Little biz update: as a two-person startup that’s spreadsheet-averse and criminally bad with numbers... we finally decided that it was time to bring on a finance team that could actually keep up with our growth.

So, we brought on Ever Ledger, the full-service accounting and finance partner that specializes in high-growth CPG. Ever Ledger is handling our books, tax, and financial modeling under one roof—so we’re not stitching together three different vendors and chasing down our own numbers.

They typically work with CPG brands, helping brands build investor-ready financials, prep for fundraising, or even plan retail expansion. If your books are messy, your accountant is too slow for your speed, or you’re gearing up for a raise/expansion, check them out!

Now, onto the goods 👇

Nate’s Pickups:

LL’s Kitchen Granola (literally all their flavors)

You may or may not have noticed it, but there are a ton of new granolas on the market. New brands are launching, cereal brands are coming out with their own granolas, and existing granola brands are massively expanding their lineups. Literally every other day I hear about a new one. If I showed you my pantry right now you’d think I exclusively ate granola. And a lot of the ones launching are great, so good it’s actually hard to pick a favorite, but there’s one that has really stood out to me. Not because it has added protein, or crazy flavors, but because of its texture. Also, I know it’s good because I shared some with my mom when she came to visit and she stole a whole bag!

• Quick Facts: Chewy, snackable granola made with infused olive oil and sweetened only with local wildflower honey—no refined sugar. All-natural ingredients, no preservatives or fillers. Handcrafted in small batches in California by founder Lindsey Mifsud, a former college athlete and nutrition coach. Comes in flavors like Blood Orange Apricot, Cherry Vanilla, Apple Cinnamon, and Sweetheart Crunch, plus limited editions like Campfire Crunch.

  • Apple Cinnamon and Blood Orange are my two faves :)

• Reasons to love:

  • It’s soft. I love a crunchy, crispy granola as much as the next guy. Luckily I have a lot of amazing options to pick from, really good options. But there just isn’t a lot out there in terms of snackable, soft granola. LL’s is that option. Look, sometimes you just want a granola snack, but grabbing handfuls of granola isn’t the most conducive to snacking. It breaks apart so easily, gets everywhere, and can lead to a whole mess. With this, there are more solid chunks for you to grab on to and eat, without it falling apart. It’s what I want from a Nature Valley bar, but this doesn’t leave a million crumbs in your lap.

  • Wildly flavorful. This is some of the best and most boldly flavored granola I’ve ever had. One unique aspect of LL’s Kitchen is that they use infused olive oil in the recipe, which I think dials the flavor up to eleven. It adds a rich, almost savory depth you don’t get from many other granolas. I’m always impressed with brands that can build such a strong flavor profiles without leaning on a ton of added ingredients or fillers, and LL’s pulls it off.

Where to buy: Online and at Sprouts (starting June 8th)

Jenna’s Pickup:

Bittman’s - Whole Grain Sourdough

In the interest of shocking you all, I’m writing about real CARBS today. The audacity!

Modern diet culture has managed to move away from keto and paleo, at least linguistically. But in CPG, fear is much stickier than trends: though these diets—in their strictest sense—haven’t lingered, the fear they produced is stronger than ever. In our silly little protein-obsessed society, I try so many products that scream about low-net-carbs and “great macros” (another way of saying “low-carb”).

But every once in a while, I’ll sample something that reminds me: there’s still innovation that has nothing to do with lowering a carb count or upping protein gains. Innovation that’s solely about the quality and accessibility of good, real food in its purest sense. This week, that thing is Bittman’s.

• Quick Facts: Whole grain, pre-baked sourdough products frozen (fresh), shipped to your door, and ready-to-bake straight from the freezer. Made by Mark Bittman, the brilliant chef, NYTimes columnist, and author behind the staple cookbook series owned by every mother you’ve ever known: How to Cook Everything.

• Reasons to love:

  • You’d never know they were frozen. These loaves arrived frozen at my door—and even having seen them in their frozen state, submerged in dry ice, I’m still having a hard time believing they were ever frozen. They come pre-baked and were frozen fresh—all you need to do is toss them in the oven for a few minutes to reheat, and they fully taste (and smell) fresh-baked. Without any preservatives, stabilizers, or additives, each loaf maintains that perfect, farmers-market-fresh, sourdough crunchy crust with a soft, bouncy center.

  • Simplicity meets innovation. Made with a base of just three ingredients (water, whole grain flour, and salt) plus a wild sourdough starter that’s “old enough to vote, possibly rent a car,” the recipe is bakery simple. But the products have range, including a corn sourdough and sourdough focaccia (this was a HUGE hit at a recent dinner party). The whole grain element may seem trivial, but it adds this lovely nutty flavor that pairs beautifully with the tang of sourdough. Innovation isn’t always about doing something net-new—it can be about taking an age-old staple and giving it a little more character or changing how it’s preserved and distributed.

  • A gorgeous gift. I love the idea of giving the gift of beautiful bread. Whether you have a long distance foodie friend (promise they’ll know Mark Bittman) or you’re looking for a condolence gift that isn’t another sad lasagna, this is a fantastic option. These artisan loaves come beautifully packaged—they’re one of those special gifts that’s both very practical and a luxury in every sense.

Where to buy: Build your own box of six sourdough products on their site for $99, or subscribe to save.

