Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

🚪 Why a successful CPG founder walked away from Whole Foods, Sprouts, and 3,500 retail doors
🌱 Non-UPF is the next big label in CPG… but not without retailers
🤖 90% of grocers are experimenting with AI, CPG deal value jumps 119%, cottage cheese and whey supplies run dry

Meet Lauren Chew, founder of Love + Chew, a vegan, gluten-free cookie brand that uses almond flour, chia, and dates.

Lauren was working at a solar startup when she got into vegan baking. It’s a familiar CPG origin story: great recipes shared with friends and family, and everyone telling her she should sell them.

So she did. Door to door, café by café, all around San Francisco. The real turning point came when a friend pitched her cookies into his company’s cafeteria. The purchase order that came back was big enough to turn a hobby into a business.

Over the next eight years, Love + Chew scaled to 3,500 grocery doors, including Whole Foods and Sprouts. Six months ago, Lauren walked away from all of them.

“It was a really tough decision,” she says, “because the velocities were solid, but it just financially didn’t make sense for us.” Lauren rebuilt around channels that were profitable. And the business is better now than it ever was on retail shelves.

00:18 - The mind behind Love + Chew
03:14 - Two flavors carry the whole line
06:07 - Pulling out of 3,500 retail doors
10:47 - Customers really like going into store
13:23 - We want to do business with people we like
17:56 - Right product, right packaging, right price

• 3,500: Retail and grocery doors Lauren walked away from

• $75,000: A single distributor chargeback, invalid and unresolved for months

• 70%: gross margin CPG founders should aim for before entering retail

Shelf space can hide bad economics. Love + Chew had what most founders want: 3,500 retail doors, strong velocities, and national distribution. But retail revenue tells you what sold, not what you made. The real number that matters is contribution margin after trade spend and deductions.

You can leave on your own terms. Most brands don’t pull out of retail; they run out of cash and have to shut down instead. Lauren decided to walk away before that happened. It wasn’t easy, but she kept the channels that were making money (club, Amazon, food service) and cut the rest. What’s left is a healthier business she enjoys running.

Early focus beats early variety. Love + Chew stayed at two flavors for its first two years. Not for lack of ideas, but because Lauren understood her market. “We have one or two flavors that are the clear winners. Everything else kind of does okay.” Founders love launching new SKUs, but profitable founders look at the data before expanding.

Know what each channel costs before you scale it. Retail doesn’t just take margin at the shelf. It takes it in chargebacks, promos, bridge buying, and slow-pay terms. Every part of the supply chain is optimized for its own economics, not yours. Know your expected deductions before signing the next purchase order, not after the chargeback shows up.

Budget for the costs you can’t see yet. Lauren tells founders to target a 70% gross margin into retail. About 20% of that, she says, is usually spent on marketing alone, which is on the conservative side. It’s better to build a cushion from day one rather than explain the lack of cash later.

Market signal → National grocery retail used to mean a brand made it. Now it’s just one channel among many… and not always the best one.

The channel profitability check

Before your next renewal or retail push, run the numbers on every channel:

1. Run a P&L by channel. Not just topline revenue; know exactly where you make money and where you don’t.

2. List all your costs. Chargebacks, slow pay, bridge buying… look at everything eating into your margin.

3. Evaluate the channel, not just the sale. Is it a good fit? Does it pay on time? Is it sustainable long-term?

4. Set a decision point. If the math doesn’t work, give yourself a deadline to act. Don’t wait for the channel to hit a dead end.

The natural CPG industry has spent years talking about ingredients. The next conversation is about processing.

When a new standard like Non-Ultraprocessed Foods (non-UPF) Verification shows up, the instinct is to chase the certification, reformulate, and wait for shoppers to notice.

But Ashlie Winson-Jones doesn’t think it plays out that way. As a founding member of Social Nature, the leading shopper activation platform for natural CPG brands, she has a front-row seat to which certifications make an impact.

Her take? Certifications don’t move shoppers on their own. Retailers do. Non-UPF won’t mean a thing to most consumers and brands until it has retailer backing.

The Non-GMO Project launched its new Non-UPF Verification this year. “What does this mean for shoppers? Do shoppers actually understand it? No. I don’t think the industry fully does either. The challenge with non-UPF is the processed foods, like sugar, emulsifiers, seed oils, often make food taste good.”

But certifications don’t matter until there’s a partnership with a major retailer. “In 2018, Expo West was flooded with non-GMO certifications. That was when Whole Foods put a stake in the sand: get organic or non-GMO certified, or don’t get shelf space. The entire industry flipped overnight. At the end of the day, that’s how consumers catch on because certifying bodies don’t have the resources to build mass awareness on their own.”

Retailers can get products on shelf, but now what? “I’ve been at Social Nature for 11 years, and the problem hasn’t changed: once you get on shelf, you have a few months to prove yourself. We take a brand’s exact store list, cross-reference it against where our members shop, and invite them to try the product at those specific locations. Members buy it, upload the receipt, and we reimburse them through a rebate tool. That helps force sales at the exact stores you need to hit velocity targets.”

Read the rest of our Q&A

90% of grocers are experimenting with AI: The robots are here, and they’re filing purchase orders.

Fewer deals, bigger checks: After four years of declining deal volume, CPG deal value jumped 119% YoY in Q1 2026 (although driven by a handful of deals, not a market comeback).

America is a fast food nation: And it starts at school, where most lunches are 20 minutes, leaving kids only 10 minutes to eat, after accounting for walking, lines, and bathroom breaks.

Where has all the cottage cheese gone? And the whey too.

Blurred lines: Part grocery, part restaurant. Cooking at home, eating out. Nobody’s picking a lane.

Mondelez 2026 State of Snacking: A review of frequency, occasions, and motivations (why we’re never not snacking)

Oatly stops explaining itself: Now that oat milk is a staple, the Swedish company shifts its focus from explanation to events and experience.

C-store shoppers want less interaction and more freebies: Honestly, same.

How does food get traded around the world? An interactive tool of global food trade, where it starts, and where it ends up.

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

July 1 (Virtual): Opportunity Knocks - Fireside Chat with Kroger

July 2 (Virtual): Deadline to nominate 2026 Store Brands Editors’ Picks

July 7 (Virtual): The TikTok Shop Launch Playbook

July 9 (NYC): From Noise to Momentum: How Emerging CPG Brands Actually Win in 2026

July 12-15 (Chicago): IFT First

July 19-24 (New Orleans): Tales of the Cocktail 2026

Oct 20-21 (Chicago): Call for Speakers at the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Tech Summit

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

🦝 A first-time CPG founder who brought a concept to Costco in 3 months
📦 How a packaging designer looks at your product
🥓 Kevin Bacon is now Kevin Bean, retail’s new job description, the New Consumer Report (it’s about alcohol)

Meet Jonathan Cornish, co-founder and Head Bandit of Froot Thief, a 100% natural fruit whip made from the equivalent of a cup of fruit.

For the last 20 years, Jonathan and his brothers built private-label products for retailers like Target, Costco, Wegmans, and Woolworths. He’s put countless first-to-market ideas on shelves. Froot Thief is the first one with his name on it.

Together with his partner Hayley Gait Golding (who founded and sold Bear Yo-Yo), Jonathan saw a gap in the snack aisle: plenty of “fruit” snacks, not much actual fruit.

But they didn’t make another fruit roll-up. They made fruit spaghetti: 100-inch gummy strands of pure fruit that kids can twirl around their fingers, bunch into a ball, and have fun eating.

Jonathan took it straight to Costco. “The buyer said she’d take every strand if he could make their back-to-school campaign, which was two months away.” Now Froot Thief is nationwide in Costco, as well as Target, Sprouts, and 500+ retail doors, proving there’s still room to play with your food.

00:18 - The minds behind Froot Thief
03:19 - Our very first customer was Costco
06:27 - If you can win over the child, you’ve got a customer for life
09:07 - Our biggest challenge was supply chain
13:35 - Buyers want as much margin as they can get
18:11 - You push in all your chips

• 100 inches: Length of fruit whips in every bag

• 3 months: Time from receiving their first Costco PO to shipment

• Tens of millions: Bags shipped to the US, with almost no customer complaints

Don’t bring them another can of baked beans. Buyers don’t want a cheaper or slightly different version of something they already have. They want a product different enough to jump off the shelf. Fruit spaghetti was a new format with no direct competition, which made it an easier “yes” than a better-but-familiar product.

Novelty gets the meeting. Infrastructure gets the PO. Landing Costco as their first retailer sounds like a lucky break. What made it possible was Jonathan’s 20 years of manufacturing, QA, compliance, and supply chain systems built through his private label business. So when Costco said yes, Jonathan knew he could deliver.

Sampling is still the highest-ROI marketing in food. Froot Thief puts a disproportionate amount of budget into demos instead of digital ads. “I’d rather apply the money to demos than to silly banners online,” Jonathan says. Nobody converts off a banner the way they convert off a bite.

Honesty closes more than overpromising does. A lot of sales people go in there and promise the world just to make the sale. “If you can’t meet their volumes or timelines, just say it. A lot of buyers are reasonable people.” After working with thousands of buyers, Jonathan encourages founders to tell buyers the truth instead of starting the relationship on the wrong foot.

Deliver direct whenever you can. U.S. distribution has many layers founders don’t expect: brokers, distributors, deductions, spoilage fees, off-invoice promo allowances. A $100K invoice can easily end up as $25K after all the deductions. One solution is to asks retailers if they’re open to delivering direct. It isn’t always an option, but when retailers allow it, Jonathan sees significant savings.

Market signal → In mature categories, quality is rarely the bottleneck. Attention is. Consumers stop noticing products that look like everything else.

The seen vs. noticed test

• If people have to read it, it’s probably an improvement. If they can see it, it’s probably an innovation.

• If your difference is an ingredient, expect to explain. If it’s a format, expect to be noticed.

• If you’re “better than,” you’re in comparison. If you’re “different from,” you’re in discovery.

• If buyers ask about margins first, you’ve made a product. If they ask what it is first, you’ve made something new.

Most founders think packaging is a design problem. It’s usually a business problem.

After 20 years helping CPG brands like Magic Spoon, Good & Gather (Target), and Velveeta, Anna Ison has seen the same mistake over and over: founders using design to solve other problems. Problems with positioning, differentiation, clarity.

We talk about why community comes before capital, the reality of building in New York, and why the pitch that wins is rarely the one you expect.

Packaging has two jobs. People don’t have the time or energy to decode what you are. Make it easy to buy and help them understand quickly. It’s one thing to catch attention. It’s another thing to close the deal. You have to do both.

Your brand is not your product. What founders get wrong: they want their packaging to list every benefit, every functional claim. But there’s no emotional storytelling. Branding isn’t the product. It’s the story, the emotional connection. That’s a different layer of strategy entirely. It’s not just about the look. It’s about knowing your consumer and speaking their language.

How many messages should be on a package? I’d say three at most. Fewer is better. You’re not writing a crossword puzzle. You’re trying to help someone make a decision in seconds. Too many messages and the eye scans everything and lands on nothing. Look at Oreo. One giant logo, maybe a flavor. That’s it. And over time those shapes and colors get embedded. They become visual shortcuts. You flash a Coca-Cola bottle and you just know. That’s what you’re building toward.

Read the rest of our Q&A

Where is consumption going? Multi-sensory, micro-community, customized, and apocalyptic prepping.

Private label is winning pocket-share: 92% of U.S. grocery shoppers currently have store brand products.

Retail’s new job description: Betting on experiential formats that digital channels can’t replicate.

The next snack looks like sports nutrition: Energy gel has +486.8% combined YoY growth?

Kevin Bacon is now Kevin Bean: PSA from Humane World for Animals’ “Beansday,” a weekly campaign encouraging people to swap meat for beans.

New Consumer Report is out! And it’s about alcohol.

Mars to Table Challenge: As NASA eyes Mars, what will astronauts eat?

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

July 2 (Virtual): Deadline to nominate 2026 Store Brands Editors’ Picks

July 7 (Virtual): The TikTok Shop Launch Playbook

July 9 (NYC): From Noise to Momentum: How Emerging CPG Brands Actually Win in 2026

July 12-15 (Chicago): IFT First

July 19-24 (New Orleans): Tales of the Cocktail 2026

Oct 20-21 (Chicago): Call for Speakers at the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Tech Summit

The natural CPG industry has spent years talking about ingredients. The next conversation is about processing.

When a new standard like Non-Ultraprocessed Foods (non-UPF) Verification shows up, the instinct is to chase the certification, reformulate, and wait for shoppers to notice.

But Ashlie Winson-Jones doesn’t think it usually plays out that way. As a founding member of Social Nature, the leading shopper activation platform for natural CPG brands, she’s had a front-row seat to which certifications actually sticks.

Her take? Certifications don’t move shoppers on their own. Retailers do. Non-UPF won’t mean a thing to most consumers and brands until it has retailer backing.

The Non-GMO Project launched a new certification this year called Non-UPF Verification.

But what does this mean for shoppers? Do shoppers actually understand it? No. I don’t think the industry fully does either.

The categories under the most scrutiny are anything in center shelf: packaged goods and how processed they are inside the package. I think what will happen is shoppers will just see processed food is bad, this meets a standard, check, and move on because we’re all so busy.

