reduction of harm.

• Encouraging new occasions: Leaning back into the indulgence and hospitality of a good bottle of wine. Pairing with charcuterie boards and hosting, creating new routines. Not as frequent as daily dinner, but more than once in a blue moon.

• Reframing value: Wine prices are up 40% since 2020. Tariffs have layered an additional challenge. Wine purveyors are rolling out new formats and packaging to try to regain margin and value shoppers.
  

Despite the best efforts, in 2025, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine reported that global wine sales fell to their lowest since 1961. In the US, the world’s top wine market, consumption fell 5.8%.

Wine makers and sellers must pivot quickly, adapting their aisles to sell both traditional wines and their more moderated alternatives. I don’t think wine is dead, but I do think it’s about to be reborn with organic practices, “purity” and low and no ABV taking a larger portion of the stage.

Are you in a “red wine” boom?

It’s easy to live on the high of a wellness wave without appreciating that the same perception that built the wave could flip into a crash.

For red wine, we saw that the narrative around red wine compounded much faster than the medical research could. One hugely impactful TV segment and a repeatable, “good for your heart” phrase created a thirty-year boon. And then, all at once, when science caught up, we saw a huge retraction.

The permission to consume daily became a defining feature of the category. A daily glass recommendation was not just messaging, it changed frequency, basket size, and category growth. When that permission disappeared, so did a huge chunk of routine occasions.

If your brand’s value proposition rests on an oversimplified interpretation of emerging science, be wary that the next WHO or Surgeon General statement could flip the script. Health framing is fragile in hindsight.

Baby Boomers saw red wine as a healthy choice. Their kids were told it’s a Group 1 cancer risk. Generational divides and information sources can be the difference between a dying or emerging category. Be sure to understand the context behind the choices of your consumers and how entrenched those beliefs are.

The lesson for operators is simple: Do not build your entire growth plan on one flattering study or one health headline. Build systems, occasions, and value that can survive when the wellness wave moves on. Red wine had a thirty-year head start and still could not outrun a three-word update from the WHO. Design your products, claims, and occasions so they still make sense even if the halo is gone.

PS - For what it’s worth, I do still enjoy a glass of red. My preference these days is a bottle of low ABV from Dry Farm Wines.

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Since Thanksgiving is around the corner, let’s talk about the turkey one, the mistake that helped kick off the multi-billion dollar frozen meals category.

As the lore goes, in the early 1950s Swanson wildly overestimated how many frozen turkeys America wanted for Thanksgiving. After the holiday, about 260 tons of turkey were still sitting in refrigerated railcars with nowhere to go. Thanksgiving had come and gone. No one is craving a whole bird in December.

Whether every detail in the overstock story is true, the general story holds. Instead of slapping stickers on the boxes and discounting the mistake away, Swanson found a more creative solution. They reworked the mountain of frozen turkey into a complete dinner in a tray that you could pull from your freezer, heat, and eat in front of the television.

That pivot didn’t just save Swanson’s quarter. It set the template for the frozen meal category I spent years working in, and the story still gets play as a “fun fact” for newbies to the space.

Frozen infrastructure, not yet a frozen “meal”

The timing made this possible.

By the early 1950s, the frozen infrastructure was there. Clarence Birdseye (yes, the same Birds Eye you have in your freezer) had already proved that you could quick-freeze vegetables and sell them nationally. Frozen peas and mixed vegetables were in grocery stores. Home freezers were starting to show up in middle class kitchens. Grocers had freezer cases waiting to be filled.

What did not exist was a frozen dinner.

Dinner was still defined as something you assembled yourself: you chose a meat, a starch, a veggie. Frozen foods were ingredients. They saved prep time, but they did not answer “What are we having tonight?”

Swanson, known mainly for meats and poultry, walked straight into that gap when it misread Thanksgiving demand.

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From leftover turkey to TV dinner

Inside the company, the brief was simple and clear: move a massive surplus of cooked turkey, fast, without training consumers to expect bargain-bin turkey every December.

The answer was not liquidation. It was reframing.

Instead of trying to sell whole birds, Swanson sliced the turkey and portioned it onto compartmentalized aluminum trays with cornbread dressing, peas, and sweet potatoes. They cooked the full plate, then froze it. At home, your only job was to throw the tray in the oven for about 25 minutes.

The name did as much work as the product.

Swanson did not call it “Frozen Turkey Dinner.” They tied it to the new piece of technology taking over the living room: the television. “TV Dinner” told you exactly when and how to use it. You were not buying clearance turkey. You were buying a modern ritual, a full meal you could eat off a little metal tray in front of your TV instead of setting a table.

In one move, Swanson:

• Cleared surplus inventory without obvious discounting

• Flipped sunk cost of inventory into opportunity

• Turned frozen from components into a fully built solution

• Attached the product to a new behavior that was already spreading

That is how one forecasting error became a category, not just a cautionary tale.

What the turkey story actually changed

Before TV dinners, frozen foods were helpers, not heroes. Your freezer held peas, spinach, maybe a pie, and a lot of ice. You still had to cook.

After TV dinners took off, the unit of value in the freezer shifted from “bag of ingredients” to prepared solutions.

The aluminum tray did more than hold the food. It taught people what a complete, factory-designed meal looked like: one protein, one starch, one vegetable, all pre-balanced and pre-portioned. That pattern was easy to copy across cuisines and price tiers. It made life easier for merchants too. One facing now represented an entire dinner with a clear consumer job and a predictable margin.

For consumers, that turkey tray normalized several ideas that used to sit on the fringes. It validated that it was acceptable to outsource the entire meal to a manufacturer and to eat dinner in front of the TV.

Today, all of that feels commonplace. In the early 1950s, it was a genuine shift.

From one turkey tray to an entire freezer aisle

Once Swanson proved you could sell a turkey, potatoes, and peas tray on an average Tuesday, the rest was inevitable.

First came the variations: chicken, meatloaf, Salisbury steak, breakfasts. Then a brand for every moment: budget lines, kids’ meals, family-size trays and bags, “restaurant style” offerings.

As culture turned against the original TV dinner image, the format got a nutritional twist. Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, Smart Ones cut the calories, then natural and organic brands all kept the same basic idea but swapped in different ingredients, portions, and claims. More recently it turned into grain bowls, global flavors, and vegan or high-protein entrees in paper bowls.

Under the surface, the rules have barely changed:

• One tray = one decision

• The brand plays both chef and manufacturer

• The freezer carries both ingredients and ready-made solutions

All of that traces back to someone staring at a line of cold railcars filled with unwanted turkey and asking a better question than, “How fast can we mark this down?”