Check out our most recent episode of The Curious Consumer, where we dive head first into the rise of the canned shirley temple, Jam’s genius NFL partnership, and why the $50 strawberry brand just closed $150 million round. →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

This week’s episode is brought to you by Ever Ledger, the full-service accounting and finance partner specializing in high-growth CPG (they handle your books, tax, and modeling all under one roof).

If your books are messy, your accountant is too slow for your speed, or you’re gearing up for a raise/expansion, check them out!

Today we’re getting into the nostalgic side of CPG: the rise of Shirley Temple (dirty and otherwise), Jams’s genius NFL partnership, and OLIPOP's brand refresh.

Plus, why the "$50 strawberry brand" was never really about strawberries, the “blended” pasta trend, and more. Let's get into it!

The breakdown:

00:00 Intro

02:12 Rise of the Shirley Temple

05:13 Jams x NFL: The Uncrustables Opportunity

08:02 OLIPOP’s brand refresh

12:26 Oishii’s $150M Raise

17:52 Brami’s $33M Series B

24:14 David Protein’s unhinged marketing (per usual)

29:55 Banana water?

32:17 The next format of supplements

35:48 Conclusion

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News of the Week

Last week, I broke down the whey shortage from the inside. The reality of a demand spike—and subsequent supply struggle—that built a category almost docile in nature, reluctantly accepting a shortage and its staggering costs.

Without an impending whey supply savior, founders of whey-based products have been left with a dismal choice: absorb price increases, or attempt to move away from whey—the second which, to most, felt like a non-option. In 2026, plant proteins suffer a perception problem: pea = grainy and bad tasting, while soy = vaguely menacing (hormones! GMOs! despite being, by every actual nutritional measure, extremely comparable to whey).

Which brings us to this week’s exploration: what if there was a third option—a protein sub-category that didn’t suffer supply constraints or a poor reputation? I spoke with founders building brands on (commercially) new, non-whey protein sources, and discovered that this sub-category not only exists, but has the potential to entirely transform the future of protein… so long as funding can catch up to it.

Let’s get into it →

From whey dependent to peanut power. As the first ops hire at Magic Spoon, Liz Lane spent four years learning the intricacies of the whey supply chain—and easily could’ve predicted whey’s modern challenges. The protein cereal used a whey protein concentrate (WPC) that had to be from a certain supplier, and much of her time was spent trying to adjust formulas based on what the market was doing:

“If one of the massive food brands was sourcing a lot of WPC30, that would get much cheaper and WPC80 would get really expensive,” she told me. “So we were almost trying to create different formulations to go with the flow of the market.”

• For a product like Magic Spoon, taste was the selling point—so this constant reformulation was critical, and taxing. Liz knew her next move would be far away from this supply chain.

• “The second peanut isolate was being mass manufactured in a way consumers or brands could purchase, I knew right away it was 100% what I wanted to do. I knew I was never going to touch whey again.”

So, Liz built Scoops. Scoops is a protein powder made from peanut isolate—a first-to-market ingredient that delivers 27 grams of protein per 170-calorie serving with the versatility of peanut butter powder, designed to work as a straight protein shake, a PB2-style baking ingredient, or a peanut butter substitute.

• Peanuts are legumes, which means they’re nitrogen-fixing (not reliant on nitrogen fertilizer), commonly rotated with cotton and corn to restore soil. The agricultural supply chain is mature, so the innovation lives at the isolate step, not the farming step—ensuring Scoops is betting on a farming system scaling fast enough to support it.

• And, perhaps most importantly, peanut comes with built-in consumer affection. People have been eating peanut butter their entire lives, and already understand peanuts as a protein source. It’s the rare case where the ingredient has better brand equity than the category it’s entering.

“We’re not trying to be a compromise or a cheap alternative,” Liz told me. “Peanut protein is premium, scalable, and sustainable.”

And then there are those creating new protein sources entirely. If you really want to solve a massive supply challenge, you need to think outside of the box—or in this case, the cow. How do cows even produce whey in the first place?

Turns out, cows create whey protein by using specialized stomach bacteria to ferment and unlock the nutrients inside plants like alfalfa, which their bodies then synthesize into milk. This begs the question: what if you were able to extract the protein directly from the plant… and cut out the bovine middleman? 🐮

Companies like New Zealand-based Leaft Foods are doing exactly that, using mechanical technology to break open the plant’s tough cell walls and harvest the pure, abundant plant protein directly from the source: RuBisCO, the most abundant protein on Earth, which exists in literally every green leaf. Scientists have been trying to extract RuBisCO commercially since the 1940s, and Leaft finally cracked the code at scale.

The result is a protein with, frankly, absurd nutritional credentials. RuBisCO has the best essential amino acid profile of any commercially available protein, a PDCAAS of 1.0 (Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score—1.0 is best-possible!), and digests 5-6x faster than whey. Its sourcing is similarly impressive: alfalfa is a perennial legume, which means no annual cultivation, no fertilizer required (fixes its own nitrogen), and much less land required (~2,000 kg of Rubisco protein per hectare vs. ~500 kg of dairy protein per hectare).

• Leaft launched a consumer product earlier this year—Blade, a 100ml frozen pre-workout shot with 18g of Rubisco protein and the full nutrient profile from the leaf itself. Over 100 professional athletes are currently using it.

• But what’s really interesting is what Leaft is doing on the B2B side. Unlike pea or soy, Rubisco is a “gelling protein,” can act as an emulsifier (holding water and fat at the same time), and foams. That functional range opens up wide-ranging applications—including replacing eggs in baking—with the biggest opportunity is in dairy itself.