That’s the real misconception. Social Nature represents the largest community of natural shoppers, and when they don’t want to buy something, price is usually six or seven out of ten. So they don’t mind spending more, but they have to understand why they’re spending more, and it still has to taste good.

The challenge with non-UPF is the processed foods, like sugar, emulsifiers, seed oils, often make food taste good. So it’s just gonna be a really interesting challenge, and I don’t think brands will care until their retailer cares. The requirements are wildly specific and different depending on the category. Brands can get a free audit through the site, which is probably the best start.

But certifications don't matter until there's a partnership with a major retailer.

In 2018, Expo West was flooded with non-GMO certifications. It was orange everywhere. That was the year Whole Foods put a stake in the sand: get organic or non-GMO certified, or don’t get shelf space. The entire industry flipped overnight. It was destabilizing, and arguably anti-startup. The big boys can afford to do this, but a startup can’t.

But at the end of the day, these certifications often don’t mean anything until they partner with a major retailer. That’s really how consumers catch on because certifying bodies like the Plant Based Foods Association and non-UPF don’t have the resources to build mass awareness on their own.

Retailers can get you on shelf, but now what?

When Social Nature started, there were almost no levers for shopper marketing. Just us or in-store demos. COVID forced a wave of contactless sampling options and the methods got very sophisticated. But after 11 years, the problem hasn’t changed: once you get on shelf, now what? You have a few months to prove yourself.

Brands come to us for targeted trial at specific stores, without having to run demos all day every day. We take a brand’s exact store list, cross-reference it against where our members shop, and invite them to try the product at those specific locations. Members buy it, upload the receipt, and we reimburse them through a rebate tool. That helps force sales at the exact stores you need to hit velocity targets.

Distribution points and a cool product is the secret formula.

So Molly Suds is a laundry product, and as soon as they came to our doorstep, I was like, this is gonna kill it. Molly Suds is $21 at retail, so it isn’t cheap. I figured the campaign would take six months, but we ran through all the redemptions in three weeks, it went so incredibly well.

It was a 50% off discount and 97% of those who purchased were new to the brand, but willing to put $11 of their own money in to try the product. The brand also had great distribution in Walmart, Target, Home Depot, which matters just as much as the offer itself. Without that distribution, we wouldn’t have had the funnel to support the demand.

Giving shoppers more choice will increase redemption rates.

Our offers run more aggressive than something like Ibotta, because most of our brands are challenger brands, not enterprise. Once a brand gets big enough, they’re not defending shelf space the same way.

The best offer type depends on the category. Buy-one-get-one (BOGO) works well for beverage and frozen because they’re products people stock up on. For something like an açaí bowl, I’d give one free and retarget with a BOGO later; nobody’s buying two smoothie bowls at once.

Usually, 30% off on a brand with no name recognition doesn’t move the needle. Shoppers have to put in too much of their own money for an unknown product, they won’t try it.

Brands often get too attached to tying offers to one SKU but widening the offer to apply to all your products gives shoppers more choice and almost always increases redemption.

The more product reviews that are syndicated, the better.

SEO used to be everything; now it’s AEO. Your product needs to be searchable across every channel, and reviews are the easiest way there. We partner with Bazaarvoice and syndicate reviews directly to Walmart.com and Target.com, which makes products more visible to tools like ChatGPT.

One of our clients, Daiya, is being picked up by ChatGPT when people ask about plant-based butter alternatives Partly because of syndicated reviews and partly because they’re already a known name. I think everyone’s trying to figure it out, but let’s just say the more product reviews you have that are syndicated, the better.

Buyers are exposed to hundreds of brands, just make it easy for them.

Beyond velocity and reviews, we let brands ask shoppers 10 custom post-trial questions. My favorite use of this is to help de-risk a retailer’s investment in the brand.

Going back to Molly Suds, their narrative is about how they compare to conventional, which will always be cheaper and has tons of brand awareness.

So post-trial, we ask shoppers: is this as good as Tide? Would you buy it over the leading brand? We can also show whether they’re Walmart or Target shoppers, and whether they plan to buy again. This data de-risks the brand and gives retailers a forecast beyond just initial velocity.

There’s tons of swaps you can make for scale that you might as well do early.

Brands consistently underestimate how much margin they need before they can really go to market. Then pressures like non-UPF only add to that.

I always tell founders: get real advice early about the swaps you’ll eventually need to make. A lot of founders are too idealistic about their product, which erodes margin until it’s impossible to scale or fundraise.

Aim for 50%+ margins, get good operational advice, and make the trade-off between perfection and scale early. I’ve seen brands wait until year five or six, then have to pull products off shelves entirely to reformulate, repackage, and basically start over. If founders got that tough-love advice from the get-go, they’d save themselves years and a lot of money.

One of the biggest mistakes a brand makes is thinking they know what their shopper cares about.

Working with a lot of owner-operators and founders, I find that one of the biggest mistakes a brand makes is thinking they know what their shopper cares about.

I knew a founder who was completely fixated on the fact that his product used Italian wheat. He was proud of it, convinced shoppers would care because European standards are stricter than North America’s, and that Italian wheat was easier for the body to process. When we actually sampled shoppers, all they cared about was the 23 grams of protein… and this was even before the whole protein craze. He spent years marketing in a direction that didn’t resonate with his actual audience.

I see this constantly. A supplement brand says “gum-free” and shoppers think, what’s gum, and why would it be in here? When you’re close to your mission, you don’t realize how much of an expert you’ve become, or how little the average shopper is tracking what you mean.

Most founders think packaging is a design problem. It's usually a business problem.

When sales stall, the immediate reaction is to redesign the label, refresh the colors, or hire a new agency. But according to packaging strategist Anna Ison, that’s often the wrong move.

After 20 years helping CPG brands like Magic Spoon, Good & Gather (Target), and Velveeta, Anna has seen the same mistake over and over: founders using design to solve other problems. Problems with positioning, differentiation, clarity.

In this conversation, Anna explains the importance of looking at data, packaging’s two jobs (grab attention and close the sale), and the simple research method every founder can do for free.

Americans are novelty-driven. Dopamine packaging, new everything. That’s part of why so many brands enter the market; and why most don’t last more than two years.

Before you redesign, start with data

You have under three seconds to grab someone’s attention, explain the offering, communicate what makes it unique, and give them a reason to buy. Before you touch anything, you need data. Velocity from the retailer, shelf performance, whether people even understand what your product is at a glance.

Is it moving compared to competitors? Does it look credible? Does it fit the right price point? Is it communicating anything different? Get a sense of how it’s performing first.

Packaging has two jobs

If someone is attracted by the visual but doesn’t understand what it is, there’s confusion. Mental friction. And you’re already competing against everything else on that shelf. People don’t have the time or energy to decode what you are. Make it easy to buy and help them understand quickly.

It’s one thing to catch attention. It’s another thing to close the deal. You have to do both.

Your brand is not your product

What founders get wrong: they want their packaging to list every benefit, every functional claim. But there’s no emotional storytelling.

Branding isn’t the product. It’s the story, the emotional connection. That’s a different layer of strategy entirely. It’s not just about the look. It’s about knowing your consumer and speaking their language.

When packaging isn’t the problem

Sometimes the issue isn’t packaging at all. It’s positioning. Is there enough visual context (texture, size, flavor) for someone to understand what they’re looking at? And more importantly: is your product actually different from everything around it? If it’s a granola sitting next to five other granolas, what’s the differentiator?

That’s a strategic question before it’s a design question. Packaging is more than look and feel. It ties back to where the brand is coming from and what it’s trying to say. It becomes less about the designer’s style and more about making the brand feel like itself.

How many messages should be on a package?

I’d say three at most. Fewer is better. You’re not writing a crossword puzzle. You’re trying to help someone make a decision in seconds. Too many messages and the eye scans everything and lands on nothing. Mental friction sets in and people move on.

Look at Oreo. One giant logo, maybe a flavor. That’s it. And over time those shapes and colors get embedded. They become visual shortcuts. You flash a Coca-Cola bottle and you just know. That’s what you’re building toward.

Why great brands don’t constantly redesign

Every time you redesign, you lose equity. Equity is what compounds over time: the shapes, the colors, the visual language that live in people’s memory. Redesign ten times and customers don’t recognize you anymore. Do it once, twice, properly.

Think of it as a facelift, not a face transplant. Identify the core visual equities, the things that are distinctly yours, and bring them forward in a new way. You’re not changing the person. You’re just refreshing them.

The best packaging research is free

Go to the store and watch someone shop. Do they touch your packaging? Pick it up and put it right back down? Are they scanning? Where does their eye go?

Just observe it. You might get some good clues out of it. Be like a little investigator.

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

🍋 How one founder is bringing her grandmother’s nimbu pani recipe nationwide
🏆 The Knicks won the series; Graza won the post, ALDI launches its limited-time Blind Box, Yelp’s Fastest Growing Brands of 2026
📅 Whole Foods 2026 LEAP Applications now open, Summer Fancy Food Show, IFT First

Meet Maxine and Alan Henderson, the husband-and-wife team behind Bollygood, the first Indian-inspired sparkling lemonade and limeade in the U.S.

Growing up, Maxine spent summers in India drinking nimbu pani, a traditional beverage her grandmother made from scratch. “She’d add the sugar, squeeze the lime juice, and grab some spices from the kitchen,” says Maxine. “It was the most refreshing drink.”

It was also 40 grams of sugar per serving.

When Maxine and Alan started their own family, they kept the tradition alive, making a healthier version at home. Around the same time, they noticed Indian food had become a grocery store staple. But Indian beverages? Nowhere to be seen.

So they decided to bring one of South Asia’s most beloved drinks to a wider audience. Six years, 20+ formulation rounds, and a major redesign later, Bollygood is in almost 500 stores, a family recipe turned national beverage brand.

00:15 - The minds behind Bollygood
03:19 - No Indian representation in beverage
06:17 - The Hollywood Bollywood feel
08:58 - We like to say it’s organized chaos
12:35 - Taking your taste buds on a trip
15:59 - Being out of stock for nine months
18:35 - Landing a distributor, getting our first retailer
21:58 - Velocity, placements, store count
24:19 - Fundraising is an ongoing thing
26:39 - Raise as much money as you need, then a little more

• 20+ iterations: To turn a family recipe into a shelf-ready product

• $100,000: Bootstrapped into their first production run

• ~500 stores: Nationwide distribution and growing

Community can open the first door. A strong brand opens the next hundred. Bollygood’s first customers were the South Asian community: people who already knew and loved nimbu pani. After reformulating the product, earning Non-GMO Project Verification, and introducing new flavors, Bollygood started attracting a broader audience of health-conscious and culture-curious consumers. “Not being pigeonholed in the ethnic aisle was a big thing,” says Maxine. “We’re right beside all the sodas and sparkling beverages.”

Raise more than you think you need, before you need it. Bollygood has been mostly bootstrapped, and Alan is clear about what he’d do differently: “Raise as much money as you think you need, and a little bit more.” Once you’re managing inventory runs, demo budgets, and retailer timelines, there’s rarely a convenient time to fundraise. Well-funded brands don’t have fewer problems. But they do have more options when problems pop up.

Less on the can, more in the cart. Bollygood launched with a strong product and founder story. But things really started rolling after a packaging redesign. During Target’s Forward Founders accelerator, the main feedback was too much was happening on the can. It stung at first, but they listened. Bollygood 2.0 was cleaner and easier to read at a glance. It caught UNFI’s attention at Expo East and opened the door to their first major retail account.

Demo like you mean it. A three-hour demo costs about $200. With 65 Whole Foods locations in the Northeast alone, Bollygood can’t be everywhere. So they treat demos like an investment, not an activity. To justify spending, a demo has to either boost a top-performing store or revive a slower location. Sampling without strategy is just giving stuff away.

You don’t need a ton of data. You need to understand what you have. Most early-stage brands can’t afford Nielsen or SPINS. Bollygood runs their operations using the Whole Foods supplier portal and a pivot table their college freshman son built. “That really changed the game for me to be on top of my data,” says Maxine. “It literally takes five minutes… I told him he might have a business.”

Market signal → The beverage aisle is years behind the food aisle when it comes to global flavor. For every dish that’s made it to the dinner table, there’s a drink that hasn’t made it to the shelf yet.

The demo cheat sheet

Before you spend $200 on a demo, ask: what's my velocity and promo strategy?

• If velocity is down + promo is running → Do a demo. It’s the best way to convert customers.

• If velocity is flat + no promo → Wait. Consider a promo first, then demo.

• If velocity is up + no promo → Skip. Sales are good. Save your budget.

• If velocity has been flat for 2+ months → Don’t demo. Fix placement first.

You’re already paying your invoices. But you could be earning on them.

Every time you pay a vendor via ACH or check, you’re leaving money on the table. Not because the invoice is wrong. Because you’re paying it the wrong way.

Most CPG brands have vendors who accept cards. They just never checked.

Our partner Dash.fi identifies which vendors accept cards automatically. Switch the payment method, start earning 3% back on those invoices. Done.

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Chances are you have more card-eligible vendor spend than you think. From invoices you’re already paying.

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Get a free 5-minute demo

The Knicks won the series. Graza won the post.

Drop it like it’s hot: ALDI introduces its Blind Box with four limited-time themed grocery bundles (Snack, Fiber, Protein, and Mystery), dropping on June 22, 12pm ET.