The operator takeaway

If you want a quick story to change topics at the Thanksgiving table: modern frozen dinners started because Swanson had way too much turkey and refused to accept “discount it and move on” as the only answer.

If you want the operator version: surplus is not just a margin problem. It is sometimes the cheapest R&D budget you will ever get. Ask yourself tougher questions and you may just land on the next new category.

Happy Thanksgiving! See you next week!

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I recently revealed to some friends that I used to be a soda fiend. Before I found the love of my life, coffee, I was a regular at the 7-Eleven on campus where I indulged in a variety of diet sodas, Diet Coke, Diet Mountain Dew, and Diet Dr Pepper, for both energy and the fact that there was zero anything in them. No calories, no sugar, no real ingredients for that matter.

I haven’t consumed traditional soda regularly in years, but the product is so omnipresent that it’s hard to ignore the shifts in convenience store fridges, advertising during NFL games, and what influencers are sipping. The diet sodas I loved in a past life were being slowly replaced with “zero,” largely the same product inside the bottle but a whole new outfit.

This shift in soda isn’t about Poppi and Olipop arriving on the scene. This is about Big Beverage moving a word around to keep their lucrative diet franchises alive.

When “Diet” Was the No Calorie Default

It’s hard to believe that diet soda was ever a niche, but when it launched in the 1950s, “dietetic” colas like No-Cal and Diet Rite were made for diabetic and sugar-restricted consumers who had limited to no options. It wasn’t until mainstream cola brands, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, found their way into the space in the 1960s that the category exploded and took on the form we know today.

Tab entered the world in the 1960s, and Diet Coke stepped in as Coke’s flagship diet brand in 1982. Diet Pepsi grew right alongside it. The products were positioned as slimming but also stylish. Throughout the 80s and 90s, every major brand followed suit. Diet meant lower calories, same flavor cues. Pop a diet logo on top of the masterbrand and ship. Regular vs diet became the default architecture of the category. One formula with sugar, one without, and a single word that told you which to pick up.

Then “Diet” Became a Liability

“Diet is dead” has lived in headlines and PowerPoint presentations for years as consumers have pulled back from the idea of control and restriction and rejected the unrealistic standards marketed across the 90s and early 2000s.

The reality is that “diets” tend to shift to new north stars, not disappear. Calorie restriction was replaced by sugar reduction. Consumers started to ask questions about the magic of artificial sweeteners and whether that was creating more problems than solutions. Evidence was mounting that diet sodas weren’t helping with the weight loss they implied.

In 2023, WHO issued guidance advising against using non-sugar sweeteners to control body weight. A flurry of lawsuits and petitions reached the big soda companies, arguing that “diet” was misleading consumers. Even though the opponents lost in court, “diet” had mounting challenges culturally, nutritionally, and legally.

Rename Instead of Reformulate

Diet Coke sales slowly transition to Coke Zero Sugar. Pepsi Max disappears and Pepsi Zero Sugar takes its place. A Google search for Diet 7UP returns SEO posts for “7UP Zero Sugar.”

Diet sodas were positioned as similar but not identical. Diet Coke has a distinctive lighter base than its Classic Coke counterpart, a unique experience altogether. Their Zero Sugar siblings promise a much closer comparison to the core, the classic flavor consumers love, just without the sugar. A more gender-neutral approach to “diet.”

Operations teams are happy. These changes rarely require new suppliers or factories. Marketers have something new to talk about. The no calorie, no sugar segment is fresh again. Consumers feel seen. The same taste they love, zero compromise. The Coke Zero Sugar tagline provokes “Best Coke Ever?”

Actions speak louder than words:

• In the US, Diet Coke still carries roughly twice the volume of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar (about 7.8% vs 3.8% of the soda market), but Zero Sugar is the growth driver (+9% in latest earnings)

• Beverage Digest data pegs Diet Pepsi at roughly 3.3% share of US soda volume and Pepsi Zero Sugar at about 1.2%; the catch is that Zero Sugar is growing mid-single digits while Diet Pepsi shrinks

• Keurig Dr Pepper has already pushed most of its old Diet SKUs, from 7UP to A&W and Sunkist, into ‘Zero Sugar’ branding, maintaining only a few iconic “Diet” SKUs like Diet Dr Pepper

Same Job, New Words

In a moment when a consumer is still looking for sweetness, fizz, zero calories, and something that feels lighter than full sugar, their choice to fulfill that “job” changes.

In the words of the man who popularized Jobs Theory, Clayton Christensen, people don’t simply buy or pick products or services, they pull them into their lives to make progress.

For those who still pick Diet Coke for style and taste, the world keeps spinning. For most, as sugar continues as public enemy number one and they don’t want to be seen as restricting themselves, we’ve fired Diet Pepsi and hired Pepsi Zero Sugar.

Retailers are more than happy to play along with the cosmetic shift from diet to zero. Shelf sets are shifting from the tiers of diet and regular to a more diversified set, regular, diet (for the loyalist), zero, and lastly, the functional set. Modern, functional soda gets to take the headlines, but zero sugar is right behind it.

Language as Risk Management

The words “diet” and “light” mean something to us as consumers as much as they mean something to regulators and lawyers. What was previously seen as a category norm now holds a heavier weight culturally and legally.

The same manufacturers found creative ways to keep the factories and formulas largely the same while changing the perception and sales outlook. Most of these zero sugar offerings were around for years, some decades, before they took their moment in the sun. It’s important to sense when tides are turning and start to change the frame around a topic or concept long before you have to throw away the whole farm.

Lessons for Operators and Founders

Big incumbents are very good at repainting the same asset as the winds start to change. These language shifts are just that, shifts, not to be mistaken for true innovation but just as impactful in performance.

As pop culture moves faster than ever, be wary of latching too closely onto a term or phrase that is hot in the moment. Words age out faster than brands with strong equity. First it was “diet,” and maybe next it’ll be “simply” or “clean” or “guilt-free” that catches the eyes of plaintiff lawyers.

As your competitors are quick to shift dollars to their zero sugar SKUs, your “sugar free” or “zero sugar” alternative starts to feel a little less special in consumers’ minds, even if you used natural sweeteners. Audit your own claims for aging language. Be quick to understand the ever-changing context you exist in and be two steps ahead of the competition.

While Diet Pepsi made it back into the zeitgeist for a minute thanks to Addison Rae, don’t let the TikTok star distract you from the fact that we’re seeing a strategic and planned implosion of the diet soda segment to make way for expansion of zero sugar.

It’s “diet” today, but what term and segment will be retired next?

Retail used to be about the person who knew the neighborhood and hand picked what went on the shelf. In a lot of banners, the core question has shifted.