Dairy companies are quietly buying Rubisco to blend into yogurts and milks, pushing protein claims to 20-22g without the chalky graininess that makes most high-protein yogurts taste like wet sand. 🤷‍♀️ As co-founder Ross Milne told me:

“What we see in those applications is the ability to satisfy the consumer’s demand for more protein right now by blending Rubisco protein on top of a dairy company’s base, and at the same time, alleviate some of those supply chain constraints that they have further upstream.”

And then there’s the truly wild stuff: molecular farming. This is the process of creating genetically modified (dirty word, I know) plants that produce actual dairy proteins—like casein, the protein that gives cheese its stretchy, melty quality. Brands like Mozza Foods (California) are engineering soybeans to produce casein directly in the seed, structurally identical to what comes from a cow, targeting a late 2028 launch.

The industry is heading toward a real, structural protein supply solution.

We have a wave of brands building alternatives to the alternatives—with nutritional and textural parity to their dairy counterparts, and none of the perception problems of the OG class of alts. And we have a slew of new consumers who are ready for the next protein wave. As Liz told me:

“Consumers are becoming more educated and intentional about where their protein comes from, whether that’s driven by sustainability, allergies, digestion, taste, or supply chain concerns. Over time, the winners will be proteins that can combine strong nutrition with great taste, scalable economics, and sustainable sourcing. That opens the door for a much broader set of protein formats.”

These new formats include the possibility of blended protein: RuBisCO quietly hitting protein targets in your Greek yogurt, peanut isolate in unexpected formats, molecular-farmed casein licensed to dairy giants who need supply security…. you get the gist. It’s the whey equivalent of the “balanced protein” trend in meat.

The problem is, this is all happening just as funders are moving away from plant-based anything. The plant-based meat boom cooled, exits stalled, and VC money moved on (to anything that sounds remotely like AI…). Meanwhile, the brands building what dairy is going to need three years from now are scrapping for Series A extensions and pilot facility funding.

“It’s a really interesting world we live in,” Ross told me. “If you think about the development of technology and AI, and the potential benefit that this brings to society, that’s accelerating and growing flat out. And at the same time, we are bound by these physical constraints, like food. And we haven’t really had any technology unlocks in the last 30 plus years to alleviate that.”

The whey shortage isn’t going away, which means the dairy industry is going to need these innovations more than ever. And now, the question isn’t whether the innovation is there—because clearly, it is.

The question is whether the brands can stay solvent long enough to still be there when the rest of the industry finally figures out it needs them. - Jenna

CPG & Consumer Goods

• From the locker room to store shelves. JAMS, the high-protein, crustless frozen PB&J brand, announced a partnership with NFL Players Inc. to create the first PB&J developed directly with active NFL players, set to launch nationwide at Walmart and Target this summer.

  • The fact that Uncrustables hasn’t done this yet is…short sighted. Back in 2024 it was reported that NFL teams go through at least 80,000 Uncrustables a year. The Denver Broncos went through 700 a week alone!

• The second coming…of cod? David launched yet another product, tinned cod at $39 for a four-pack, the portability follow-up to last summer’s viral frozen cod stunt.

  • Both last year’s and this year’s cod stunt are really just elaborate marketing campaigns. They’re trying to show that David bars have the best protein-to-calorie ratio—second only to cod, which has, for a filet, around 23 grams per 100 calories, whereas a David bar has 28 grams of protein per 150 calories.

  • It’s a clever and expensive stunt, but a marketing one nonetheless. And whether you like it or not, it’s getting eyeballs and reinforcing their brand message.

• No treat is safe from protein. Novus Foods, Which owns brands like Noosa yogurt, launched Winky Protein Pudding, a refrigerated snack with 10g protein, no added sugar, and 80–90 calories per cup. It will be rolling out at Kroger and H-E-B first, with Target and Walmart later this year.

• Messi can’t win at everything 🤷. The Mark Anthony Group discontinued Más+, the hydration brand it co-launched with Lionel Messi nearly two years ago. CEO Phil Rosse said the company fell short of “all objectives” without disclosing any specifics.

  • There are a few reasons this just… didn’t land. For one, the product is a near brand copy of Prime, the hydration beverage founded by internet personalities KSI and Logan Paul. And Prime, of course, caught onto that quickly, posting on socials that the brands look similar and ultimately suing Más+ for being a hydration brand associated with a celebrity.

  • Prime brought the core issue to light: Messi was presented with the product by the Mark Anthony Group, rather than being a real “founder” of the brand. The beverage company then licensed his name, image and likeness for the product—which, Prime claimed, was misleading and ultimately harmed its retail presence across the US.

  • Beyond being a threat to Prime, this is also exactly why the brand couldn’t make it. It was a “celeb brand” but wholly lacked involvement from the talent. Unlike other celeb-founded hydration brands (of which there are MANY, from Unwell by Alex Cooper to the newest k2o by Kylie), Mas+ never benefitted from Messi’s authentic promotion of the brand. We dove into what makes a good celebrity CPG brand a few weeks ago here.

• Where’s Bob? Bob’s Red Mill announced a full brand and packaging redesign, developed with Turner Duckworth, rolling out across core flour products in September 2026 and additional categories through 2027.