A $395 pineapple: “Only a few thousand of the pineapples are produced each year and they always sell out.”

Yelp’s Fastest Growing Brands of 2026: Caffeinated drive-thus, dirty soda, and lots of chicken.

Plant by numbers: The West has highest household penetration, the South has the biggest sales volume, the Midwest is the fastest growing, the Northeast loves a vegan cheese.

Putting the junk in junk food: The Consumer Report on additives and contaminants in everyday products.

Low on stock? Letting customers know actually increases loyalty and spending.

June 1-July 16 (Virtual): Whole Foods Accepting Applications for 2026 LEAP

June 16 (Virtual): How GLP-1 Is Reshaping Food, Nutrition & Supplements

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

June 18 (NYC): Margs & Momentum: A Summer Fancy Food Show Celebration

June 28 (NYC): Startup CPG Founder Dinner @ Summer Fancy Food 2026

July 7 (Virtual): The TikTok Shop Launch Playbook

July 12-15 (Chicago): IFT First

July 19-24 (New Orleans): Tales of the Cocktail 2026

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

🍷 How a first-time founder got canned wine into 200 stores, one door at a time
📰 Gen Z goes modular, when east meets west, everyone’s going private
☀️ Shows of summer: IDDBA, KeHE Holiday Show, Summer Fancy Food Show, IFT First

Meet Hogan Burrell, founder of PNKYS, a canned wine brand for people who like wine but aren’t “wine people.”

The idea started after a trip to Mexico, some questionable water, and a case of salmonella. During recovery, his doctor suggested red wine as one of the alcoholic drinks easier on the stomach.

So Hogan started ordering wine at bars. Looking for it at parties. The problem? Every trip down the wine aisle left him more confused than when he walked in. Cursive labels, complicated tasting notes, no idea why one cost $15 and another $150.

What he wanted was something simpler.

So he cashed out his 401k and spent more than a year figuring out self-distribution and how to build a brand that sells.

Today, PNKYS is in nearly 200 independent accounts, in conversations with major retailers, and scaling the old-fashioned way: one door at a time.

00:14 - The mind behind PNKYS
03:46 - The easiest to drink, that’s what we want
07:34 - Quit my job, cash out 401K, cash out savings
11:03 - 70% off premise, 30% on premise
14:15 - The exact opposite of every other wine brand
17:29 - Raising close to half a million right now
20:15 - I would do it all over again 100 times

• $60K: Initial investment from his 401k and personal savings

• ~200 accounts: Self-distributed as a one-man team

• 4–5/week: Number of in-store demos Hogan still does himself

Remove as much risk as possible for the retailer. When Hogan started pitching PNKYS to retailers, he thought they’d care about the brand story. Most didn’t. They wanted to know one thing: Will it sell? A new brand has no velocity data, no distributor, and no track record. Every reason to say no. So Hogan made the decision easier. He did tastings, promotions, and if the product didn’t move within 30 days, he’d buy it back.

The goal of a demo isn’t to create a sale. It’s to create a repeat customer. Hogan runs four or five tastings a week but caps new stores at two per month. Because retailers want to know what happens when the founder leaves. If sales only happen while you’re pouring samples, that’s not proof of demand. That’s proof you’re good at selling. The real test is whether someone comes back and buys it again when nobody’s watching.

Use trends to open doors, and your core products to stay there. Last summer, everyone was putting jalapeños in their Sauvignon Blanc. Hogan spotted it and launched a canned version before anyone else. “It’s fun and it’s definitely a door opener,” says Hogan. “If there’s an account we want, we’ll approach with the Jalapeño Sauvignon Blanc, let that sell, then bring our others on.”

Know what you’re actually selling. PNKYS is organic, well-made, and tastes good. But Hogan barely talks about that. He talks about “wine that just pairs well with vibe.” In a category obsessed with tasting notes and terroir, PNKYS competes on something else entirely: bright colors, tailgates, and high energy. The product is canned wine. The thing being sold is a good time.

Increase your surface area for luck. Hogan found his winery through a connection of a connection. He showed up to Expo West even though it was mostly non-alc. Neither opportunity promised an immediate payoff. One led to a production partner. The other validated the brand. Put yourself in more rooms. You never know which conversation changes the trajectory of the business.

Market signal → Over time, categories optimize for enthusiasts. Language gets more technical. Experience gets more intimidating. The opportunities are at the edge, where people are waiting for something made for them.

The retailer pitch checklist

Retailers aren’t buying your vision. They’re buying confidence that the product will move. Before your next pitch, make sure you can answer yes to all five:

1. Do you know where the product fits? Walk the store first and have a shelf placement in mind.

2. Do you know their margin? Most independents have a required margin range. Know it before the meeting and show how your pricing fits.

3. Can you reduce their risk? Buybacks, small opening orders, or flexible terms all make it easier to say yes.

4. Can you commit to driving sales? Demos, sampling, and in-store support show you’re invested.

5. Can you prove demand? Reorders from another account are gold, but repeat purchases and strong sell-through count too.

Have all five and you're not pitching; you're making it easy to say yes.

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When east meets west: Consumers prefer authenticity over adaptation.

Nestlé acquires yfood: 3 months after Danone acquires Huel (and the 1st acquisition of new CEO Philipp Navratil).

Going private: Private label sales are onward and upward, reaching a record $283 billion last year.

… and it all starts with the morning cup: Private label wakes up and smells the coffee.

Gen Z wants a bit of this, a bit of that: Modular eating is the latest food trend.

The sweets and snacks winners: 2 new awards (Trailblazer and Powerhouse) and a lot of mix-and-match texture.

Tip your delivery driver: Instacart and DoorDash are the least stable gig work, fluctuating heavily based on order volume, variability, and location density.

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

June 10 (Virtual): Live Packaging Audit: How to Make Your Brand Stand Out on Shelf

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 11 (NYC): The FreshPitch: A Brand Pitch & Discovery Event

June 11 (Virtual): Getting Your Brand in the Media

June 12 (TX): Pre-Match Dinner

June 16 (Virtual): How GLP-1 Is Reshaping Food, Nutrition & Supplements

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

June 18 (NYC): Margs & Momentum: A Summer Fancy Food Show Celebration

June 28 (NYC): Startup CPG Founder Dinner @ Summer Fancy Food 2026

July 7 (Virtual): The TikTok Shop Launch Playbook

July 12-15 (Chicago): IFT First

July 19-24 (New Orleans): Tales of the Cocktail 2026

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• The founder who landed 1,000+ Target doors before she had a business

• Five years inside New York CPG (from someone who’s heard every pitch)

• The missing ingredient in plant-based food, summer of staying at home, and how minimalist rebrands are really just mobile optimization

If there's something missing from the list, just reply or drop a comment. Thank you!

Meet Liz Lane, founder of Scoops, a new high-protein peanut butter powder that just launched across 1,000+ Target doors.

But when Target signed on, Scoops didn’t have a registered business yet. “The business was officially established after the Target call,” Liz says. What it did have was a clear white space, deep supplier relationships, and 12 years of CPG experience behind it.

Liz spent her career as an early operator at industry darlings like Magic Spoon, Huel, and Clevr Blends. She knows what it takes to start and scale a successful brand. This time, she’s building her own.

00:19 - The mind behind Scoops
03:19 - Right after Target confirmed, I started raising
07:06 - More protein, more health focus, more brand
10:06 - It has to be delicious. There’s no point otherwise
12:24 - Airspace closed. Sea closed. Inventory was locked
15:04 - Just stay calm and keep everything moving

• $50K → $500K: Pre-launch budget to fundraise.

• 1,000+ doors: Awarded by Target, after pitching for only 500

• 20,000 units: First purchase order, per flavor

When something breaks, relationships are the only thing that holds. Weeks before launch, global conflicts disrupted logistics and grounded Scoops’ first inventory run. Airspace closed. Sea routes closed. What kept it from becoming a full crisis: a group chat. Suppliers sent real-time updates and moved inventory the moment a ceasefire window opened. “Everybody was doing everything they could to get this here on time,” says Liz. “I feel really lucky for that, because that’s not always how it goes.”

Branding gets trial. Taste gets velocity. Velocity keeps you on shelf. That’s the job. A great brand gets someone to pick it up once. The product has to do the rest. “All the founders I’ve worked with really nailed the branding,” she says. “But I do think it comes down to the taste. It’s food. If the taste isn’t there, it’s not going to sustain the sell.”

Don’t fight for shelf space. Own the aisle nobody’s fighting over. Everyone sees protein as the opportunity. Liz saw something more specific. The protein powder aisle: crowded, noisy, expensive to break through. The peanut butter aisle: enormous foot traffic, almost no innovation, one incumbent peanut powder brand that hadn’t changed since anyone could remember. Scoops was still the same high-protein product, but on a shelf where consumers had fewer alternatives and retailers had a reason to pay attention.

The shelf doesn’t reward best practices. It rewards contrast. Every incumbent peanut powder came in a plastic tub, looked functional, and skewed fitness. Scoops went bright, nostalgic, inclusive. And ditched the tub entirely. When Liz brought the packaging direction to Target, they didn’t just okay it. They loved it. Visual separation is worth more than another product that looks like everything already on shelf.

The best investors may already be on your team. Liz’s first round didn’t come from angels or funds. It came from her manufacturer, ingredient suppliers, and operators she’d worked with for years. They committed within a month. And because they have equity, the people responsible for production, pricing, and inventory are incentivized to make all of it work (not just their piece of it). A traditional investor can write a check. A supplier-investor can improve your bottom line.

Market signal → Consumers are done over-optimizing. The next big food brand won’t look like a supplement. It’ll look like food you actually want to eat.

The aisle audit

Before you pick a category, go to the store. (Not the website. The store.) Walk every aisle your product could potentially live in and ask:

• Who has the traffic? Look for aisles people are already shopping, but hasn’t had any significant changes in years.

• Who’s already there? Count the brands. Count the SKUs. Note who’s been there long enough to go stale.

• What does everything look like? If it all looks the same (same packaging, same font), it’s time for a change.

• Who is it for? If the whole aisle skews toward one type of person, everyone else is underserved.

• What would stop someone? What would make a real person pause and pick it up? That’s your brief.

If you’ve built a food or beverage brand in New York, there’s a decent chance Adrienne DeLisio knows your story.

The Executive Director of Naturally New York spends her days between the founders trying to make it and the buyers deciding whether they will. Five years of that adds up.

We talk about why community comes before capital, the reality of building in New York, and why the pitch that wins is rarely the one you expect.

Show up, even before you have anything to show. What really differentiates the ones that make it versus the ones that don’t is making an effort to network within the community, building a strong group of advisors, and learning from their peers. If you’re not showing up, how are you really going to grow your network and build meaningful connections that could lead to something even greater?

Own your backyard before you go anywhere else. New York in general is just a really tough market. But it’s very important for any brand to really establish your presence and build a solid consumer base. I’ve heard from many investors and retailers: if a brand is not already owning their backyard, they shouldn’t think about expanding into other markets. Because it’s going to be a common question from folks in other markets. And honestly, it’s New York or nowhere.

The pitch that wins is the one nobody forgets. Certain pitches just stick out, mainly because of the opening line. When Keya Wingfield of Keya's Snacks submitted her pitch video to Fairway, the first line was, "I'm an Indian woman who fell in love with an American who hates Indian food." The judges were only supposed to award one winner, but they were so impressed they gave her a runner-up prize too. Damiano Messineo from Loopini took out a protein shake, a bar, all these things, and said you need to consume all of these… or just eat a Loopini pizza. Lori Gitomer of Whipnotic did whipped cream shots down the Whole Foods buyer pitch panel. Did it help them win? Possibly. But at the end of the day it was just a great pitch. Memorable, fun, something you don’t forget.

Read the rest of our Q&A

The missing ingredient in plant-based food: As they’re starting to achieve taste parity with meat and dairy products, what they need is a story.

The summer of staying at home: Spend is moving away from convenience and discretionary categories and toward staples and at-home consumption.

Does healthy = less convenient? Consumers look for snacks and breakfasts that require five minutes or less to prepare, and lunch and dinner in under 30 minutes.

The SPOONS to your cereals: WK Kellogg adds an on-pack nutrition guide to its cereal boxes. That’s simple ingredients (S), protein (P), outstanding fiber (O), other nutritious foods (O), nutrients you need (N), and single-digit sugars (S).

“Minimalist” rebrands are really just mobile optimization: Packages used to compete from 3 feet away. Now they compete from 6 inches away on a screen.

Mo’ meat, mo’ problems: As new Trump rules remove meat production limits, it adds risk to workers.

Are we still all eating tinned fish? The Pinterest Summer 2026 Trend report has spoken

June 2 (Virtual): Get In. Sell Through. Stay On Shelf. The Two Yeses of Retail.

June 2 (NY): Ugly Talks: Can Your Brand Thrive in Agentic Commerce?

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 3 (Virtual): What to Build Next: A Founder’s Playbook for Smarter Innovation Decisions

June 4 (Waltham, MA): Startup CPG Boston Founder Social

June 5 (Virtual Deadline Submission): For Target’s Food & Beverage Brand Discovery Day on July 16

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

June 10 (Virtual): Live Packaging Audit: How to Make Your Brand Stand Out on Shelf

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 12 (TX): Pre-Match Dinner

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

July 12-15 (Chicago): IFT First

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• How a creative director and two scientists built the supplement section’s best-looking, best-working brand

• Whimsy is the new wellness, beverage as snack, a China mall’s viral eating contest

• A quick poll 👇

If there's something missing from the list, just reply or drop a comment. Thank you!