How much can this four feet of shelf make if I treat it like a real estate asset instead of a neighborhood store?

That is where language matters. Merchant, buyer, forager. Three different operating systems for the same job, deciding who gets to show up on the shelf and why.

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Three Shelf Archetypes: Merchant, Buyer, Forager

These are not just job titles on LinkedIn. They are a way of thinking about and building the shelves you shop.

The Buyer - A gatekeeper of margin and process.

Their questions sound more like:

• What slotting, trade plan, and margin offer do you have

• How do you perform on dollars per facing versus the next best option

• Will this make my category scorecard look better this quarter

The buyer lives in line reviews, vendor portals, and JBP (joint business plan) decks. They’ve got partners in category management and pricing so they can treat each aisle as a strategic business unit, with data and supplier collaboration to optimize the whole category.

Most large national banners lean heavily on the buyer model. Think mass, club, and big conventional grocers with centralized planograms, velocity thresholds and standardized processes across thousands of stores. There’s an upside to the discipline but the downside is a whole lot of the same.

The Merchant - A store operator at heart.

They think in terms of:

• What does my shopper want from this aisle

• Does this brand make the set feel better, clearer, more useful

• Will people come back for this product and tell a friend

They balance art and science. They care deeply about the P&L, but they start at the shelf and work backwards. They are sensitive to duplication and will cut the bottom quarter of their set. They will protect a slower turning item that makes the set feel special because it reinforces who they are to the shopper.

You still see strong merchant cultures at places like H-E-B, Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, and high performing independents. The assortment has a point of view. You can feel a human hand in the mix.

The Forager - A scout. Their job is to go find what the rest of the organization is not set up to see.

A forager asks:

• What is bubbling up locally that our shopper would love if we gave it a platform

• Which tiny brand has something special and just needs guardrails to be retail ready

Whole Foods built the most visible version with their network of local foragers who search farmers markets, small bakeries, and early stage CPG brands. Co-ops, natural independents, and banners like Erewhon use similar frameworks even if they don’t use the title. Players like Pop Up Grocer are creating an entirely new segment in this space.

Foragers are rarely the ones making that final decision for a national reset but they are the champions. They feed the pipeline, bring in local or regional bets, and de-risk discovery for the big machine.

Which Retailers Sit Where On The Spectrum

No retailer is purely one thing, but you can feel which logic is driving the bus.

Buyer led and landlord heavy

• Big conventional: Kroger, Albertsons-Safeway divisions, Ahold banners

• National drug chains: CVS, Walgreen’s

• Mass and club: Walmart, Target, Sam’s, BJ’s

What signals to look out for:

• Heavy reliance on centralized planograms

• Line reviews as the only real entry point

• Strong focus on trade spend, slotting, and retail media

Here, the shelf is treated as an asset to monetize. The buyer is optimizing yield per linear foot and per slot. You are dealing with an asset manager who happens to sell groceries.

Costco is an interesting hybrid. Very merchant minded in SKU discipline, very buyer driven in how they treat vendor funding and demo programs.

Merchant led banners

• H-E-B and Wegmans

• Trader Joe’s

• Strong regional independents and co-ops

Signals you are in a merchant culture:

• Assortments that clearly reflect local tastes

• A limited amount of me too duplication

• Store teams that actually know and talk about the products

You still deal with buyers, but there is air cover for “this brand makes our store better” as a real argument. A merchant will take a risk on something that sharpens their identity, not just their margin report.

Forager influenced

• Whole Foods with formal local foragers

• Natural chains and premium banners that celebrate local on shelf tags

• Co-ops and regionals that send people out to scout

These retailers still run on a buyer backbone for resets and national programs. The forager layer simply widens the funnel of what gets considered. Early stage brands can slip in through this side door if they are special enough and just operationally solid enough.

A Quick Guide for Founders and Operators

Information is power. While you can’t change which game the retailer is playing, you can show up knowing what is going to help them (and you) win.

In a buyer led account

Your job is to make the “yes” easy for the buyer.

• Bring clean data on velocity, lift, and profitability

• Be precise on margin, trade spend, and slotting offers

• Map exactly how you beat the item you are kicking out on dollars per store per week, with incrementality

You are not asking them to “fall in love with the brand.” You are asking them to make a rational trade. If you cannot show, in numbers, why you are a better use of space than what you replace, this is going to be a tough conversation.

In a merchant led account

Your job is to make the set both interesting and effective.

• Show how you clarify the category for their shopper

• Bring proof that you drive repeat, not just trial

• Speak their language on neighborhood fit, basket building, and trade up versus private label

Avoid coming with a generic deck. Show up with evidence that you took the time to understand their store and their shopper. A good merchant will absorb a little risk for something that strengthens the banner’s story.

In a forager influenced system

Your job is to be yourself.

• Lead with what makes you meaningfully different or locally relevant

• Be explicit about where you are operationally ready and where you are shoring up

• Make it easy for them to advocate for you with central buying, with clear pack sizes, cases, lead times, and support

“Special” gets you noticed. “Ready” allows you to take advantage of the opportunity.

Why This Distinction Matters

Merchant, buyer, forager. Three unique ways your product gets on shelf. Three unique stories you need to tell about your brand.

The job is to figure out which operating system is running behind the scenes, then answer the question that version of the retailer is actually asking when they look at your four feet of space.

Your product might be great but wasn’t the question.

Yes, you read that right — potato chip consumers don’t associate chips with potatoes.

This is not a phenomenon that can be solely linked to Lay’s. As packaged goods become more entrenched in our lives, they take on a life of their own and ultimately move further and further away from their original source. Sometimes just figuratively, but oftentimes also physically.

Do you think of eggs and oil when you think of Hellman’s Mayo? Or cream and cheese when you think of Prego Alfredo? Or flour and water when you think of Barilla pasta?

These recipes evolved over time to be more suited for safety, stability and mass consumption. Inching further and further away from the homemade recipe that inspired it and becoming an entirely new thing that defines the category for consumers all over the country. Sometimes, but rarely, the product has barely changed at all, but nonetheless the packaged version replaces the original culinary version in our minds.

Processed food didn’t take over overnight. It crept in as a tradeoff for time, consistency and rising expectations at home. The modern packaged-goods era kicked off in the early 1900s as National Biscuit Company, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble scaled mass production and national distribution. Refrigeration, home freezers and a growing number of women in the workforce accelerated the shift. Packaged goods moved from convenience to default.

Bisquick and Campbell’s were not selling pancake mix or soup. They were selling certainty. You bought the guarantee that it would taste the same every time. Consumers no longer had the physical or mental capacity for risk or variation from scratch.