  • While this rebrand is aesthetically pleasing, I think it removes so much life from the brand. The old branding, featured Bob himself front and center, gaving it a sense of legacy and credibility. The current branding, it looks like any new brand or even private label brand that just launched. The character has been taken out of this brand. - Nate

    

• And in other rebrand news… OLIPOP unveiled its first major rebrand since launching in 2018, fully leaning into its “feel good soda” positioning. The new look brings bolder colors, more flavor-forward packaging, and a unified system across SKUs. The gut health messaging is also taking a back seat, with OLIPOP positioning itself more as a new soda rather than a wellness product.

  • Overall, I’m a fan of this new packaging. It feels bold and unified and much more cohesive branding across all their SKUs. It’s all much easier to read and see the flavors at a quick glance. Something else they did that was really smart, was they removed a lot of the up front health claims. While many people want to drink “healthier soda,” I think more people want simply better soda, and they’re leaning into that idea. On the front, where it used to say “supports digestive health” Now it says “store anywhere. chill to enjoy”. - Nate

• Is this the new skinny marg? Spritz Society, a ready-to-drink canned cocktail brand focused on wine-based spritzes, launched the Skinny Spritz, a low calorie and low sugar take on the iconic Aperol spritz.

• Global candy enters TikTok Shop. Bazooka Brands launched Go Wandr™, a new sub-brand focused on global candy brand debuting with Mini Mochi Gummy. It hits TikTok Shop in fall 2026 and major U.S. retailers in early 2027.

  • Launching on TikTok Shop is no mistake: The platform is quickly becoming a major channel for both brands and consumers do business. TikTok Shop exceeded $14 billion in US sales in 2025 (larger than Wayfair, Etsy, and eBay combined), and generated $6.75 billion in US sales from January through April 2026 alone, nearly double the same period a year prior.

  • Beauty and personal care is its biggest category at roughly $2.7 billion in 2025, but food and beverage is also growing fast, with Frito-Lay, Mars, and Coca-Cola all selling directly to consumers on the platform.

  • Despite this momentum, TikTok Shop still represents only about 1% of overall retail sales and 3% of e-commerce sales, leaving significant headroom—especially since roughly 67% of American consumers go there specifically to discover new products and brands.

• Dairy-free is still making its rounds. OATRAGEOUS, Misunderstood Brands’ dairy-free espresso oat milk liqueur, announced a partnership with JetBlue, making it the first and only dairy-free cream liqueur available on any airline as of May 1.

• Bitter → sweet. ANGOSTURA launched two premium cocktail syrups—a Demerara Sugar Syrup and a Spicy Honey Syrup—extending the 200-year-old bitters brand beyond bitters into a broader cocktail ingredient category.

• Ending the drama. Danone is reportedly set to exit its ~22.7% stake in Lifeway Foods, the kefir brand the French dairy giant has held a stake in for years amid a prolonged and public boardroom dispute.

  • After being a Lifeway shareholder for over 20 years, Danone attempted to buy the remaining outstanding shares in late 2024 with offers of $25 and $27 per share. Lifeway’s board, led by CEO Julie Smolyansky, rejected the bids, stating they undervalued the company.

  • This is all coming off an extremely successful first quarter for Lifeway, which posted a 36.7% increase in net sales to $63m. Operating income surged from $1.57m to $6.32m, while net income rose 32% to $4.6m.

Retail

• K-Beauty is about to explode in the US. Olive Young, the South Korean #1 health and beauty store operating 1,380+ stores, is opening its first American store—an 8,647-square-foot flagship in Pasadena, Calif.—on May 29, alongside a nationwide e-commerce push.

  • K-beauty’s grip on US beauty has been building for years and it’s about to hit light speed.

  • The 26-year-old retailer has become South Korea’s top beauty shopping destination operating 1,380+ stores across Korea, crushing all competition including Sephora, which pulled out of the country back in 2024. Their entrance to the U.S. market is coming at the perfect time. Interest in the category is at an all-time high with no signs of stopping: K-beauty sales in the U.S. hit $2 billion in 2025, up 37% year-over-year.

  • Across TikTok, Instagram, and Google, K-beauty averages 81.3 million monthly interactions growing 25% year-over-year (Spate.nyc). TikTok Shop U.S. beauty sales hit $928.5 million in Q1 2026, a 96% jump year-over-year, with K-beauty brands leading the platform with Dr. Melaxin ($46.3M) and Medicube ($44.3M) at the top of the charts.

Funding

• Lupini is the new darling of protein. Brami has raised a $33 million Series B led by VMG Partners, with the San Diego lupini-bean-fortified pasta brand projecting ~400% year-over-year growth by end of 2026.

  • Brami is an example of the aforementioned “blended” future, balancing real durum wheat semolina with lupini beans—a naturally high-protein bean. This allows for a taste and texture that mimics high-quality, real wheat pastas, while offering the nutritional boost of alternative pasta brands.

  • Per new NielsenIQ data, the only pasta made with alternative grains that is seeing an increase in year over year sales over the past year is ‘Grain and Legume’–a segment which has more than doubled in the past three years. Meanwhile, Chickpea, Whole Wheat and Brown Rice are all seeing declines, while only Durum Semolina is experiencing significant declines–nearly 25%.

    • Banza, the brand that essentially made chickpea pasta a “thing,” recently made a similar move. The brand officially pivoted away from its fully-bean roots and launched a high-protein wheat pasta, which still features chickpeas but is also combined with semolina.