Meet Jane Kate Wong, CEO and co-founder of NOON, a cognitive wellness brand where neuroscience meets plant science.

Jane was a creative director at a global design consultancy in New York. Fun job, interesting work, demanding hours.

Then she hit a wall. Her doctor’s solution was two weeks of steroids. Hard pass.

That sent her down a path of adaptogens, nootropics, and a supplement aisle full of products that looked clinical and performed worse.

Together with naturopathic physician Dr. Julie Hwang and neuroscientist Dr. Christine Wong, she built the formulas from scratch. Then designed a holistic brand to match.

Eighteen months in, NOON sold over 19,000 units its first year, has customers reordering as many as six times, and just landed in 878 Target doors nationwide.

00:11 - The minds behind NOON
03:11 - This actually works, this is shockingly good
07:17 - Our whole thing is helping people find their best baseline
11:04 - Sleep is our bestseller by 20%
14:31 - Going into 878 Target doors
18:52 - People order at least 5-6 times
21:42 - Do less, but make it more impactful

• $250K: Total investment, self-funded and friends and family

• 19,000+: Units sold in year one (exceeding their first run)

• 878: Target doors for their nationwide launch

Format is the first thing a customer experiences. NOON started as a tincture. Bioavailable, effective, and deeply confusing. How many drops? On the tongue or under it? The brief for their gummy came from everything the tincture wasn’t: fun, shareable, low barrier to trial. “Everyone knows what a gummy is. You don’t need to give them more education.” The product that’s easiest to use is the one people will use.

Build margin in from day one. You’ll need it. NOON targeted mid-80% gross margin on DTC from day one. A four-month lead time, shipments from Asia, a 30% tariff. None of that is unusual. But all of it erodes margin fast… and it compounds. “Starting with a good margin is very important because it just goes downhill from there.”

Experience > explanation. Try explaining functional mushrooms and it falls on dead ears. Instead, NOON showed up in places where the product could be experienced: outside the sauna at Othership, sample kits at Pop-Up Grocer, a corner at Remedy Place. The goal wasn’t to educate. It was to become part of someone’s routine. Once you have that, no explanation’s needed.

Do less, but make it count. Year one is ‘yes’ to everything: every event, every retailer, every opportunity. And that’s great. You’re testing the market and collecting data. But you can’t move if you’re spread across 40 things at once. Year two is learning from that and going deeper on the two or three things that worked.

Every CPG company is a media company. “If I were to redo this, I’d do the whole build-in-public thing a lot sooner,” Jane says. “’Build and they will come’ doesn’t happen anymore. There are too many products on the market.” What’s your story? Why are you the best person to create this product?

Market signal → People don’t come back because of product. They come back because of habit. Brands with retention figured out a moment, a format, a routine that makes repurchase automatic.

The routine is the product

Jane spent two years figuring out how to make NOON stand out in market. Here’s what she discovered:

1. Moment: Is it attached to something they already do? If they have to create a new behavior, most won’t.

2. Format: Is it the most frictionless version? People come back to the easiest option, not always the best one.

3. Delight: Is it something they look forward to? Things like taste, texture, packaging make the experience worth repeating.

4. Price: If they have to think twice about the price, the habit breaks. Find their repeat purchase ceiling.

5. Shareability: Do they tell anyone about your product? Word of mouth is retention’s compounding interest.

Meta overbilled you last month. You just don’t know it yet.

This week’s partner Dash.fi audited $20M in ad spend and found 5-33% in billing discrepancies across the board. Misallocated budgets, inflated metrics, out-of-geo ads you paid for that never reached your customer.

To put it into perspective, if you’re spending $50k/month, that’s up to $15k gone. Every single month.

Most founders find out too late. Or never.

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This isn’t a better credit card. It’s a margin recovery tool that happens to be a credit card. See what Dash.fi recovers for you.

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Brami raises $33M in Series B: The two-ingredient brand is the fastest-growing pasta in the U.S.

Gen Z no longer shops by aisle: When mood, need, and occasion replace snacks, meals, and beverages.

Beverage as snack? For consumers who “snack” on beverages, 46% pick soft drinks, 32% sip fruit juice, 26% reach for coffee, and 15% pour a glass of milk.

Most frequent shopper: Men shop more frequently than women (1.6 trips a week vs 1.4) and Gen Z outpaces millennials (6.7 trips a month vs 6.1)

Whimsy is the new wellness: “I got this really cute coffee machine, made little sprinkles and all these things that were just for me.

Vote for a farmer. The 2026 Friend of a Farmer Choice Awards are open through May 29, 12:00pm EST. Your vote helps direct $1,000 grants to farmers.

Chinese mall turns secret classroom snacking into viral eating contest: That’s all.

May 28 (NY): Naturally Rising New York: The Conscious Business Pitch Competition

May 20 (Virtual): Workshop: AI for CPG Brands

May 20 (NY): DTC Dinner Club

May 20 (NY): How Smart Brands Win in a Crowded Aisle

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

May 31 (Virtual): Bon Appetit Pantry Awards Submission Deadline

June 2 (Virtual): Get In. Sell Through. Stay On Shelf. The Two Yeses of Retail.

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

June 10 (Virtual): Live Packaging Audit: How to Make Your Brand Stand Out on Shelf

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 12 (TX): Pre-Match Dinner

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

If you’ve built a food or beverage brand in New York, there’s a decent chance Adrienne DeLisio knows your story.

As Executive Director of Naturally New York, she spends her days between the founders trying to make it and the buyers deciding whether they will. Five years of that adds up.

We talk about why community comes before capital, the reality of building in New York, and why the pitch that wins is rarely the one you expect.

00:19 - The road to Naturally New York
01:36 - Founders who succeed vs. those who don’t
02:37 - How to make it in New York CPG
04:51 - The secret to a winning video pitch
06:42 - Make your pitch memorable
08:18 - Adrienne’s favorite NNY event
09:42 - The biggest challenges in CPG today
11:22 - The best $100 in CPG

Text answers below have been edited for length and clarity. Full answers are in video. (We highly recommend watching!)

Brands that make it vs. brands that don’t

What really differentiates the ones that make it versus the ones that don’t are making an effort to network within the community, building a strong group of advisors, and learning from their peers. If you’re not showing up, how are you really going to grow your network and build meaningful connections that could lead to something even greater?

Even if you’re not ready now, this is the time to prepare yourself to be ready later. A lot of brand members are pre-launch. And they’re still interested in being a part of our community because they want to foster those connections. See what else is happening in market, what competitors are doing, and how you can maybe position yourself differently.

What does it take to make it in New York CPG?

New York in general is just a really tough market, but it’s important for any brand, especially if you’re local or grew up here, to really establish your presence.

Many investors and retailers have told me if a brand is not already owning their backyard, they shouldn’t think about expanding into other markets. Because it’s going to be a common question from folks in other markets.

As a born and raised New Yorker, and someone that has grown their career here, there’s definitely a different hustle. It just never feels like the day ever ends. You’re kind of always working even when you’re not. But I think that’s actually what makes us so great and why I’ve never really thought about working anywhere else. I thrive off that energy. And I think a lot of people here do too. It’s important to tap into that, or you’re not gonna make it. And honestly, it’s New York or nowhere.

What’s the secret to a pitch people remember?

Certain pitches just stick out, mainly because of the opening line and being memorable. When Keya Wingfield of Keya's Snacks submitted her pitch video to Fairway, the first line was, "I'm an Indian woman who fell in love with an American who hates Indian food." The judges were only supposed to award one winner, but they were so impressed they gave her a runner-up prize too.

Damiano Messineo from Loopini took out a protein shake, a bar, all these things, and said you need to consume all of these… or just eat a Loopini pizza. Lori Gitomer of Whipnotic did whipped cream shots down the Whole Foods buyer pitch panel. Did it help them win? Possibly. But at the end of the day it was just a great pitch. Memorable, fun, impossible to forget.

My favorite event by far is the Holiday Bazaar.

A couple of years ago, I was hearing a lot of complaints about how hard it is for brands to activate at trade shows. The cost was just out of their means. I really wanted to provide a solution for that. The Holiday Bazaar is my mini expo: very affordable, just a few hundred dollars for you to activate, sample, sell products, and connect with industry professionals.

Over the last two years, we’ve had at least 300 attendees at each. It continues to grow and it’s getting to the point we’re outgrowing our space.

I know there are other showcases, but it’s just something I wanted to do to really celebrate all the hard work brands did that year and end on a high note. It’s one I look forward to every year.

Naturally New York started in the fall of 2021.

It was still a very post-COVID climate with supply chain disruptions and fundraising challenges. We broke out of that and there were sunnier days for a while, but I feel like we’re going back into some of those challenges again.

Fundraising has been harder recently, maybe because there’s more competition. Investors are being very conservative. Retailers are being more selective. You need patience and perseverance. One day, if it’s meant to be, the spot will open for you.

Another big concern is around distributor relationships. There seems to be a lack of transparency and at the end of the day, brands don’t even feel profitable. They’re at the distributor’s mercy because how else is your product going to get in stores?

I’m grateful for companies like Adventure CPG that are trying to change the game and make it more accessible for brands to activate. It’s going to be hard to fight against the bigger distributors (I won’t say those names, but I think you know who they are), but hopefully something will change.

We have dedicated pavilions in Expo West and the Fancy Food Show. It’s good to have that community because we help bring traffic and broker the introductions you’re looking for.

Someone once told me it’s the best $100 you could ever spend as a brand founder.

I feel like a proud mom when I walk into any store and recognize some of the brands. I’m like, “Oh, I know that founder.”

It really is such a joy to see them and be able to just act as a consumer and support them. These brand founders, they have my phone number. They know they can text me anytime, or call, send me an email.

We do at least 50 events a year outside of any trade show activations. At least one networking event a month, educational webinars, and quarterly boot camps.

If you’re not a member of Naturally New York, visit us at naturallynewyork.org. There are tons of events there that you can start to register for. It’s as little as $100 for brands a year. Someone once told me it’s the best $100 you could ever spend as a brand founder.

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• How a senior nutrition company secured multi-millions to shake up a stale category

• The Instacart strategy that takes you from 2x to 15x ROAS

• The biggest one-month jump in grocery prices, where everyone’s getting their health advice, say bye to your caprese salad

Meet Jess Haghani, founder of Lucille, the first better-for-you senior nutrition shake that just closed a multimillion-dollar funding round.

The company is named after her 92-year-old grandmother, who still drives herself into the city, day trades, and says her 90s are the best years of her life. But when Lucille started facing health challenges, the nutrition drinks meant to help her were so bad she could barely finish them.

Jess took it to nutritionists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Their reaction: she couldn’t engineer a worse ingredient list if she tried.

Nutrition for older adults hadn’t really changed since the 1980s. Someone needed to do something about this. That someone, it turns out, had a grandmother named Lucille.

00:14 - The mind behind Lucille
02:40 - Her 90s are the best time of her life
04:49 - I can’t put a single worse ingredient in any of these shakes
07:17 - Grandma Lucille is our lead tastemaker and she’s quite opinionated
10:01 - It’s simple, it’s nutrition for older adults
12:47 - Not going to sugarcoat it, raising is really hard
15:57 - The end consumer matters the most
18:47 - A feeling like nothing I’ve ever experienced

• 40 years: How long the senior nutrition category has gone without meaningful innovation

• 10 months: From first test to market-ready formula

• 0: Ingredients shared with existing incumbents (other than water and salt)

The biggest opportunity in CPG isn’t a niche. It’s a blind spot. Adults 65+ are nearly 20% of the US population, yet account for less than 1% of food and beverage innovation. The products designed to help them haven’t changed since the 1980s. Nearly 50 years of neglect in one of the largest consumer segments in the country. That’s not a gap. That’s an wide-open opportunity.

Study what’s broken, not what’s working. When Jess brought existing products to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the nutritionists didn’t suggest improvements. They told her to throw them out. “I cannot put a single worse ingredient in any of these if I tried.” She started from scratch, using none of the same ingredients except water and salt. Most brands try to slightly improve what already exists. Sometimes the better move is to see what’s broken and start over.

The end consumer and the buyer are different people. You have to win both. In senior living, the resident doesn’t choose what gets stocked. The facility does. That means Lucille has to be delicious enough for residents to finish the product, and effective enough for buyers to justify the premium. Jess started at the source. When residents like what they’re drinking, outcomes improve, waste lessens, and the cost per serving works itself out.

Feedback is just raw material. Pattern recognition is the real skill. Jess ran blind taste tests, hosted events at senior living communities, sampled at conferences. She heard all kinds of opinions: loud, contradictory, occasionally stinging. “There will be a lot of noise. One person’s feedback can sting harder, but it’s not representative of the majority.” The job isn’t to listen to everyone. It’s to identify the difference between personal opinion and larger pattern.

Packaging is part of the product. Lucille’s lightweight carton, disposable straw, and easy-puncture tab aren’t just nice design. They’re accessibility. As people age, things like grip strength, joint mobility, and dexterity change. A tightly sealed cap that feels normal to most consumers can become a daily frustration. Removing that is part of what makes the product stand out.