The result was standardization. Bread shape stopped reflecting the baker’s touch. Tortilla chips no longer varied in color based manual removal from the fryer. Human judgment was engineered out of the process. Plants began checking output at beginning, middle and end to ensure the product matched the spec. Low variance became the goal because many categories see a household only every 6 to 12 weeks. The product needs to hit the same, every time.

Now, as consumers push back against the industry that has bent to these standards of perfection, we are itching for food closer to the source:

• Within the last year, 61% of consumers sought out foods with fewer preservatives or processed ingredients (Food Institute, 2024)

• Most consumers say they consider whether or not a food product is processed when making a decision to purchase it and a majority (63%) say they avoid processed foods at least some of the time (IFIC 2024 Food and Health Survey)

Consumers are raising their hands and saying,

“Yes, we’re okay with a little variation, some trade offs, if that means the quality is higher and processing is lower”

Brands new and old alike are embracing this but haven’t we seen this story before? It wasn’t that long ago that we saw simply slapped on every household brand.

(Frito Lay’s 2014 line up of their Simply variations of core offerings)

The “Simply” era of the 2010s was cosmetic. Swap the sugar, swap the artificial colors, slap on kraft paper and call it clean. This time has different energy. The shift is coming from consumer distrust, scrutiny of processing itself, and a desire to understand both the ingredient and what happened to it.

If you’re an emerging brand, stay close to the source and show it off. Make the pepper, the tomato, the potato the hero. Let seasonal or batch variation live on purpose. Explain it so consumers see it as a feature, not a flaw.

If you’re a legacy brand, go back to your roots (pun intended). Rethink the over-engineering. A little irregularity reads as real again. We’re looking for made, not manufactured.

This is not cover for chaos. There is a line between “natural variability” and “you lost control of your line.” Think more Taylor Swift pop tarts and less Legendary protein pastry. The standard is perfectly imperfect, not sloppy production.

We’re exiting the era of “perfected” food. The brands that win next will prove they can scale without erasing the source. And when we do it right, it tastes better and is better for us.

🌟At Pace Setters CPG, we help founders build brands that scale without losing their edge (or their source 🥔). From positioning to portfolio, pricing to process, drop us a line → pacesetterscpg.com

Last week, several states warned that SNAP benefits could run out in November if the government shutdown is not resolved.

If you don’t receive this benefit or know someone who does, it’s easy to miss how critical it is to the grocery industry and to those who utilize it. Roughly 10–12% of all grocery sales and about 22% of CPG sales are paid for with SNAP.

A disruption here would ripple through the entire food system.

What SNAP Actually Is

Who it serves: Households below 130% of the federal poverty line (around $34K a year for a three-person household). In 2023, 39% of participants were children, 20% were elderly, and 10% were adults with a disability.

How it works: Benefits are distributed via an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, used like a debit card for eligible food items. Items like alcoholic beverages, tobacco, prepared hot foods, vitamins, medicine, and non-food household items are not eligible.

Scale: Roughly 42 million Americans — one in eight — used SNAP in 2023 (USDA).

It’s not a niche safety net; it’s one of the largest sources of recurring food spend in the country.

How SNAP Flows Through Grocery

SNAP dollars move fast. About 80% of benefits are spent within two weeks (USDA), creating clear patterns of spend that inform retailers and their partners when increased support will be needed.

Traffic patterns: Stores schedule labor and promotions around “SNAP week” as shoppers front load spend. When the 2019 shutdown forced early issuance, shoppers loaded up, then slowed sharply the following month, creating inventory whiplash.

Category impact: While SNAP shoppers split their spend fairly evenly across grocery store departments, Circana data shows that there are select categories with the highest SNAP over-index:
• 150+ Index – Baby Food, Juices, Carbonated Soft Drinks
• 140–150 Index – Cold Cereal, Frozen Desserts, Breakfast Foods, Frozen Meals

Retailer concentration: Numerator data shows

“94% of SNAP shoppers purchased groceries at Walmart in the past year, capturing 25.8% of the group’s annual grocery spend.”

While the total spend maps closely to the national grocery rankings (Kroger, Costco, Alberstons), there are several retailers that are heavily shopped relative to non-SNAP households:

• 180+ Index – Dollar Tree, 7-11, Dollar General, Winco
• 105-130 Index – Walmart, Alberstons, BJ’s

These series of behaviors directly influence how the industry sets forecasts, production, and promotions.

CPG’s Dependence on SNAP

According to Circana’s “Understanding the Resilience of SNAP Shoppers”, SNAP households buy 26% more CPG food and beverage products than non-SNAP households making it perhaps one of the most notable “over-index” behaviors.

• Brand loyalty: 78% of units, 81% of dollars, go to name brands.

• Private label growth: 19% of spending goes towards private label, up 4.3% in unit/buyer growth year over year.

• Shopping cadence: 22% more total trips and 38% more food and beverage trips than non-SNAP households.

(Note: A recent USDA study suggests Circana consumer panel data may understate SNAP food-at-home spending by over 30%, meaning true exposure could be even higher.)

Industry analysts have also noted this overexposure is affecting different “big food” players uniquely (Barrons):

• Walmart-anchored portfolios: General Mills, Campbell’s, PepsiCo

• Lower-income cohort exposure (>22% of sales): Conagra, WK Kellogg, J.M. Smucker

• Brands frequently purchased on SNAP trips: Conagra, Kellogg, Kraft Heinz

When SNAP slows, these players feel it first and then it trickles down to everyone else.

Why It Matters

SNAP is both a critical safety net and a stabilizer.

It helps millions of households buy food each month while also anchoring demand for the businesses that feed them. Each $1.00 spent through SNAP generates about $1.50 to $1.80 in economic activity (USDA ERS), circulating through farms, factories, logistics, and retail.

When benefits are delayed or reduced, the first impact is human: families tightening budgets or skipping meals. The second is economic: slower store traffic, lower order volumes, and tighter margins across the supply chain.

Understanding that link matters. A reliable nutrition program supports not just food access but business predictability.

What Now?

Even if your brand does not position itself as value-tier, SNAP influences the puzzle of the grocery industry. Consider:

• Plan for volatility: Build demand scenarios that include possible SNAP delays or early issuances. Expect uneven orders depending on state-by-state actions and short-term swings.

• Consider how your brand shows up: Maintain entry-level sizes, ensure placement in value and dollar channels, and support modernization of programs like EBT Online to reach more households.

• Understand exposure: If a large share of your sales flow through Walmart or Kroger, your business is more dependent on SNAP cycles than you might assume.

• Keep access in the equation: Stay close to the organizations and initiatives that keep food accessible and affordable. The stronger the infrastructure around food access, the more stable the industry and most importantly, our consumers’ lives.