    • After an era defined by wheat alternatives, it’s looking like the future of pasta, among so many other aisles, is blended—a combination of the ingredient we were once moving away from (in this case, gluten) and its alternative. - Jenna

• Artisan English muffins, Series A money. Stone & Skillet raised a $5 million Series A led by BFG Partners, with Beliade Consumer Partners and Supernatural Fund participating. The Boston-based brand, in 3,000+ doors including Whole Foods and Publix, will use the funds for national retail expansion.

  • We LOVE Stone & Skillet!!! This brand is a great example of how innovation doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel—it’s about looking at a sleep category and finding small tweaks that can seriously uplevel the product and reintroduce it to a new audience. English muffins felt like grandma food until Stone & Skillet got their hands on them, with sleek branding, fun flavors, and high-quality, clean ingredients.

• Kardashian name + protein hype = $15M. Khloe Kardashian’s Khloud Foods, known for its protein popcorn, raised $15M in a new round, bringing total funding to over $27M since launching last April, with backers including Serena Ventures, K5 Global, and William Morris Endeavor.

  • The Starbucks placement was the tell: kettle corn hit the snack case in January, Amazon sales of the flavor nearly doubled the following month, and Target performance picked up too—a retail halo effect that most brands spend years trying to manufacture.

  • The bigger question hanging over every celebrity brand isn’t whether the name moves product at launch (it does)—it’s whether the product earns its own repeat purchase rate once the novelty wears off. Khloud is less than 14 months old. That answer is still TBD.

• Banana water goes national. Banagua raised $5.5 million from Hingham Growth Partners to accelerate U.S. retail expansion. The organic banana water brand is already in 3,500+ doors—Sprouts, Kroger, Albertsons, and Erewhon among them.

  • “We believe banana water is where coconut water was twenty years ago, but with an even easier path to adoption because consumers already love the flavor profile and familiarity of bananas,” said Rob Smithson, Co-Founder of Banagua.

  • Banana is having a moment, more broadly. Banana is one of the fastest growing trends in coffee, and more CPG brands are trialing the flavor in their products—from Barebells’ new Banana Bread protein bar to beauty brands like Rhode, Sand and Fog, and more launching banana-scented products (for, as WWD calls it, a “banana girl summer.”)

• Influencer wellness meets OTCQB hustle. Healthy Extracts acquired Sommer Ray’s Imaraïs Beauty, a beauty-focused supplement company, for ~$20 million, projecting $55M+ in 2027 revenue. The deal adds CVS distribution (4,400+ locations) and Ray’s 23M Instagram followers to Healthy Extracts’ manufacturing platform. Imaraïs makes “ingestible wellness products” (AKA, gummies) with function-led branding.

  • Healthy Extracts currently trades on the OTCQB, a marketplace for developing companies, and has been expanding its supplement manufacturing capabilities through acquisitions.

  • Sommer is having a good few weeks, first she launched a Dirty Shirley Temple RTD and then sells her business? Solid work.

• The future of supplements is… strips? True Beauty Ventures has invested $1 million in Sleep or Die for its angel round. The fund—which backs Crown Affair and Dieux—is betting early on founder Lauren Sudeyko’s tongue-strip sleep brand, launched in 2025.

  • Over the past few years, gummies have dominated the supplement space, so it makes sense a new format was bound to break through. Patches are everywhere (see Kind Patches and Barrière), but strips—the Listerine kind—haven’t really taken the spotlight.

  • The branding is genius too. The whole sleep category has been color-coded the same way for years. Pale blue, lavender, navy, crescent moons, wispy clouds. Every sleep brand bleeds into the next. Sleep or Die went in the opposite direction, they’re making sleep sexy again.

• Science-backed skincare keeps winning. Good Molecules received an investment from Aria Growth Partners—which has backed skincare brands like The Inkey List and Ultra Violette—as the firm doubles down on masstige, ingredient-led skincare. Industry sources estimate Good Molecules is profitable with ~$100 million in annual sales.

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Quick housekeeping: because of the holiday, our next newsletter will land on Tuesday instead of Monday. If you’re looking for some light holiday reading (by a pool somewhere sunny, we hope!), check out Monday’s deep dive on the whey protein shortage—I spoke with four founders to understand how this is actually playing out behind the scenes, and it’s full of fascinating insights. Check it out here!

And stay tuned for part 2 on Tuesday, where we’ll feature the plant-powered protein brands innovating around this shortage (one of them is featured in this week’s Pickups 👀).

One more thing—we’re running an audience survey and would love to hear from you!!! Takes <2 minutes, and we’ll send one lucky respondent a care package full of some of our fave brands as a little thank-you.

Fill it out here!

Now, onto the goods 👇

Nate’s Pickups:

AMA - a.k.a liquid focus

There’s a lot of products out there that make a lot of claims, especially claims about focus. Jenna wrote a whole deep dive on it the other week! We’re all looking to focus, to calm down, to get our work done in a timely fashion. As someone who runs their own business on top of having lots of generalized anxiety and ADHD….I’m constantly searching for something to lock me the f*ck in.

When I got AMA I was, naturally, skeptical. There are a lot of shots and drinks out there claiming focus and energy. I think a lot give you energy, but that locked in feeling? None. Except AMA. I’m serious when I say I love this stuff.

• Quick Facts: A functional wellness shot formulated for focus and mental clarity, built around a blend of adaptogens and nootropics. The hero ingredient is 5mg of detoxified Amanita muscaria extract, plus 100mg of natural caffeine from green coffee and 150mg of L-theanine for smooth, jitter-free clarity.