Market signal → The best opportunities in CPG aren’t always in what’s trending. Sometimes they’re in who’s been ignored.

The blank page brief

The instinct is to study the incumbents and iterate. The problem is you end up building a better version of something that’s already wrong. Start here instead:

1. Autopsy the incumbent. Don’t look at what’s working. Look at what are settling for because nothing better exists.

2. Write your negative brief. What would you never put in your product? What would you never compromise? Sometimes the “no” list matters more than the feature list.

3. Find what nobody ever tried. Not what the category does badly. What it never attempted at all. The unasked questions are where the white space lives.

4. Build from scratch, then compare. Pretend the category doesn’t exist. What would you make? Then compare it to what’s on shelf and find your differentiators.

5. Turn the gap into the pitch. The distance between what exists and what you built is the story. Not “we’re better.” Better for who? Better how? Better why?

Most CPG founders think about Instacart wrong.

They see it as a logistics channel. A way to get product into grocery orders. Something that “just runs in the background.” And because of that, they set it up once, let it run on auto, and wonder why results are mediocre.

Here’s what the brands actually winning on Instacart understand: it’s not a delivery app. It’s a media platform. And once you see it that way, everything changes.

Mateusz Drela, founder of RMIQ, has spent 17 years in performance marketing helping CPG brands drive real sales through retail media. Here’s how he thinks about Instacart.

Instacart is the great equalizer. Because Instacart has no physical shelves, it has no physical shelf politics. No slotting fees for eye-level placement. The algorithm doesn’t know your revenue. It knows your bids and your relevance. That’s it. And crucially: when a shopper types “tortilla chips” into Instacart, they’re not thinking about you. They’re browsing. That’s the moment you win them.

The one format that actually moves product. Instacart offers a suite of ad products: Reach, Engage, Acquire. Ignore most of them. The format that matters is Sponsored Products (also called Sponsored Search). It’s the only format directly tied to sales velocity. Ads appear where decisions get made: search results, homepage, “frequently bought with” sections, and checkout.

A note for early-stage brands. If you’re spending under $150/day on Instacart, A/B testing is probably a waste of time. You won’t reach statistical significance fast enough to draw conclusions. Instead, run auto campaigns first. Not as your long-term strategy, but as a keyword harvesting tool. Let the algorithm identify what’s converting. Take those insights, build a manual campaign, and go from there.

Start converting on Instacart

The biggest one-month jump in grocery prices in nearly four years: The category called “food at home” (aka, your grocery store)

Where are you getting your health advice? If you’re like half of U.S. adults under 50, the answer is influencers and podcasters.

Say bye to your caprese salad: The price of tomatoes are up almost 30%.

When Costco says, “I’m built different”: Why Costco pays $30/hr and Target doesn’t.

The most-followed big box retailer on TikTok: Target launches Club Target and Target Ambassadors (after retiring its previous commissions-based creator program).

Groceries get a side gig: Prepared food sections grew 2.8% in dollar sales and 1.8% in unit sales the last year.

May 19 (NY): Consumer Founders Rooftop Happy Hour

May 20 (Virtual): Workshop: AI for CPG Brands

May 20 (NY): DTC Dinner Club

May 20 (NY): How Smart Brands Win in a Crowded Aisle

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

May 21 (Virtual): Where the Dogs Of Society Howl: CPG, Growth, and the Exit Nobody Posts

May 31 (Virtual): Bon Appetit Pantry Awards Submission Deadline

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 28-30 (NY): Summer Fancy Food Show

June 29 (NY): The Early Round: Founders & Investors

Most CPG founders think about Instacart wrong.

They see it as a logistics channel. A way to get product into grocery orders. Something that “just runs in the background.” And because of that, they set it up once, let it run on auto, and wonder why results are mediocre.

Here’s what the brands actually winning on Instacart understand: it’s not a delivery app. It’s a customer acquisition platform. And once you see it that way, everything changes.

Mateusz Drela has spent 17 years in performance marketing and now runs RMIQ, an AI-powered retail media platform that helps growing CPG brands generate real sales across retail media networks. Their clients include Smash Kitchen, Smearcase, Heirloom Coffee, and Kooshy Croutons.

Here's how he thinks about Instacart.

00:07 - The moment Amazon became an ad network
02:39 - A platform where size doesn’t matter
04:38 - Your first 30 days on Instacart
08:00 - More keywords, more problems
10:02 - 3 brands, 3 different ROAS

Why Instacart is the great equalizer.

Instacart doesn’t own a single store. But it sells across 1,800 national, regional, and local retail banners, covering nearly 100,000 locations in all 50 states. For a startup with distribution at three regional chains, that’s the same playing field as a Fortune 500 conglomerate.

Because Instacart has no physical shelves, it has no physical shelf politics. No slotting fees for eye-level placement. No penalties for being a small brand. The algorithm doesn’t know your revenue. It knows your bids and your relevance. That’s it.

And crucially: when a shopper types “tortilla chips” into Instacart, they’re not thinking about you. They’re browsing. That’s the moment you win them.

Up to 90% of sales generated through Instacart ads are from customers who have never bought your brand before on the platform. Of those, 30–50% become repeat buyers. This is new-to-brand acquisition at a scale that’s genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else.

The one format that actually moves product.

Instacart offers a suite of ad products: Reach, Engage, Acquire. Ignore most of them.

The format that matters is Sponsored Products (also called Sponsored Search). It’s the only format directly tied to sales velocity. Ads appear where decisions get made: search results, homepage, “frequently bought with” sections, and checkout. It’s performance-based. It’s measurable. And it’s where 70–80% of total Instacart ad spend should go.

Everything else is brand awareness. That matters eventually. But if you’re a founder trying to move units, Sponsored Products is where the work happens.

The 4 moves that separate average from excellent.

Here’s where most brands leave money on the table. They set up Instacart’s automated campaign tools, watch ROAS hover around 2.0–2.5, and call it a day. But automated campaigns are designed to be good enough for everyone. Which means they’re optimized for no one.

Moving from automated to advanced management isn’t complicated. It’s just specific.

Move 1: Go manual. Automated campaigns work by spreading budget across categories and testing keywords at scale. Instacart’s algorithm can’t favor one brand over another, so it defaults to average.

Switching to manual campaign setup puts you in control of where dollars go and why. Brands that make this switch consistently see ROAS jump significantly. One specialty coffee brand went from 2.4 to 4.9. A tortilla chip brand went from 2.2 to 4.3.

Move 2: One ad group per product. Grouping multiple SKUs into a single ad group feels efficient. It isn’t. Different products have wildly different performance profiles. One SKU might return 3x ROAS. Another returns 6x.

When they’re bundled together, you can’t bid specifically for the winner. You end up underinvesting in your best performer and subsidizing your worst one. Build one ad group per product. It takes longer to set up, but it pays off immediately.

Move 3: Bid at the keyword level, based on your data. Instacart will offer you “suggested bids.” Ignore them. Suggested bids are calibrated across all advertisers in a category, not for your margins, your ROAS targets, or your specific product.

Instead, build a product-keyword matrix. For each product, map out which keywords actually convert and bid according to your own performance data. A tortilla chip brand should bid aggressively on “tortilla chips” and much lower on “crackers” (even if crackers are technically relevant).

Your bid should reflect what you can afford to pay per click while still hitting your target ROAS. Start with a target (say, 4.0), calculate your maximum allowable cost-per-click, and build your bids around that number.

Move 4: Maintain weekly, not monthly. This isn’t a set-and-forget channel. Extract performance data weekly. Kill underperforming keywords. There’s a catch: Instacart’s UI doesn’t let you pause keywords.

The workaround is to either drop the bid to the $0.30 minimum or rebuild the ad group without the keyword. It’s annoying. It’s also the difference between wasting budget on irrelevant terms and running tight, efficient campaigns.

A note for early-stage brands.

If you’re spending under $150/day on Instacart, A/B testing is probably a waste of time. You won’t reach statistical significance fast enough to draw conclusions. Instead, run auto campaigns first. Not as your long-term strategy, but as a keyword harvesting tool.

Let the algorithm identify what’s converting. Then take those insights, build a manual campaign structure, and go from there. Scale, then optimize. In that order.

The operational details most founders miss.

• Retailer-specific ads. Instacart generally runs ads across all retailers where your product is listed. But if you want to advertise specifically on Sprouts’ or Thrive Market’s website, you need a separate account — unless you’re running through a unified third-party platform.

• Data feed timing. If your product isn’t showing up on Instacart, the issue is almost always the retailer’s data feed. National chains update weekly. Regional retailers often update monthly. If you just got a new account, you might be waiting. Chase your retailer to make sure they’ve included you in the specific feed Instacart pulls from.

• SKU-level targeting. If you have an exclusive product at one retailer, you can effectively target only that retailer by running ads only for that SKU. It’s a useful workaround for retailer exclusivity situations.

Instacart is the virtual number three grocery retailer in the United States. It’s also the most underutilized acquisition channel in CPG for brands that are still treating it like a logistics tool.

The brands winning have made a simple mental shift: stop thinking about how your product gets delivered. Start thinking about how your brand gets discovered. That shift changes how you build campaigns, how you bid, how you measure, and ultimately, how you grow.

For more about retail media, check out Mat’s new book Retail Media: Strategy, Structure, and Execution: A Practical Framework for Brand Managers and CMOs.

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• How childhood best friends turned a Saturday hangover into a bottled cocktail brand

• The hot girlification of grocery

• Diet Coke parties, carnivores bond over brisket and butter, ice cream therapy

Meet Michael Gu and Perry Ya, co-founders of Wild Mannered.

Their parents were neighbors in New Jersey, the only Chinese families in the area. They’ve known each other since birth. “Like the cousin you’re forced to see every Christmas or New Year’s,” recalls Michael.

They both ended up in tech, spending their late-20s closing out Friday nights in NYC’s Koreatown over green-bottle soju. Then came the hangovers and the questions: What’s in this and why isn’t there a cleaner version?

So they made one. A ready-to-serve, lower-ABV cocktail with a soju and wine base.

The name flips “mild mannered,” a backhanded compliment Asian American kids grow up hearing. The product flips the usual RTD format: not a single-serve can, but a bottle you pour for those around you.

After a pivotal rebrand, sampling shots through a plexiglass case, and select partnerships with mahjong clubs and gaming lounges, Wild Mannered is in almost 100 accounts across New York, growing 130% year over year.

✍️ This week’s Founder Feature was written by Param Gopalasamy. He runs PG Marketing Consulting, specializing in content, product messaging, events, and more. In his free time, he enjoys creative writing, rewatching the same 3-4 shows, and working on his golf swing (where he’ll be spending most of his later years if things go according to plan).

00:11 - The minds behind Wild Mannered
01:29 - 2 p.m. on a Wednesday tasting soju and getting tipsy
05:58 - It’s like eating a piece of black licorice
08:19 - The person that doesn’t grab the High Noon variety pack
11:45 - About to hit 100, which is a huge milestone
15:27 - Chock-full of fun little restrictive tidbits
19:39 - 85-90% of our business is retail
22:32 - Voice of customer matters more than ours

• 130%: Year-over-year revenue growth from 2024 to 2025, trending higher in 2026

• ~100 accounts: Retail footprint across New York

• 3 initial SKUs: Strawberry Basil, Cucumber Lime Mint, Pineapple Ginger. The original Gen 1 lineup. (Yes, that's a Pokémon reference.)

Your category decision is also your distribution decision. Michael and Perry didn’t choose a soju-wine hybrid just because it tasted better. Wine carries lower federal taxes, fewer DTC shipping restrictions, and access to channels: beer-and-wine restaurants, cafes that convert into wine bars, accounts without full liquor licenses. The product category determines where you can sell.

The first stores aren’t where you make money. They’re where you find out what the product actually is. At launch, Wild Mannered’s $19.99 bottle sat next to $5.99 mass-market soju. Customers got sticker shock. Not because the price was wrong; because the positioning was. Their ready-to-serve bottle is something you bring to a social gathering, something you share with the people around you. Once that clicked, everything else followed: new name, different shelf, different conversation entirely.

Find where your product makes sense. Then keep showing up there. Soju isn’t just a beverage. It’s a behavior. The pour-for-each-other, take-a-shot-together move that happens naturally around a table. Wild Mannered became the exclusive alcohol provider for a mahjong club. It show up at supper clubs. It’s on the menu at a gaming lounge. Every partnership reinforces the same core idea of bringing people together.

Go deep in one market before you go wide. Two years in, Wild Mannered is still focused on New York, where every store is individually owned. No liquor chains, no one call that opens fifty doors. “It’ll grind your gears,” Perry says. But that grind gave them a pitch that works, positioning that lands, and the emotional calluses to handle rejection without spiraling.

Buyers listen to the voice of a customer. Not yours. A woman in Queens DM’d them that Wild Mannered was the best thing she’d ever tasted. She buys a bottle every week. When her store held off on reordering after the rebrand, she went in and asked for it herself. The store placed the order that day. “The voice of a customer matters so much more than ours,” Michael says. “If a customer wants this stuff, the store’s going to order it.”

Market signal → Brands are at their strongest when the purchase is about more than the product. If you can build emotional connection to an occasion, that's the juice (in today's case, soju) that drives sales.

The occasion fit test

Every placement is a bet. Here’s how to know if it’s worth taking.