Interested in Learning More?

• U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service – SNAP Data Center

• Circana – Understanding the Resilience of SNAP Shoppers

• Numerator – Snap Hub

I was recently talking to a founder who was worried about speed to expand as a tidal wave of new products entered their category. My word of advice: Don’t worry too much about it. The first mover is rarely the market maker.

This isn’t just my opinion, it’s been studied.

The idea that being first to market guarantees success is mostly marketing lore. You lead the way, you innovate, and you expect to be rewarded with outsized returns. It’s a nice story, but it’s rarely how it plays out. One study found that pioneers were more successful than followers in only 30% of cases.

The burden of being first

Market leaders often take on more than their fair share:

• High cost to develop and educate consumer

• Reliance on research over lived experience

• The pressure to deliver something new before it’s ready

The advantage of following

Market followers have a clearer view. They can:

• Learn what doesn’t work

• Enter at a lower cost

• Adapt to the real market reaction, not the one that existed in the lab

I’m not suggesting you wait around for someone else to make the first move. Just don’t do it for the sake of being first in the consumer’s mind.

When being first still helps

There are moments where it pays off:

• In CPG, one study showed the early movers often see a volume edge, but it comes with long-term margin erosion

• You can build moats through patents or distribution that buy you time

• You define the reference point for consumers

But context matters. You might want to sprint to launch the first pumpkin spice creamer before the mania wears off. But it’s okay to take your time if you’re tackling something like a better approach to dandruff shampoo.

There’s a lot of evidence to support drifting behind the first mover so you’ve got energy and resources left when it’s time to pass.

A Case In Action: Athletic Brewing

Athletic Brewing didn’t invent non-alcoholic beer. They just made it better. They weren’t only following traditional beer, they were following the non-alcoholic subsegment too. And yet, they managed to redefine both.

How did they overtake decades of mediocre and watery NA beers and help turn non-alcoholic beer into the second-largest beer subcategory in the U.S.? They studied what didn’t work and built around it.

Founder Bill Shufelt put it best:

“The market itself was bleak enough that I wanted to go out and reinvent the category. I saw an opportunity to make far better products.”

Athletic wasn’t the only brand to enter the space, but it was the one most intentional about learning from what didn’t work and turning that disappointment into an advantage.

Questions to ask yourself

If you’re debating how fast to move, ask:

1. When is your category reset, and how often?

   Most grocery categories reset (add and delete new items) once a year. Miss that window and you’re boxed out for another cycle while the first mover digs in. If you’re 85% ready, I say sprint towards that reset line.

2. How high are switching costs, and how often do shoppers buy?

   If switching is easy and the category turns over weekly, you don’t need to be first. Win the key moments that trigger change: promo windows, seasonal resets. Don’t miss key switching moments for your category like back-to-school or new year, new you.

3. What tensions are still unresolved?

   If the leader didn’t nail it, there’s something left to fix — packaging, taste, price, convenience. Find it and make that your edge.

First movers open the market. Second (or third or fourth…) movers figure out how to make it work.

Are you a founder trying to find your pace as your launch and scale? Drop us a line at pacesetterscpg.com or email us at audrey@pacesetterscpg.com to get started.

There was a time when every recipe video on TikTok ended with someone dropping a full brick of cream cheese into a crockpot. It was so pervasive that someone made an entire account dedicated to it. It was the age of keto = good fat = cream cheese.

Now, my Instagram algorithm has moved on to a new trend and a new hero product: cottage cheese. We’ve entered the protein era, and cottage cheese is its queen.

Cottage Cheese on the Homefront

Cottage cheese got its first taste of fame during WWI, when the U.S. government urged citizens to cut back on wheat, meat, fats, and sugar so those products could be sent to troops overseas.

Creameries were instructed to produce more high-protein options as part of the “Food Will Win the War” campaign. Cottage cheese got an extra boost when Tom and Carl Knudsen relinquished their patent on its production process to support the country’s wartime effort.

“Fewer Calories! More Body-Building Protein!”

While its growth began in WWI, cottage cheese truly took hold when dieters caught wind of its low-calorie, high-protein ratio in the 1950s. The talking points of that era’s ads sound familiar today: low calorie, high protein, versatile.

By the 1970s, the category peaked. Kraft consolidated Breakstone’s and Knudsen — the two largest regional players — into a single national force, manufacturing both branded and private-label offerings. That move effectively eliminated most regional competitors.

The Probiotic / Prebiotic Party

In the 1970s, cottage cheese was the wellness food — high protein, low fat, “slimming.” By the 1990s, that same diet-era baggage opened the door for a new player: yogurt. It was healthy but also “flavorful fun,” capturing hearts, shelf space, and manufacturing capacity across America.

By 2006, the yogurt market was booming — and then Danone’s Activia exploded, surpassing $100M in year one. Chobani entered the scene the following year.

In a last-ditch attempt to stop the decline, Breakstone’s and Knudsen launched LiveActive cottage cheese, fortified with probiotics (the same strain used in Activia) and prebiotic fiber (inulin – you may recognize it from probiotic sodas).

But the market didn’t buy it. Too late to the probiotic party, too early to the prebiotic one, LiveActive faded out by 2009. By then, cottage cheese consumption had fallen 30% from its peak.

Meanwhile, dairy manufacturers switched production lines to yogurt’s easier continuous-processing model — fueling its dominance. By the early 2020s, cottage cheese was one-sixth the size of yogurt and collecting dust on refrigerator shelves.

From Questionable Curds to the Belle of the Ball

If legacy brands weren’t going to save the category, a new player was determined to — enter Good Culture.

Fifty years post-peak, cottage cheese is suddenly the star of TikTok’s wellness feed. Creators are blending it into everything: pizza crusts, smoothies, sauces. Stretching across savory and sweet occasions beyond your wildest imaginations. #CottageCheese has racked up more than 500 million views, promising high protein and creamy taste.

Then Bethenny Frankel — yes, the original Skinnygirl — declared it “the new Greek yogurt.” The irony was hard to miss: the category once ousted for being “too diet” and “too bland” was now being championed for the same reasons.

Good Culture made a simple bet: great cottage cheese would bring people back. They were right. Demand boomed, supply lagged, and I still check my Whole Foods each week hoping to snag one of the few remaining tubs.

So What?

If you own a category, it’s your job to keep it relevant. Cottage cheese succeeded early on because it was marketed around versatility and benefits. Its fall came when category leaders stopped evolving those reasons to believe — chasing yogurt’s playbook instead of modernizing their own.

Its return to the main stage is led by brands that celebrate what it is — not what it’s not. Evolving usage occasions, not abandoning them, is key to sustaining brand and category health. And it helps that Good Culture brought us a version that tastes great with the health claims to match.