• Reasons to love:

  • It shockingly works. I really feel that with adaptogenic and nootropic products you run into an efficacy problem. Most simply do not work, or they at least don’t work for me. I’ve been taking this for a few weeks now and can confidently say these little shots work. I feel myself perk right up and my brain lock in. There’s no panic, I feel energized but leveled.

  • Doesn’t taste bad. So many times you have a functional product it tastes like shit, especially anything derived from a mushroom (I personally don’t like mushrooms generally). I think they did a great job formulating this to not only function well but taste good. Healthy and functional products can and should taste good. Especially if you’re trying to get someone to build a habit with your product. If they can’t get it down, they’ll churn. This is why Grüns is beating AG1.

  • An ancient ingredient, properly upgraded. Amanita muscaria isn’t new. It’s a red-and-white-spotted mushroom (like from Mario), used across cultures for centuries for its calming, “introspective” properties. In its raw form, yes, it is a psychedelic. What AMA did is detoxify it: they strip out the ibotenic acid (the problematic compound), preserve the muscimol (the GABA-modulating compound that helps with the calm-focus). The result is standardized, non-psychedelic, shot for daily use.

Where to buy: Online at drinkama.com.

Jenna’s Pickup:

Scoops Original Peanut Protein Powder

If you caught Monday’s newsletter, you know that there’s something of a whey protein shortage going on right now. With the absurd spike in protein demand, every brand reliant on whey is feeling it—and the brands building outside the dairy system entirely are looking smarter by the day.

But, as I alluded to at the end of that deep dive, constraint (famously) breeds creativity. And in the case of Scoops, that meant an entirely new protein source built on an ingredient hiding in plan sight: the humble peanut.

• Quick Facts: Liz Lane, former Head of Operations at Magic Spoon and first US operations hire at Huel, left the world of whey-based protein to build high-protein powder made from peanut isolate—a brand-new, plant-based protein source with the macros to compete with whey and a sustainable, regenerative agricultural profile. It’s something of a cross between a peanut powder (PB2 or PBFit) and a peanut-flavored protein powder.

• Reasons to love:

  • Genuine innovation. I’m a sucker for (actually) novel CPG, and this is the rare new launch built on an ingredient I’ve never seen at retail before. Peanut isolate has been a B2B curiosity for a few years, but the agricultural infrastructure and processing tech have only recently caught up to make it a viable consumer product. Scoops works with one of the very few suppliers globally capable of producing it at scale!!

  • Taste meets macros. The macros are mind-boggling on this one: 170 calories, 27g protein, 5g fiber, and 0g added sugar. When I spotted those figures, I immediately assumed it would taste like cardboard—and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it tastes fantastic. It also isn’t too sweet, which is something I’ve come to really appreciate in a protein powder.

    • And on that note, the ingredients are wildly simple: peanuts, sea salt, monkfruit, xantham gum. That’s it.

  • Peanuts are SO underrated. Because they’re actually legumes, peanuts are nitrogen-fixing—AKA they regenerate soil rather than deplete it. Farmers will often rotate peanuts with crops like corn or cotton specifically to restore the soil for the next planting.

  • The branding. The protein aisle is a funky place: it’s either hypermasculine, weirdly sterile +, or trying too hard to be fun in a way that reads as almost… juvenile (see: Ghost, FlavCity). Scoops’s branding, on the other hand, nails the fine balance of fun, inviting, and a smidge whimsical while still conveying that it’s a real-deal wellness product.

Where to buy: Online or Target

The other week, we featured our most fascinating interview yet: Dr. Mastaneh Sharafi, SVP of Science & Innovation at Ritual, a supplement company known for its science-backed formulas. She answered some of our biggest questions around the most controversial category in CPG: supplements. →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

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News of the Week

Protein isn’t a trend anymore. It’s a full-blown, undeniable, societal obsession.

It feels like like every other article or TikTok is an exploration of the growing protein demand, a recipe cramming cottage cheese and egg whites into some abomination called “dessert,” a new proteinified product launch, or a clickbaity piece investigating “if you really need that much protein” (answer: probably not).

Whether it’s the downstream effects of booming GLP-1 usage or wellness culture more broadly (likely a combination), consumer demand for greater grams is skyrocketing. And as a result, every consumable brand wants in on the gains.

Anyone who has ever taken a single econ class can tell you what comes next: when demand spikes this drastically, a supply challenge is on the horizon. There's a whey protein shortage going on, and no bulked-up brand or macro-tracking consumer is fully safe from it.

I know what you’re thinking: but why don’t they (the ambiguous, elusive “Big Dairy”) just… make more? What’s interesting is that whey actually isn’t a milk supply problem: milk production hit record highs in November 2025—up 4.5% YoY, the largest monthly gain since May 2021. There is, by historical standards, an absurd amount of milk in this country right now. And whey markets are still tight.

• The bottleneck is downstream, at the cheese-making and processing-equipment step. when milk gets turned into cheese, the watery stuff left over is whey. Cheesemakers can turn it into low-value dry whey for animal feed, or invest in the expensive equipment to the liquid gold of 2026: whey protein concentrate (WPC; WPC 80, for instance, is 80% protein) or whey protein isolate (WPI; 90%+ protein).