• The occasion: What is the moment your product is for? Not the demographic. The moment. The morning commute, the post-workout window, the dinner party. Be specific. “Anytime” is not an answer.

• The ritual: Is there already a behavior your product slots into, or are you trying to invent one? (Think Oreos in milk building off dunking biscuits in tea.) Leaning on a ritual that exists is the easier path. Teaching a new one is harder.

• The placement: Does this shelf, venue, or event put the product in front of someone at the right moment? Or are you just happy to be there?

• The partner: Does this partnership reinforce the occasion or dilute it? If you’d take the deal for the reach alone, that’s a sign. Reach without occasion is borrowed.

I wrote about hot girl food for Cool Shiny Culture. And it starts with pickles.

Regular pickles ask nothing. Hot Girl Pickles have plans. Regular soda is a beverage. Hot Girl Soda is a whole thing.

Gendered food isn’t new. It’s just never been this fun. For decades, “food for women” meant 100-calorie packs, Special K, anything “lite.” Hot girl is something else entirely.

What makes something “hot girl” isn’t the product. It’s the feeling of buying it. These brands aren’t trying to speak to everyone. They’re designed so the right person picks them up immediately and everyone else puts the jar back down.

For a long time that would’ve been considered a problem. Every brand wanted to be for everyone. The bigger the audience, the better the business. Now, niche is the point.

Read the whole thing

Meta overbilled you last month. You just don’t know it yet.

This week’s partner Dash.fi audited $20M in ad spend and found 5-33% in billing discrepancies across the board. Misallocated budgets, inflated metrics, out-of-geo ads you paid for that never reached your customer.

To put it into perspective, if you’re spending $50k/month, that’s up to $15k gone. Every single month.

Most founders find out too late. Or never.

Dash.fi catches it automatically. Flags every discrepancy, recovers the difference, and gives you 3% back on every ad dollar on top.

This isn’t a better credit card. It’s a margin recovery tool that happens to be a credit card. See what Dash.fi recovers for you.

Get a free 5-minute demo

$4.99 vs. $5: Out of 500 grocery items on Walmart.com, only five (~1%) ended in .00.

Ice cream therapy: For Mental Health Month, Van Leeuwen and Rula turned the “treat yourself” impulse into a therapy session.

Diet Coke parties: In India, scarcity made Diet Coke a status drink. People are paying $16 a ticket to sip “Coke-tails.”

Oatly’s first full year of growth: First growth quarter since going public, thanks to repositioning from alt-dairy to “an experience canvas for the beverages market.”

And at the other end of the table: Carnivores bond over brisket and butter at Meatstock.

Meatless MREs are coming: The U.S. Army is the ultimate CPG stress test: shelf-stable, palatable, manufactured in combat zones.

Cheers to beer sales: Anheuser-Busch InBev sold more drinks for the first time since 2023 in the first quarter.

May 13 (Virtual): Practice Your Retail Buyer Pitch

May 20 (Virtual): Workshop: AI for CPG Brands

May 20 (NY): DTC Dinner Club

May 20 (NY): How Smart Brands Win in a Crowded Aisle

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

May 31 (Virtual): Bon Appetit Pantry Awards Submission Deadline

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• How a founder turned a family peanut brand into a Kung Fu cinematic universe

• Running an influencer marketing campaign without the influencer price tag

• (Super)market moves, TIME 10 Most Influential Food & Drink Companies in 2026, when Gen Alpha is the consumer… and parents are the buyers

Meet Anmao Sun, co-founder of WA-CHAA!, a Kung Fu-themed snack brand and the best spicy peanut you’ve never heard of. Yet.

He didn’t start with an idea. He started with a product that already worked. Huang Fei Hong is a cult peanut brand his father built in China. Two decades old, legendary history, strong demand.

But to the American market, the brand didn’t translate. It had a name no one could pronounce and ingredients Whole Foods wouldn’t carry.

So Anmao remastered it. Same bold spice, same Shandong production, but no MSG or GMOs. “We don’t think about ourselves as a peanut company. We think about ourselves as a Kung Fu brand that makes snacks.” Less than a year in, WA-CHAA! is hitting 600+ Sprouts doors. The peanut is back.

00:11 - The mind behind WA-CHAA!
02:32 - MSG is MSG
05:24 - Snacks are the vehicle
07:40 - The safer you play, the more forgettable it is
11:38 - We built in the margin from the beginning
14:35 - The real ramp up is when we start hitting retail

• ~1.5 years: Spent on positioning and product development

• $50K: First inventory run, packed into one container

• 600+: Sprouts doors, less than a year after DTC launch

The product is what you sell. The brand is why anyone cares. “We don’t think about ourselves as a peanut company. We think about ourselves as a Kung Fu brand that makes snacks,” says Anmao. Peanuts are the delivery mechanism. That distinction shapes every downstream decision: who you hire, what you make, how you measure a good week.

Your ingredients determine your distribution. The original Huang Fei Hong had MSG… and Whole Foods won’t carry MSG. Anmao spent months trying to match the original flavor and went through two R&D firms. Finally, his restaurant partner Brandon Jew (James Beard winner, chef behind the Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s) cracked a recipe that was better than the original. Know where you want to be sold, and build toward that.

Margin isn’t a result. It’s an input. Most founders calculate margin after the product is built, then spend years trying to fix it. WA-CHAA! started from the other end: what would someone actually pay, and what does the cost structure need to look like to make that work? They built to hit a 45–55% retail margin target from day one.

DTC is more than a sales channel. It’s a feedback loop. It took WA-CHAA! six months to understand their DTC channel. And it wasn’t about velocity. “It’s kind of been like an ad delivery tester,” says Anmao. Meta campaigns revealed what messaging landed, what visuals converted, when a customer actually became profitable.

The audience you build is worth more than the audience you borrow. WA-CHAA! tried owned social, creator placements, and whitelisted ad content. “We found it’s better where we control the engagement and the conversation.” If your goal is a real community, you can’t build it on someone else’s platform. Test with borrowed audiences. Build on your own.

Market signal → The next breakout category probably isn’t the new. It’s the neglected. Familiar, accessible, and wide open for a refresh.

What are you really selling?

Most brands describe the product. The best ones define what people are really buying. Those are rarely the same thing.

Fill in the blanks:

• We make: ______.

• People buy us because: ______.

• So we’re actually a ______ brand.

Then reassess:

• Does this change who you compete with?

• Does it change what product you’d make next?

• Could someone be a fan without ever buying?

• Would your best customer say it this way?

Lydia Lee has been in influencer marketing long enough to remember when it was just called “talking to your customers.”

Her claim to fame was helping grow Nutpods, a dairy-free coffee creamer, from a Kickstarter campaign to acquisition. When they sold, she cashed out and started her own influencer marketing agency For the Clout.

The first thing I always say is, start with math. You can easily bankrupt yourself when it comes to influencer marketing. Build a scaling model with two tiers of packages: your seeding product and your welcome package. Your seeding product is something you can bleed through with samples. It’s a low-tier offer to try your product. If you like it, then move them up to your welcome package, the higher-tier offer.

For every 1,000 creators you cold DM, about 20% of people actually respond. That’s 200 people. Multiply 200 times the cost of your seeding product. Can you afford to do that monthly, quarterly, or annually? Of those 200, about 40% will want to join your program. Multiply that by the cost of your welcome package. That’s the cost to acquire an influencer.

I really like to invest in nano and micro creators. If we’re paying a flat fee for content, I spend $200-$1,000, depending on the creator and the quality. Then you buy the ad rights and run it as an ad. It’s the best bang for your buck. My philosophy is to bleed through samples, create UGC, buy it for cheap, and run it as an ad because you can control who sees it. You can target your target demographic, your target location, within five to ten miles of stores you’re stocked in.

Here’s what a 41% engagement rate actually looks like. Evergood Sausage is a retail-first brand doing really well with our program. They were at 19,000 followers when we started. Now they’re at 36,000. We’re at a 41% engagement rate. (Industry average is 2-3%.) We don’t create any of our own content. It’s all done through creators, real people consuming products. The brand pays about $5,000 a month for paid collabs, but we get tagged in like 20 pieces of content a week. It’s crazy.

Watch the full Expert Talks with Lydia

(Super)market moves: ↑ Costco and Amazon/Whole Foods and ↓ for Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons.

When Gen Alpha is the consumer… and the parents are the buyers.

Not in it to win it: ALDI removes another 44 ingredients from its private label products.

Raw milk is going mainstream: More than three dozen bills supporting raw milk have been introduced in 18 states across the U.S.

TIME 10 Most Influential Food and Drink Companies in 2026: From Ferrero and Fishwife to Jollibee and David Protein.

Alcohol brands have now entered your TikTok feed: While sales and under-25 targeting are still off-limits, age-gated ads and content are in.

Maryland says no to “personalized” pricing: Your groceries shouldn’t know who you are.

Tech meets taste: YC just released their Request for Startups, including one for AI for low-pesticide agriculture.

May 9 (Austin): SKU Spring ‘26 Showcase in Austin

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

May 31 (Virtual): Bon Appetit Pantry Awards Submission Deadline

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

Lydia Lee has been in influencer marketing long enough to remember when it was just called “talking to your customers.”

It was finding your super fans, giving them early access, and seeing what happened.

Her claim to fame was helping grow Nutpods, a dairy-free coffee creamer, from a Kickstarter campaign to acquisition. When they sold, she cashed out and started her own influencer marketing agency For the Clout.

She doesn’t care about follower counts. Or beautiful branded content that no one sees. What she cares about is the math, and getting product into enough hands that people start talking on their own.

00:15 - Before influencer marketing was a thing
05:09 - TikTok vs. Amazon
06:07 - Go nano and micro, almost always
09:17 - How to DM creators without being weird
11:32 - When your best creator stops converting (it happens)
12:37 - The Instacart-to-influencer strategy that drives sales
13:42 - When you can’t even give it away
16:18 - What a 41% engagement rate actually looks like
19:35 - We’re very much in your business

Text answers below have been edited for length and clarity. Full answers are in video. (We highly recommend watching!)

The first thing I always say is, start with math.

You can easily bankrupt yourself when it comes to influencer marketing. Build what I call a scaling model with two tiers of packages: your seeding product and your welcome package.

Your seeding product is something you can bleed through with samples. It’s a low-tier offer to try your product. If there’s a good fit, then move them up to your welcome package, the higher-tier offer.

For every thousand creators you cold DM, there’s about a 20% conversion rate of people actually responding. That’s 200 people. Multiply 200 times the cost of your seeding product. Can you afford to do that monthly, quarterly, or annually? Of those 200, about 40% will want to join your program. Multiply that by the cost of your welcome package. That’s the cost to acquire an influencer.

I really like to invest in nano and micro creators.

If we’re paying a flat fee for content, I spend $200-$1,000, depending on the creator and the quality. Then you buy the ad rights and run it as an ad. It’s the best bang for your buck.

For the really big creators, the smart move is a revenue share model. Put their name on the packaging, pay them a percentage of everything sold as long as they promote it. That’s less risky than paying $150,000 for a 30-second YouTube clip.

With organic posts, you don’t control who sees it. My philosophy is to bleed through samples, create UGC, buy it for cheap, and run it as an ad because you can control who sees it. You can target your target demographic, your target location, within five to ten miles of stores you’re stocked in.

“TikTok is short-form Netflix, in my opinion. People go there to be entertained. We’ll do a TikTok Live for a brand, but then we see a spike in Amazon sales. I look at influencer marketing as a holistic channel.

I always DM. If they don’t respond, then like their stuff, comment on a post, say “Hey, check your DMs.”

Outreach takes about a month to two before you start getting addresses back. Shipping takes a week, maybe a week and a half. They get their packages and maybe create content a couple weeks later. There’s no urgency because they’re not getting paid. So it’s usually a two-to-three-month ramp-up before really seeing any tagged content.

It takes about three months of building and six to nine months of consistently running it before you see sustainable results. Consistency is key. Gift 50 to 100 creators a month, give them prompts, let them play, and literally develop a relationship.

There’s a natural plateau with every creator.

You see a spike in sales, and then they drop off because everyone that follows that creator that loves your bagels will have already converted and become a customer. Unless they go viral and get new followers, they’ll naturally plateau and die off. You maintain that relationship, but you want to find new blood and not rely on that person so heavily.

I always recommend an affiliate program and an ambassador program. An affiliate is an extension of your sales team. An ambassador is an extension of your brand. The KPIs are different: affiliates make a percentage on sales, whereas ambassadors’ main goal is how many times they post and tag you.

I had a brand with a very superior product and we could not give their shit away for free. We were outreaching to 400 people a month and got three responses. Creators didn’t want to be associated with with brand. As hard as it is to listen to consumer feedback, you have to in order to succeed.

I have a very specific retail strategy.

You want to buy UGC content you’re being tagged in and run it as ads. For retail, I do sampling through Instacart. We find creators that live near one of the stores and ship them product through Instacart. It depletes your inventory, gets to them faster, and acts as an order. You see who actually posts, pay for the whitelisting or ad rights, and run it as an ad within a five-mile radius of select zip codes of stores you’re located in. They drive to the where-to-buy page, or you do an aisle offer they can redeem in store.

Evergood Sausage is a retail-first brand doing really well with our program.