I’m loving this new generation of brands that aren’t waiting for legacy players to lead. What are you waiting for?

Pace Setters in This Space

Good Culture remains a brand setting the pace but we’ll throw in a two other brands celebrating cottage cheese’s versatility and benefits:

• Smearcase - Protein packed, fro-co (frozen cottage cheese) that eats like an ice cream

• Cotto - High-protein dips with a cottage cheese base with a whipped like texture

Need help disrupting the status quo in your category? Pace Setters helps brands build strategies that reinvent and reinvigorate categories. Reach out anytime - pacesetterscpg.com or info@pacesetterscpg.com.

In the main piece this week, we talked about when retailers copy branded players but what happens when one retailer tries to copy another? In the case of Amazon vs. Trader Joe’s, it reads like a thriller with covered walls, sealed doors and insiders doing whatever it would take to beat the competition.

Trader Joe’s is almost the anti-Amazon. No customer data, no discounting, no advertising, no e-commerce.

When Amazon decided they wanted to take down the colorful private label giant, they deployed their typical tactics — begging, borrowing and reverse engineering their way to dominance.

What happens when the most data-driven company on Earth tries to clone the most intuition-driven brand in grocery?

According to The Everything War by Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli, without access to their typical data to analyze, Amazon hired a former Trader Joe’s senior manager to help decode the formula.

When she arrived in Seattle in 2015, she unwittingly walked into what could only be described as a Trader Joe’s war room – a conference space lined floor-to-ceiling with Trader Joe’s snacks and frozen meals. Paper covering the windows and door. The mission: recreate TJ’s top 200 SKUs, down to flavor and packaging.

Over the next six months, Amazon managers allegedly pressed her to share internal Trader Joe’s data – sales volumes, margin targets, SKU performance. Eventually she relented and shared an Excel document with top sellers but it didn’t stop there – her manager demanded margin details.

When she resisted, he reportedly snapped, “You just have to give us the data.”

The spreadsheet was circulated internally before another employee raised alarms with Amazon’s legal team. The fallout: terminations, an internal audit, and the official statement – “We do not condone misuse of proprietary information.”

Introducing Wickedly Prime

Whether or not the proprietary information informed the Wickedly Prime line, they failed to capture any of the magic that Trader Joe’s has cultivated. Within three years the brand was quietly shuttered with market share never cracking 1%.

You can bully your way into volume and margins but building a brand, taste and trust takes time. Where they landed was not only completely devoid of the “dupes” we’ve come to expect from private labels, but also the antithesis of Trader Joe’s.

Why Trader Joe’s Works

Trader Joe’s is a historically secretive business but they do run a podcast that gives some insight into how they make decisions and the culture that informs them. One message that is repeated frequently is, “the store is our brand,” – the people, the merchandising, the vibe, the assortment. Trying to take the products out of that context just doesn’t work.

“The store is our brand. People can’t understand, “Why aren’t you selling products online? …. It’s like, well, because that’s not what Trader Joe’s is, you know, for us the store is our brand and our products work the best when they’re sold as part of this overall customer experience within the store. And so we’re not, we’re not ready to give that up. For us, the brand is too important, and the store is our brand”

Trader Joe’s has built a $16B empire on this playbook. They keep assortment low, about 4k SKUs per store compared to a standard 40k, and over 80% private label. Product decisions are made via taste panels and they churn about 10-15% of their SKUs per year to keep things fresh.

Curation is a strategy. Trader Joe’s has built a brand on it.

Now Everyone Wants to Be ‘Trader Joe’

While data is hard to come by, other retailers have certainly taken note of what’s working and not working at Trader Joe’s. Most notably is the rise of house brands that have a distinct personality, brand positioning and tone.

Think Walmart’s Bettergoods, Target’s Good & Gather, Aldi’s recent move to a unified brand.

Retailers have learned that there is power in building their own brand equity instead of simply borrowing from national brands category by category. They already own the physical availability, building consistent branding helps build those mental nodes for consumers — “I trust this brand, I like this brand, I want to buy this brand” — even if it’s a private label.

Amazon — Down but not out…

The desire to copy Trader Joe’s wasn’t just competition for Amazon, it was an important step in their journey of becoming a “daily habit” for Amazon shoppers. Groceries are an important part of that seamless lifestyle Amazon sought to build.

While Wickedly Prime ramped down in 2017, they certainly weren’t going to give up on winning the routine of groceries. That’s when they deployed another tool in their kit, acquisition - by buying Whole Foods that same year for $13B.

Today, Amazon operates a “One Grocery” model that was rolled out earlier this year. Bringing together Amazon Fresh, Amazon grocery stores and Whole Foods under one strategy and leadership team to once again try to compete for the hearts and stomachs of Americans.

During a question-and-answer session with investors late last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he’s “very bullish” on the company’s future in grocery.

So What?

Amazon bets on data. Trader Joe’s bets on taste.

The algorithm is only as good as the people behind it and if I’m a betting woman, those with taste will remain the best barometer in the food space.

And the worst part? It’s totally fair game.

Let’s unpack why private label can copy you and what smart brands do about it.

The Law Protects Distinctiveness, Not Originality

In CPG, there’s a gap between what feels unfair and what’s actually illegal.

The Lanham Act only protects trademarks and trade dress—the look and feel of packaging as long as they’re distinctive and non-functional.

• Distinctive = instantly tied to you. Consumers could spot it blurred out in the background of a reality-TV show.

  

• Non-functional = purely aesthetic. It doesn’t change how the product works, stacks, or costs to make.

There are a few principals that build up to this quiet “right to copy” —

• Packaging vs. Product Design: labels and box shapes can be inherently distinctive (ie, Reese’s orange); cookie or candy shapes (ie, peanut butter cups) can’t unless shoppers link them directly to you.

• Functionality: if a design choice makes a product cheaper, easier to stock or reseal, it’s fair game.

• Genericness: you can’t own the native tongue of a category (ie, blue = ranch, green = plant-based)

• Comparative Fairness: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) actually encourages honest comparisons like “compare to Brand X” — calling it good for consumers

As long as a shopper isn’t confused about who made it, it’s fair game.

The Dad Test

Call it The Dad Test: if I send my dad to the store for Graza and he comes back with the private-label dupe, odds are the design’s too close for comfort.

And it’s not just my dad who’s confused. 71% of shoppers say they can tell private label from branded products yet 72% fail when tested side-by-side. (First Insight)

You can’t trademark category language, but you can own what people remember. The question isn’t whether your brand is clear – it’s whether it’s unmistakable.