  • Isolate in particular has been highly in demand as consumers get more protein literate—it’s more easily digested, quickly absorbed, and lower-calorie than its lower-percentage counterpart.

  • And the booming clear whey category—those juice-like, post-workout drinks—requires WPI specifically, because conventional whey concentrate is too fatty to stay clear. Every clear protein launch on Target shelves is, structurally, capacity that isn't going into a protein bar.

• The byproduct has turned into THE product: Cheesemakers are now prioritizing whey protein value over cheese itself, but they can only process so much, so fast. Per a January market report from a major U.S. dairy ingredient supplier, “more WPC 80 and WPI is being produced than ever before, and further supply growth is coming, yet it will not be enough to flip the market.”

Okay but like… how bad is it really? When you have brands like Starbucks now triggering demand for over 10,000 kg of whey per day in the US (shoutout protein cold foam), things get spooky… fast. USDA spot pricing (open market where buyers without long-term contracts go to find product) has WPC 80 recently topping $11/lb and WPI sitting firmly in the $12s—both at or near historic highs. Some suppliers are already sold out for the rest of the year.

As a result, smaller brands are scrambling while the big brands with big contracts eat their gains-packed lunch:

• Some are riding on “vibes,” like Waay—a sparkling protein bev that launched in Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Target in their first year (frankly, unheard of). Though retailer demand is booming, the supply chain is held together with what Kim Fuerth, Head of Ops, only half-jokingly calls “vibes.” Waay has no supply agreement—volumes aren’t yet large enough for a contracted commitment, and cash flow constraints make stockpiling impossible. So Kim sends blanket POs against 90-day lead times, forecasts month to month, and works constantly to keep her supplier relationship warm. “I’m always waiting for the rug to get pulled out from underneath me,” she told me. Her whey costs have increased 10% just in the last 5 months alone.

  

  • For Tyler Philips, founder of at POINTS! Chocolates, a lower-sugar, higher-protein startup chocolate candy brand, that rug-pull moment already happened. His whey protein isolate crisps sold out completely mid-planning for the next production run, forcing a 3-month wait and a format change.

• But even those with contracts are struggling. JJ Peterson, co-founder of Clean Simple Eats (a fast-growing clean protein brand), is in the contract camp—locked through the end of 2026. That buys him some stability, but the price hits still land hard: “Since 2022, the cost of whey protein has tripled. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen a 43% cost increase. And we haven’t even seen the peak yet.” As JJ told me: “It’s hard to lock a price any further out than that. You don’t want to walk so far out that the dam breaks and costs begin to fall.”

• Candace Wu, co-founder of Wonder Monday (a high-protein cheesecake brand), has seen costs roughly double over the last twelve months. She feels fortunate to have the scale to buy in pallet volume, with lead times holding at four weeks.

Who’s absorbing the cost? For now, the brands. None of the founders I talked to have raised consumer prices in response, and none plan to. And they know better than to seek out better whey prices, knowing that the whole market is experiencing the same fate—instead, they’re hunting for savings everywhere else:

• JJ calls it “non-protein negotiations”—packaging, secondary ingredients, co-packing arrangements. At Waay, that’s translated into co-packer renegotiation and formula tweaks on the secondary ingredients (collagen alongside whey, partly for cost reasons). “It’ll never make up the gap that we’re seeing in protein,” JJ said, “but we’re doing everything we can to offset the cost.”

• There’s only so much margin a brand can give up before something has to give, whether that’s a price increase, a formula change, or—for the brands without contracts—a missed production run. The longer the shortage holds, the closer that wall gets.

So why don’t they just reformulate? If whey is this expensive and this hard to source, why isn’t every brand swapping in a cheaper plant protein? Pea and soy are sitting right there…

• For the protein-forward brands like Clean Simple Eats, “It comes down to the calorie cost of protein,” JJ told me. “If I can get 20 grams of grass-fed whey protein isolate for 90 calories, and I trade to pea or hemp, I’m at 250 calories for the same benefit. I’m going to choose the 90-calorie option every single time.”

• For others, it’s a matter of taste parity. As Candace told me, “Taste is king. Moving away from milk protein to plant protein will compromise that.”

• And for a brand like Waay, well… it’s in the name. 🙃

Other times, it’s a matter of perception: “Plant protein” in 2026 still carries a lot of baggage. Pea protein has spent a decade struggling with texture and taste challenges (grainy texture; earthy taste). Soy is dragging around outdated perception baggage about hormones and GMOs—despite being a complete protein with a protein digestibility-corrected amino acid (PDCAAS) score on par with whey. Tyler, who is actively reformulating his POINTS! chocolates with soy crisps, is building towards a “real first-mover window to help shift that narrative.”

But there is a bright spot in all of this: call it clichéd, but turns out, constraint does yield creativity. There’s a whole new class of brands emerging that are inventing or scaling new-to-market plant-powered protein sources, and you best bet I spoke with them, too.

More on those brands—and the future of non-whey protein—next week 👀 - Jenna

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Expanding the Graza universe—or the GCU, as the kids call it. Graza launched four new homestyle potato chip flavors—Classic Sea Salt, Sea Salt & Vinegar, Zesty Caesar, and Hot ‘n Sweet—exclusively at Target. The brand’s original EVOO chips debuted in February 2024 and sold out multiple times on the website.

  • What started as a (controversial) olive oil brand has begun expanding into more of a platform company that sells olive oil-based products (chips, mayo) across aisles.