They were at 19,000 followers when we started. Now they’re at 36,000. We’re at a 41% engagement rate. Industry average is 2-3%. We use influencer to offset media production costs: intensive sampling, driving trial, and identifying what we call series regulars to create content on behalf of the brand. We don’t create any of our own content. It’s all done through creators, real people consuming products.

Last year the sausage industry was down as a whole, but we maintained market share. The brand pays about $5,000 a month for paid collabs, but we get tagged in like 20 pieces of content a week. It’s crazy.

We’re very much in your business.

We meet with your sales team: What retailers are we launching in? What are our must-win accounts? When it comes to paid ads, we’re the ones fueling them. We look at the data: what content is converting, what isn’t, why are we running this as a retargeting ad. We help influence the strategy. We meet weekly. Sometimes it’s overkill, but I like to be involved.

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• The “it” labneh of NYC (and how it won 3 awards in a week)

• Cool Shiny Culture’s: The Cultural Curve of Beverages

• CPG packaging gets its own bill, $2.25 per pound of tomatoes, protein-maxxing has hit the farms

Meet Ilay Karateke, co-founder of Bezi, the labneh brand that swept Expo West 2026, taking home a NEXTY Award, America’s Next Top Snack, and 2nd place in Albertsons Innovation Launchpad… all in the same week.

Or, as someone once described it to me: the ‘it’ labneh of NYC.

Bezi takes labneh, a Middle Eastern dairy dip somewhere between cream cheese and yogurt, and makes it feel at home on American shelves. Same protein as hummus. No preservatives, no gums. Flavors like Everything and Hot Honey.

Ilay’s path here isn’t exactly linear. She came up through McKinsey, helped launch a $2 billion grocery delivery startup, and spent an MBA summer waking up at 5 a.m. to milk cows and make cheese by hand.

A cheese brand had been Ilay’s dream for a while. Bezi is what made it real.

00:13 - The minds behind Bezi
03:10 - I was like “Hey, I love cheese!”
05:35 - I’m extremely opinionated as a founder
10:16 - American consumption is very functional
14:11 - We’re selling about 10 anhour at demos
18:00 - I don’t operate on revenue
20:44 - It’s good therapy to launch your business

🐄 Jump to 1:52 for Ilay’s TMI cow-milking story (you’ve been warned)

• 240 days: Refrigerated shelf life (2.5x longer than hummus)

• 10 units an hour: Average demo conversion

• 2 out of 4 quarters: Cash flow positive in Bezi’s first year

Don’t crowdsource your product. Ilay didn’t run taste tests or surveys. She spent years cooking for friends and trying every dairy product in New York. By the time she developed Bezi’s recipes, she already knew what would work. Hot Honey. Everything Labneh. A less tangy Turkish base. If you don’t have a strong point of view, the market will give you one, and it won’t be yours.

You don’t explain a new category. You get someone to try it. For something people don’t understand, explanation is overrated. Taste isn’t. Ilay built awareness through demos, sampling, and showing up in person. “The first years have to be very much close to the shelf.” Be there. Get it in people’s mouths. Everything else comes after.

Every channel should pay for itself. Full stop. Most founders look at a top-line revenue number. Ilay looks at every store, every market, every channel separately and asks: is this paying for itself? Launching in a new market isn’t “we need more revenue.” It’s “can this cover its own costs?” In her previous role, she watched Getir raise $2 billion chasing unsustainable growth and collapse. Bezi runs the opposite way.

Control how it’s made and how it moves. Ilay doesn’t just manage the brand. She controls how Bezi is made and how it gets to shelf. On the production side, that means custom machinery, tight processes, and a 240-day refrigerated shelf life. On the distribution side, she runs her own delivery routes and knows exactly what sells, where, and when. Owning both ends is how you actually see what’s working.

Function is how they find you. Story is why they stay. You might want to sell culture, sourcing, or story. But consumers are buying protein, gut health, or calories. You don’t have to build your entire brand around that, but you do have to acknowledge it. Ilay is taking that into her second year and learning what actually moves someone to pick it up.

Market signal → New categories aren’t won on awareness. They’re won on conversion. If trial doesn’t turn into purchase, distribution just scales the problem.

The local-first playbook

Walk stores. Build relationships. Demo constantly. Make your product feel everywhere, even when it isn’t (yet).

Step 1: Pick your fort: One city. One neighborhood. One channel. Where your product fits, and where you can actually show up.

Step 2: Go deep, not wide: Cluster stores. Build repetition. Create “I’ve seen this before” moments.

Step 3: Own the experience: Demo. Sample. Talk to customers. Watch how real people react in real time.

Step 4: Build pull, not just placement: Customers ask for it. Stores reorder faster. Other retailers start paying attention.

Step 5: Expand from strength: Take what works. Repeat it. Velocity in your fort is your proof and your pitch.

Cool Shiny Culture just released The Cultural Curve on Beverages and drinking isn’t really about drinking anymore. It’s about function, aesthetics, and when it’s “worth it.”

Helpful framing if you’re trying to figure out why everyone’s launching something with adaptogens.

The short version: Gen Z is drinking less, drinking weirder, and when they do drink, they’re doing it on their own terms (at home, in small groups, with a BORG in hand). Gen Alpha is coming in hot with a functional beverage agenda they absorbed from their wellness-coded childhoods. The flavor map is shifting south and east.

The old playbook was about occasion: Get in front of someone at the right moment and you win. The new one is about identity and function. And the real white space isn’t the liquid, it’s the ritual. Sober dating. Post-workout hangs. The thing you bring to a dinner party when you don’t want to bring wine. No one owns those yet.

Read it 🍵🍺

It’s not just ingredients being scrutinized: Packaging gets its own bill.

The battle between in-store vs online is over: Ecom sales were almost 75% of total grocery dollar growth.

It’s not the product, it’s the space around it: Research shows a clearer aisle increases sales by ~11.5%.

Tariffs are finally getting refunded: A total of $166B is on the table.

Tomatoes are the most expensive vegetable? $2.25 per pound, brought to you by climate, policy, and fuel.

As foodservice is losing ground… groceries and c-stores are picking it up.

Trader Joe’s was the affordable option: Now it’s pulling high-income Gen Z shoppers.

Get ready for food summer: 53% will buy more food and beverages this summer (more than clothing and skincare)

Protein-maxxing has hit the farms: Peas and lentils are the few crops making money.

April 29 (Virtual): From Trade Spend to True Growth

April 29 (NY): Vice Night by CPGD x Myca

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

May 31 (Virtual): Bon Appetit Pantry Awards Submission Deadline

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 10-11 (Chicago): 2026 KeHE Holiday Show

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• How a husband-and-wife team bet $60k on an Italian snack cracker and sold out in a month

• What 12 CPG experts would fix first at a $1–5M CPG brand

• 150M Americans feel dehydrated, party on aisle 4, the next CPG brand is being built in a dorm room

Meet Sheela Prakash and Joe Fiorenzo, the husband-and-wife team behind Sfizi. The brand is built on a simple idea: find the best food in Italy and bring it to the U.S.

She’s a cookbook author, he’s a former finance guy, and together they set out to import the kind of Italian products you only discover if you’ve spent real time there.

They started with taralli, the small, crunchy crackers served at aperitivo across Southern Italy. “We had never found one as good in the U.S., so we went to find it,” says Sheela. “That melt-in-your-mouth, light, flaky, almost like really good pie crust.”

The interesting part is how they did it.

No customer surveys. No market research. They opened Google Maps, searched “tarallificio” (Italian for taralli factory) and started cold-emailing producers.

After visiting six producers across Puglia, they found two brothers reviving their family’s culinary heritage, and making the best taralli they’d ever tasted. They got FDA approval in 24 hours and shipped their first run across the Atlantic.

They sold out in a month.

00:26 - The minds behind Sfizi
03:00 - Blindly emailed a dozen producers
06:30 - Sold out in a month
09:22 - There’s a lot of ocean in between
11:35 - Count the ingredients on one hand
15:23 - Nobody knows, just ask

$60-65K: Personal investment to start the business

2 months: From the family-run factory in Puglia to the warehouse in New York

1 month: Time it took to sell out their first run

Your first product should not be your masterpiece. Don’t launch with your whole vision. Launch the thing that’s lightest to ship, easiest to approve, longest shelf life. This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning. Use it to learn logistics, wholesale, pricing, and customers before you scale into the harder stuff. Sfizi started with one SKU: a snack cracker.

Branding is your sales team at launch. Sheela and Joe spent over 50% of their initial investment on branding. Not product. The box. Customers bought it as an easy, giftable aperitivo snack. Wholesale buyers saw a beautiful box of Italian crackers and bought in bulk, without tasting a single one. The product has to be good. But the brand has to sell it first.

Your manufacturer is a strategic partner. Act like it. When you sell out and need to move fast, who do you call? Sheela and Joe messaged their Puglia producers during New Year’s in a mild panic. They responded immediately. Product was ready within a week. That’s a relationship built on transparency and shared vision. Your manufacturer is either your biggest asset or your biggest bottleneck. Mostly it depends on how you treat them.

You don’t need a network. You need a search bar. Sheela had zero industry contacts in Italy. So she typed “tarallificio” (Italian for taralli factory) into Google Maps, found every small family producer in Puglia, and started cold emailing. This isn’t an Italian story. Whatever you’re sourcing, wherever it’s made, the producers exist. Most people just don’t bother looking hard enough.

Wholesale can create demand, not just fulfill it. High MOQs leave new brands with more inventory than they know how to move. Platforms like Faire and Airgoods put you in front of hundreds of buyers at once, no sales rep required. Sfizi launched expecting to rely on DTC. Instead, wholesale orders came flooding in from shops they’d never heard of, in places they hadn’t targeted. Wholesale isn’t just a channel. It’s how people find you.

Market signal → The shorter the ingredient list, the stronger the signal. “More” used to mean better. Now it just means more. The brands winning are the ones that know what to leave out.

Your first SKU scorecard

Not every product should be your first product. Run the product through this scorecard if you want to get to market fast. Score each question 1–5.

1. Market: Is this familiar, but better? You don’t want zero awareness or total saturation. Aim for something people recognize, but haven’t had done properly.

2. Compliance: Can you sell it fast? Low friction. Easy to label. No special handling. If approval takes months, it’s too complex for product one.

3. Logistics: Can it move easily? Light, durable, shelf-stable. If it’s fragile, heavy, or highly perishable, it adds complexity you don’t need yet.

4. Production: Can you get to market quickly? Simple to produce. Manageable MOQ. Reliable supplier. If it takes too long, simplify it.

5. Distribution: Do you know where the first batch goes? Can you name ten shops that would stock this? If you don’t know where the first 1,000 units go, don’t produce them yet.

6. Packaging: Will it sell itself? Clear in seconds. Visually distinct. Easy to understand. If someone wouldn’t buy it without trying it, the packaging isn’t doing its job.

7. Economics: Can you survive being wrong? Your first run is a hypothesis. Leave room for mistakes.

SCORE: 30–35: Ship it. 22–29: Simplify it. Under 22: Save it for later.

A low score doesn’t mean the product is wrong. It’s just a little more challenging to start with. But if you believe in it, go for it!

This week we didn’t talk to one expert. We talked to 12, from every corner of CPG. We asked: If you joined a $1-5M CPG brand tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d fix?

Read the rest of the answers

Party on aisle 4: Is the hottest club in your neighborhood grocery, corner store, or coffee shop?

Job-hopping at the C-suite: Hershey’s U.S. President leaves after a year.

150M Americans feel dehydrated: But is PepsiCo’s Gatorade the brand to change that?

The next CPG brands will come from dorm rooms: Insomnia Cookies, Bawi, Goldilocks, Posana, Chara, Shooka Sauce, Tart, and more.

NYC’s 1st city-owned grocery has a location: And it’s on E 115th and Park.

The 2026 Dirty Dozen: Leafy greens top the list again (#1. Spinach, #2. Kale and collard greens), according to EWG Shopper’s Guide.

From single origin to lab-grown: Mondelēz and Celleste unveil world’s first cell-cultured chocolate bar.

When greens go gummy: Grüns’ DTC is about to overtake the OG daily greens brand, AG1.

🥚🥚

Hey founders! Does your product have eggs? There’s a cohort for that.

Hosted by the American Egg Board and JPG Resources, it’s the first-ever egg-centric founder cohort.

The sessions start this June and run for 6 months as a virtual, business-school-style program, covering everything from manufacturing and distribution to margins and legal. Small group sessions. Peer networking. Personalized 1:1 advising. AND it’s free.

Apply here

April 23 (NY): Naturally New York Spring Fling

April 29 (Virtual): From Trade Spend to True Growth

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

May 31 (Virtual): Bon Appetit Pantry Awards Submission Deadline

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

Most CPG founders don’t hire full-time first. They hire fractional.

A head of marketing for a few hours a week. An ops lead to fix what’s breaking. A finance person who actually understands retail.

The hard part isn’t knowing you need help. It’s finding the right person fast. Warm intros run dry. LinkedIn’s messy. Guesswork is expensive.

Grow Pro is a rolodex of CPG operators across growth, marketing, finance, and operations. People who’ve done the job and can step in before you’re ready to hire full-time.

Find your fractional

So we asked a few of them: If you joined a scaling CPG brand doing $1–5M tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d fix?