The Grocery Store Is the Arena and Retailers Are Winning

Private label is a $200B+ force to be reckoned with. In a study from First Insight, The Quiet Takeover of Private Label, they found shoppers are now actively looking for dupes, not just settling for them.

Retailers have built entire design systems around that confusion — perfecting the art of proximity without crossing the legal line.

• Kroger Simple Truth vs Organic Brands: kraft paper, clean fonts, green leaves—an aesthetic born from the early organic wave that converged so much that no one could own it.

• Target Good & Gather vs BFY Premium Players: hand-drawn ingredients, clear packaging, similar fonts yet always just different enough to dodge legal trouble.

• Aldi vs. Everyone: from Oreo-style cookies to Thin Wheat instead of Wheat Thins, their model depends on familiarity and “borrowing” from branded icons.

Retailer brands often seek to cue quality and similarity instead of straight mimicry. And when everyone’s hunting for a dupe or a hack, that’s a winning strategy.

As a brand owner, if your visual system reads as “category default,” I’m sorry to say you’ve built an open-source brand. You’ll need to break out of your own system to rebuild distinctiveness.

When Brands Push Back

Not all brands are rolling over. The wins are usually quiet — updated labels, new hierarchies, or settlements before a suit hits the wire.

The loudest right now is Mondelez v. Aldi. Mondelez accuses Aldi of a “pattern and practice” of copying its packaging and says the retailer was “repeatedly notified” about “confusingly similar” look-alikes but refused to stop. The company argues Aldi built a “copycat playbook” around the visual equity of brands they’ve spent decades building.

Smaller brands without legal budgets are fighting with press instead of lawsuits, like Brooklyn Delhi, which called out Trader Joe’s for echoing its sauces and forced a public conversation about power and ethics in retail.

If you don’t want to take it to the streets and you’re not in the business of sending legal letters, how can brands win?

The Playbook for Brands That Want to Stay Ahead

1. Design for protectability.

Don’t rely on category codes. Build asymmetric shapes, custom illustration, or ownable typography that can’t be mistaken for generic.

2. Document everything.

Save dated files, photos, and campaigns. File trade-dress registrations early — your paper trail is your insurance policy. Get a lawyer!

3. Build claims private label can’t copy.

Ownable flavors, certifications, or sourcing stories create moats beyond graphics.

4. Refresh faster.

Retailers can only clone what sits still. Seasonal drops and collabs keep you one rotation ahead.

5. Know your shelf.

Audit your top SKUs: would shoppers know them without the logo? Track consumer misattribution. Photograph and log look-alikes. Train and audit your design team for ownability. Keep receipts – literally.

Long story, short: pace and distinctiveness beat protection.

The Bottom Line

Private-label copying isn’t a loophole—it’s the system working exactly as written.

Retailers study the same law you do; they just use it better.

The best defense is a good offense: distinctiveness, documentation, and pace.

Move fast. Design smarter. And make sure that when your product’s twin shows up in aisle 5, it’s a fraternal one.

Need help defining what’s actually ownable? Pace Setters helps brands build identities that can’t be blurred out. Reach out anytime.

Sprint: Your Melatonin is Illegal in Europe

Is that a kinda salacious title and slightly misleading? Sure, but I hear that’s what gets the clicks. In my defense, it is also mostly true — the 5mg Lemme Sleep gummy you popped before your red-eye is well above the legal amount in the EU.

While the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994 allowed melatonin to flourish as an over-the-counter supplement in the U.S., in much of Europe it’s treated as a medicine and requires a prescription. In the U.S., you can buy bottles with 10mg+ doses on Amazon. In the EU, melatonin is approved only as a short-term treatment for insomnia in adults over 55 (as Circadin, a 2mg slow-release pill). The UK, EU, Japan, Australia, and even Canada all restrict or ban OTC melatonin. The United States is the outlier.

So why the caution abroad? Regulators cite three main reasons which are also concerns on the home front:

1. Inconsistent Dosage

   • Independent lab tests have found melatonin supplements vary widely from their labels, with some containing 83% less or 478% more melatonin than advertised. Gummies, in particular, showed the greatest inconsistency (PMID: 28095978).

2. High Usage by Children

   • Pediatric melatonin use has skyrocketed. From 2012 to 2021, the CDC reported a 530% increase in calls to poison control centers for kids ingesting melatonin — now the most frequently ingested “drug” in children under 5 (CDC, 2022). While most cases are harmless, it spooked regulators who worry about self-medicating kids with a hormone.

3. Long-Term Effectiveness is Questionable

   • While melatonin can help with jet lag and short-term sleep onset, evidence for long-term insomnia relief is mixed. The European Medicines Agency concluded melatonin shows modest benefit only in limited populations, and warned of insufficient long-term safety data (EU Guidelines for Insomnia).

The U.S. Outlier

Another metric vs imperial system debate, the United States sees things differently. Melatonin is one of the most popular supplements in America, a country where nearly 20% of adults take sleep aids (CDC, 2023). Advocates argue it reduces reliance on far riskier prescription sleep drugs such as zolpidem (Ambien) or benzodiazepines, both of which carry risks of dependence, cognitive impairment, and next-day drowsiness. 

And it’s not just anecdotal, a meta analysis (PMID: 23691095) showed that melatonin does significantly improve sleep in those with disorders compared to placebo but those same authors also recommended it be considered in a clinical setting versus home dosing. Either way, the U.S. puts the trust in our consumers to make these choices and the market would suggest that we’re quite happy with our melatonin. 

And don’t worry — I did some research, and no one’s getting arrested for bringing your sleep gummies over the border (allegedly) but you should probably make sure you pack it in its original packaging and check in with your doctor about your sleep at your next physical. 

If you stepped into a GNC or supplement shop in 1993, you’d see shelves lined with tubs of protein powder, bottles of vitamins galore, and capsules promising you “energy” and “weight loss” instantly. Magazines by checkout featured the men of Muscle Beach and Jane Fonda’s latest exercise video.

But there was something else in the air — anxiety. A rising belief that the FDA was gearing up to take away vitamins and supplements — moving them behind pharmacy counters, only to be accessed via prescription or, in the most hyperbolic stories, gone from shelves forever. True or not, the $4B industry was readying their army of passionate gym-goers and shop owners to fight back.

Health food stores had “blackout days,” using black coverings swathed over vitamins and supplements to dramatize what a ban would look like. Desperate to save their fish oil and protein powder, millions of letters were sent to Congress with the rallying cry: Save our Supplements!

The fervor before 1994 set the stage for one of the most consequential regulatory decisions in modern food history.