Find your fractional

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

• How an ice cream founder went from pushing every pint to seeing massive pull

• GROW PRO again :) After last week’s wild response, the list has grown with even more people worth knowing.

• How Asia will eat, drink, snack in 2026, $10M is the average cost of a food recall, are breakfast goods just smaller meals with an egg?

Meet Sam Rose, founder of RoseBud Ice Cream, a brand selling soft serve in mess-free pouches.

In 2019, he was selling pints. Like every other ice cream brand. Sam had a genuinely great product. He had Whole Foods. He had everything you’re supposed to have. And things were fine.

“Bringing ice cream pints to a category review is like showing up to the beach with sand,” he says. No one is desperate for it. The space is crowded. Sometimes, the freezer door fogs up and you don’t get seen at all.

Then his sister, half-joking, suggested he put ice cream in a baby food pouch for her son’s birthday. He laughed it off, went to bed, got back up, and wrote a business plan.

Now orders are coming in without much promotion. New channels are opening up beyond grocery. Same premium ice cream, different game.

00:11 - The mind behind Rosebud
02:52 - Last one at the office
05:44 - Cream executive officer
08:23 - From 2pm to 2am
11:48 - Showing up to the beach with sand
15:00 - Where pints can’t go
17:38 - Getting punched in the face

$120k → $2,000: Chargebacks avoided through 8 months of daily sampling
5 years: To perfect his vanilla flavor (6 years for chocolate)
1 year: From launch to Whole Foods, while working other jobs

When quality is table stakes, format is the differentiator. There wasn’t anything wrong with the ice cream. But on a shelf full of good options, “better” doesn’t stand out enough. The move wasn’t to make a better pint. It was to ask where ice cream didn’t already exist, and go there instead. RoseBud pouches weren’t just a new container. They were a new category.

“Working” and “worth scaling” are not the same. The pints were working. Decent margins, real distribution, shelf space at Whole Foods. Most brands would’ve kept them while trying to build the next thing. But once the pouches started moving, Sam discontinued the pints entirely. Splitting between something okay and something noticeably better is just a delayed decline.

Your real competition is habit, not the brand next to you. The instinct is to look at the product two slots over and treat it like the enemy. But the real competition is the category inertia that keeps people reaching for the same thing they’ve bought for twenty years. “Some of my best insights came from people who were technically competitors. Once I started working with them instead of against them, things got a lot easier,” says Sam.

When the rollout goes wrong, showing up is the only play. Sam had just landed the biggest PO of his life. Then everything went sideways: distributor miscommunications, wrong inventory, 100 doors dropped to 20. He was staring down $120,000 in chargebacks. So he showed up. He sampled 3x a day, 7 days a week, for 8 months, and got it down to $2,000. Sometimes the only move is to be the last person still standing in the aisle.

If the core of what you’re building changes with trends, it’s not a core. In 2016 it was low-cal. In 2020, dairy-free. In 2022, keto. Now it’s protein. Each wave looked like the future, and each one receded. The brands that survive aren’t the ones who chase fastest. They’re the ones that build something strong enough to outlast the cycle. The trend gets you attention. The product is what keeps you on shelf when the attention moves on.

Market signal → The most interesting stories aren’t happening in grocery. They’re in concessions, convenience, community. When the product can travel, the distribution follows.

The format test

Run this when growth stalls or before you finalize the product:

• Where does it actually get used? On-the-go, at home, at an event

• What does someone need to use it? a spoon, a fridge, two hands, a table

• What gets in the way? Mess, prep, portability, storage (This is usually where you’ll find the most opportunity!)

• What would be different if the format changed? New uses, less friction, more channels

If yes, you don’t have a packaging problem. You have a product opportunity.

Grow Pro: A Fractional CPG Rolodex

Your first hires, before you hire.

Most CPG founders don’t hire full-time first. They hire fractional.

A head of marketing for a few hours a week. An ops lead to fix what’s breaking. A finance person who actually understands retail.

The hard part isn’t knowing you need help. It’s finding the right person fast. Warm intros run dry. LinkedIn’s messy. Guesswork is expensive.

Grow Pro is a rolodex of CPG operators across growth, marketing, finance, and operations. People who’ve done the job and can step in before you’re ready to hire full-time.

Find your fractional

Put an egg on it: Are the new breakfast foods just smaller meals, with an egg?

California certified: The most populated state takes a page out of the old organic playbook and proposes its own non-UPF label

How Asia will eat, drink, snack in 2026: Where formats, flavors, and speed are set.

Yes, there’s an association for table settings: 30 tables. 3 categories. 1 time-honored tradition.

Food safety net: $10M is the average direct cost of a food recall among corporations

Small brands taking big shares: The Red Bulls and Chobanis are still topping charts, but smaller brands are gaining loyalty and cultural relevance

Demand is down but prices are up: As food gets more expensive, do consumers slow down, swap, or stop altogether?

🥚🥚

Hey founders! Does your product have eggs? There’s a cohort for that.

Hosted by the American Egg Board and JPG Resources, it’s the first-ever egg-centric founder cohort.

The sessions start this June and run for 6 months as a virtual, business-school-style program, covering everything from manufacturing and distribution to margins and legal. Small group sessions. Peer networking. Personalized 1:1 advising. AND it’s free.

Apply here

April 16 (Virtual): Good Food Institute: Business of Alt Protein

April 21 (NY): Good Food Spotlight: Serving Up Insights on Food Service

April 23 (NY): Naturally New York Spring Fling

April 29 (Virtual): From Trade Spend to True Growth

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

This week, we’re sharing:

• How a healthcare professional bought a freeze dryer and got into Whole Foods

• Our very own Grow Pro: A rolodex of fractional CPG operators

• Whole Foods All-Star Suppliers, Reese’s rolls back, “Bad” brand names that shouldn’t work (but do)
  

Meet Jenny Yue, founder of OHME! a Vancouver-based brand making freeze-dried fruit snacks.

She wanted a better breakfast. Not in a wellness-influencer way. In a this-oatmeal-is-boring way. Everything was soft. She wanted crunch.

So she and her husband Han started making freeze-dried fruit. That led to farmers markets. Then wholesale. Then Whole Foods in Canada. Then Urban Outfitters in the U.S.

Jenny came from a seven-year career in healthcare, knew nothing about CPG, and followed the signal instead of a plan. We sat down to hear how she did it.

00:24 - The minds behind OHME!
03:22 - From side hustle to signal
06:29 - Lost in translation
10:01 - The margin reality
14:01 - Retail rewrites the rules
17:52 - The business and the brand

500+: Retail stores across Canada and the U.S.
133K+ units: Sold through retail and DTC last year
$50–100K: Their own money invested

Follow pull, not just plan. OHME! didn’t start with a grand retail strategy. It started at farmer’s markets. When cafés reached out, they tried wholesale. When retailers called, they bootstrapped and got in the door. The business grew because they kept moving. More “walk until the path appears” than “execute the 5-year plan.”

What works in one channel may break in the next. OHME! started as “Oatme,” a name that made sense when Jenny could explain its oatmeal topping origins face-to-face. Less so on a shelf, where it has to sell itself. They rebranded and within weeks, an Urban Outfitters buyer DM’d them on Instagram.

If you plan to go retail, your numbers need to show it. Low margins will work for farmers markets. But for retail, with broker fees, distributor cuts, promos, and chargebacks, the same bag doesn’t make sense. Start with the projected shelf price and work backwards.

Your distributor is your biggest customer. Once you’re in retail, everything revolves around them. When a PO comes in, it gets priority over DTC, over everything. Miss it and you don’t just lose a sale. You risk losing the shelf.

Every stage has a different constraint. It’s easy to get stuck on the last one. OHME! spent its first year getting people to buy. Then the orders came and they couldn’t keep up. With naturally growing consumer demand, Jenny and Han are more focused on recalibrating sales projections and production. The thing that got you here stops being the thing.

Market signal → No one is lacking healthy options. They’re lacking ones they actually want to eat. The gap isn’t ingredients, it’s experience.

Can your product survive retail?

Most founders price from cost. Retail prices from margin. Start with your shelf price and subtract every layer. Here's what that looks like for a $9.99 product:

• Shelf price: $9.99

• Retailer (~50%): → $5.00

• Distributor (~15%): → $4.25

• Broker (~10%): → $3.82

• Promos/fees (10–15%): → $3.25-$3.40

That $3.25-$3.40 is gross. After freight, spoilage, and fees, you’re closer to $2.50–$3.00. If your COGS don’t work there, you don’t have a retail-ready product.

Grow Pro: A Fractional CPG Rolodex

Your first hires, before you hire.

Most CPG founders don’t hire full-time first. They hire fractional.

A head of marketing for a few hours a week. An ops lead to fix what’s breaking. A finance person who actually understands retail.

The hard part isn’t knowing you need help. It’s finding the right person fast. Warm intros run dry. LinkedIn’s messy. Guesswork is expensive.

Grow Pro is a rolodex of CPG operators across growth, marketing, finance, and operations. People who’ve done the job and can step in before you’re ready to hire full-time.

→ Browse the rolodex

Reese’s rolls back: After customer backlash (and a very public callout from grandson of Reese himself), The Hershey Company is putting “real chocolate” back into the mix.

These brand names shouldn’t work. But do. Nobody says: “I bought a refreshing ethically sourced beverage.”

Aldi goes digital with Instacart: Private label meets platform.

Americans hit the grocery wall: Nearly 60% of Americans are already spending $150+/week, with price tolerances between 5–10% for snacks and drinks.

Whole Foods All-Star Suppliers: 16 brands chosen by the chain’s merchandising teams. Consider this your buyer cheat sheet.

Big food gets bigger: McCormick x Unilever: When growth slows, incumbents don’t innovate, they consolidate.

FedEx speeds up: The new standard for delivery isn’t fast. It’s impulsive. Add to cart and at your door before the sun goes down.

April 7-9 (Chicago): Rethinking Data Strategy for the Age of Intelligent Integration

April 21 (NY): Good Food Spotlight: Serving Up Insights on Food Service

April 23 (NY): Naturally New York Spring Fling

June 3 (NY and Virtual): Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between

June 28-30 (NYC): Summer Fancy Food Show

* Got an event we should know about? Send it our way.

Meet Aditya Banerjee, founder of Posana, a protein bar brand focused on taste and culture. He’s also a sophomore at Berkeley.

In high school, Adi and his friends would go to the gym and try a new protein bar every day. Somewhere between bar 50 and 60, he noticed something: the space was huge, growing fast, and pretty bland.

“At Berkeley, I was trying to make bars every night. It’s a shared kitchen, so it didn’t take long before people noticed. I became known as the Clif Bar kid.”

He’s raised $500k. He’s in 45 retail locations. He started all of it in a dorm kitchen.

00:12 - The mind behind Posana
02:19 - There was no business plan
04:23 - My first check was $2,500
06:24 - The adrenaline rush, that’s what I love about it
08:47 - That’s when it hits me
10:51 - I didn’t care I was a freshman

$2,500: First investor check from someone in his dorm building

40+ retail locations: In less than six months after launch

$500k+ total raised: From students and investors he met at parties

Start with what’s around you. Adi tested recipes in his dorm kitchen. His first investor lived upstairs. His first retailers were walking distance around Berkeley. “This is in the now. I didn’t care I was a freshman. I just kept moving forward.” The window isn’t later. It’s whatever you have access to right now.

Reach out before you’re ready. Especially before you’re ready. Before Adi had a product, a co-packer, or a plan, he had conversations. “Reaching out to people super early saved me a year’s worth of time.” He learned about co-packers, company structure, and even got a pro bono lawyer. Ask early. Advice is only free before you need it.

Build the list before you need it. Adi contacted 650+ investors, angels, and funds. Even though most of them passed, he had built a different asset: an investor update list. “I have built so many relationships, and have their permission to update them over time.” A no isn’t a dead end. It’s deferred interest. The follow-up is where the relationship compounds.

Treat your co-packer like a partner, not a vendor. Adi’s first co-packer calls felt like job interviews. “I was trying to prove myself, even though I was the one paying.” When Posana’s first production run came back drier than the prototype, he pushed back and secured a discount on the next run. Co-packers want you to scale with them. Don’t be afraid to have that conversation.

Always have product on you. In the early days, your only job is to get your product into as many hands as possible. For Adi, this meant bars in his pockets at every event and party, including the ones he crashed. “People always ask what you’re working on,” he says. “It happens to be in my pocket. I have them try it. They like it.”

Market signal → Early-stage CPG is less about brand or product, and more about proximity. The founders who stay closest to customers, buyers, and capital learn faster (and move sooner!) than everyone else.

The founder fundraising stack (pre-revenue edition)

Raising without data mostly comes down to reducing uncertainty, one interaction at a time.

1. Product in hand. Every conversation is an opportunity to put the product in someone’s hand. That’s your best pitch.

2. The identity hook. You don’t need a better angle. You need a specific detail that makes someone lean in. That’s not a pitch. It’s a person. People fund people.

3. Volume over precision. You’ll talk to a lot of people. Most will say no. The goal isn’t a perfect pitch. It’s 50 conversations that make the next one better.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

4. The update list. Everyone you talk to goes on a monthly email. Don’t pitch, just share progress. Over time, the story compounds, and so does interest.

5. Make it easy to say yes. Clear docs, simple steps. Use a SAFE and set up a Delaware C Corp early. Investors expect it. Don’t make them ask.