The Before: FDA as Gatekeeper & The Rise of Fitness Supplements (The Gray Zone)

To understand what was at stake, you need to know how the FDA worked then. Under U.S. law, anything added to food had to either be:

• A food additive, formally approved by the FDA, or

• GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) — a designation for ingredients that had a history of accepted use or scientific evidence of safety

In this era, supplements were considered food additives and therefore the FDA could, and increasingly did, challenge their efficacy and claims. Regulators argued that these products were unapproved additives or, in some cases, unapproved drugs.

At the same time, American culture was shifting. The 70s and 80s fitness boom made supplements as common in gyms as in living rooms. Arnold turned bodybuilding into Hollywood, while Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons brought aerobics to millions. Protein powders moved beyond bodybuilders, Vitamin Shoppe opened its first store in 1977, and GNC was multiplying fast. Their shelves were filled with fat burners, amino acid blends, creatine and the latest fads.

Like today, everyone seemed to be taking some sort of supplement, and while no one was quite sure if they worked, few were willing to risk missing out. Legally speaking, it was all one big gray zone.

The Turning Point: The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994

As the supplement industry exploded, the FDA tried to rein in vitamins and minerals it saw as unruly, misleading or unsafe. The goal was to stop false cure-alls for diseases like AIDS or cancer, but this sparked the all out panic among activists where we started this story.

That’s when Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) stepped in. With Utah serving as a hub for supplement makers and Harkin a champion of alternative health, they drove the bipartisan Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) to passage in 1994.

DSHEA was a true turning point. It created a new category — dietary supplements. The rules were simple but revolutionary:

• Any supplement ingredient on the market before October 15, 1994 was “grandfathered” in — no FDA pre-approval required. Think whey protein, creatine, and ginseng.

• New ingredients needed only to notify the FDA, not pass full review.

• Companies could make structure/function claims (“supports energy,” “boosts recovery”) with a small disclaimer you’ve probably seen a million times but pay little attention to — This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA

  

The law flipped the script. The FDA was no longer a gatekeeper stopping products before they launched. It became a referee, stepping in only after a product was shown to be unsafe.

The After: The Boom & the Gamble

What followed DSHEA was nothing short of explosive. Freed from the need for premarket FDA approval, the supplement industry sprinted ahead and never looked back.

The U.S. fitness supplement market grew from a niche subculture in the 1980s to a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse by the 2000s, with categories like protein powders, creatine, pre-workouts, and fat burners moving from the back corners of gyms into mainstream grocery aisles. If retail was an indicator, in the post-DSHEA era, GNC grew nearly fivefold, exceeding 5,000 stores by 2000 to meet rising demand. By 2023, sports nutrition alone was valued at over $20 billion in the U.S.

DSHEA made this possible by removing the gate. Companies no longer had to prove safety or efficacy before launching. Instead, products could hit shelves quickly, and the FDA could only intervene after harm was shown. That opened the door for some of the most successful supplement stories:

• Creatine, once a niche powder, became one of the most studied and widely adopted performance enhancers in the world

• Protein powders evolved from chalky tubs for bodybuilders into mainstream staples for athletes, dieters, and everyday consumers

• Pre-workouts turned into a cultural phenomenon, with entire brands built around the ritual of a scoop before training

But with that speed came risk. The same rules that enabled success also allowed dangerous or poorly tested products to slip through:

• Ephedra, once the hottest fat-burner on the market, was linked to thousands of adverse events and at least 64 deaths before being banned in 2004

• Stimulants like DMAA hid in pre-workouts until the FDA forced them out. Especially dangerous when mixed with caffeine, DMAA was linked to cases of liver failure, psychiatric episodes, and death

• Counterfeits and spiked products (for example, L-tryptophan) became common on open marketplaces. Today, we see it commonly in marketplaces like Amazon. In 2022, researchers tested 30 “immune-supporting” supplements bought on Amazon and found that 57% were fake or adulterated

The result is an industry that’s both dynamic and fragile — one where innovation thrives, but the line between transformative and destructive is thin.

Today: The Burden of Trust

Three decades later, DSHEA still defines the supplement aisle. The U.S. remains one of the most permissive markets in the world. In Europe, supplements are tightly regulated, often requiring pre-approval or being treated as medicines. In Canada, every product must carry a license number before it hits the shelf. In America? The barriers to entry are lower than ever.

This freedom fueled innovation. It made supplements accessible, mainstream, and culturally relevant. But it also shifted the burden. With FDA acting as referee instead of gatekeeper, the onus for safety, quality, and trust falls back on consumers. With 62% of consumers saying they don’t trust health claims made by food companies and 82% say labels on health and wellness products need to be more transparent and easier to understand (NielsenIQ), where does that leave us?

For brands, it means reputation is everything. Good actors invest in testing, transparency, and certifications not because the law forces them to, but because consumer trust builds equity. For retailers, it means the credibility of the shelf matters — a trusted platform or store becomes a filter against the chaos of the open marketplace. And for consumers, it means asking harder questions: Who made this? What testing backs it up? Why are they trying to sell me this? Does this brand deserve my trust?

Supplements are no longer simply friend or foe — they are a mirror of how well consumers, brands, and retailers navigate an industry built on freedom first, oversight second. And that, perhaps, is the real legacy of 1994: a market where wellness is abundant, but trust is our most valuable currency.

Practical Application: What to Look For in a Supplement

If the burden is on the consumer, here’s how to shop smart:

1. Third-Party Testing Seals

   • Look for third-party testing and, ideally, certifications like USP Verified, NSF Certified, or Informed Sport to verify purity and accuracy. These are so trusted in the industry that AG1 ran a campaign touting NSF certification as the most important feature on their packaging.

     

2. Transparency

   • Reputable brands publish Certificates of Analysis (COAs) or batch-level testing results.

   • Be cautious with products that feature vague “proprietary blends” that hide exact ingredient amounts or claims that promise miracles of replacing diet, training, or medical care.

3. Retailer Credibility

   • Buy directly from brand websites or trusted retailers (e.g., Whole Foods, specialty fitness shops).

   • Be cautious with third-party marketplace sellers and if doing so, always buy directly from the manufacturer.

   • Dan Go did a great deep dive on X on this issue, here’s an example from a trusted brand but a not so trusted marketplace:

     

Good Actor Brands to Know

These brands have built reputations around quality, transparency, and science. A few standouts setting the pace:

• Transparent Labs → Fully open labeling (no proprietary blends), third-party testing, clean ingredient profiles.

• Momentous → NSF Certified, partnered with pro athletes and teams; science-backed formulations.

• Promix → Transparent sourcing, publishes heavy metal testing results by the lot code, clean-label focus.
  

So much of consumer trust comes from personal experience and reputation built over time. What brands do you trust in this space?