    

  • This makes so much sense for Graza. After establishing itself as a premium, buzzy brand with strong name recognition, it is primed to move into different aisles. Olive oil is a low-frequency, high-consideration purchase—consumers only buy it a few times a year. Chips, in contrast, are a high-frequency, low-cost impulse purchase. A chip line puts Graza in the cart weekly instead of monthly, building familiarity and loyalty that can actually pull the core SKU. It can also command a premium price point within a high-velocity category—making them, by comparison, a low-cost entry point into the brand for the curious consumer who’s been wanting to try Graza.

  • Annnnd it comes as no surprise to us that this launch is a Target exclusive. As we’ve now iterated ad nauseam, Target is becoming the retailer for brand and product discovery.

• We’re all just seeking nostalgia in a can. Fitness influencer Sommer Ray launched Tempted, a 7% ABV ready-to-drink Dirty Shirley with cherry, pomegranate, and lime flavors, now available exclusively on Gopuff in select markets.

  • Shirley Temple is popping off right now. Poppi, OLIPOP, Slice, 7Up, Bloom, and Stiller’s Soda have all launched a Shirley Temple flavor in the last year.

    

  • And they’re not the only adult Shirley temple out there either: Back in March, Sazerac acquired Dirty Shirley for an undisclosed sum. Loverboy introduced a “Flirty Shirley” LTO, and Just Call Me Shirley launched as a canned cocktail and NA collection last year.

  • We don’t need to point out the obvious: nostalgia is everything. But why in RTD specifically? The RTD category exploded, but a lot of it tastes, well, the same—seltzers, teas, hard lemonade. Consumers have no strong loyalty anchors. Nostalgia solves that by importing a pre-existing emotional relationship. You’re not asking someone to try something new; you’re asking them to revisit something familiar, which dramatically lowers the bar. The Shirley Temple just happened to be the perfect vehicle: universally known, visually distinctive, emotionally warm, and totally unowned by any single brand until very recently.

• Muscle Milk’s midlife makeover. PepsiCo reformulated Muscle Milk with 50% fewer ingredients, no artificial sweeteners or colors, and protein sourced entirely from ultra-filtered milk. Early results reportedly show sales up 30% since reforluation.

  • The protein drink shelf has gotten considerably more competitive since PepsiCo acquired Muscle Milk in 2019. There’s Core Power, Coca-Cola’s Fairlife line, Danone entered with Oikos Protein Shakes, Barebells launched a Milk Drink, Slate Milk, and Nurri just to name a few. For Pepsi to compete, they have to take bets on what consumers want. Overwhelmingly, data shows that consumers want cleaner ingredients, more protein, and no artificial sweeteners or dyes—a shift being accelerated by fitness going mainstream, GLP-1 drug users prioritizing protein to preserve muscle mass, and the MAHA movement’s broader turn against synthetic additives. It’s not like there’s not enough consumers to go around either, over 70% of American consumers want to consume more protein daily.

  • PepsiCo hasn’t just been adding more protein to its protein products, they’ve been adding protein across its portfolio— from Doritos to Starbucks ready-to-drink coffees to Propel water.

• Kefir’s moment has arrived. Lifeway Foods reported its strongest quarter ever, surpassing $60M in Q1 2026 sales as consumer demand for protein-rich probiotic foods and gut health awareness drove record results.

  • This is something of a cottage cheese story: a protein-rich product that has been around and considered relatively unsexy, only to be highlighted and re-popularized by the protein and gut health craze.

• The protein products NEVER STOP. Better-for-you brands all seem to be launching the same product: higher-protein versions of their most popular SKUs. This week, Purely Elizabeth launched “Protein Ancient Grain Granola” with 10g protein per serving, while Hippeas launched “Protein Crunch” puffs, featuring 8g protein per serving (double their OG recipe).

  • Both Hippeas and Purely Elizabeth were part of the OG wave of better-for-you snacking brands. Both brands achieved national distribution in 2016. In 2021, Hippeas closed a $50M investment; in 2022, Purely Elizabeth closed a Series B for the same amount. Now in 2026, Hippeas feels more like a mature mainstay while Purely Elizabeth is experiencing a mainstream breakout (15+ years in the making).

  • Now, they’re intersecting once again to introduce the new wave of “clean” protein: Purely Elizabeth is proudly calling out its protein source: no protein powders, fillers, or isolates, just added pumpkin seeds and nuts. Meanwhile, Hippeas uses pea protein. “Clean” messaging is smart from the demand side, while the formulations are clever on the supply side—avoiding reliance on high-cost, low-supply whey.

• Supplements and skincare continue to merge. Lemme and Starface launched their first-ever collaboration, a three-piece limited-edition skin collection available at Target (gummies, patches, and a lip balm).

• Influencer, YouTuber, and now beauty entrepreneur. A classic story. Olivia Jade Giannulli launched O.Piccola, a self-funded minimalist beauty brand debuting with a singular hero SKU, the Bronze & Glow Balm—a dual-sided bronzer and highlighter stick in three shades.

Retail

• Honey, I shrunk the stores! Whole Foods Market announced its Daily Shop smaller-format concept will expand to Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia over the next two years. The format launched in NYC in 2024 and now has eight locations across the NYC metro, Arlington, and London.

  • The numbers back the expansion. According to Whole Foods’ own data, 42% of shoppers at the Lenox Hill Daily Shop between September 2024 and May 2025 were either new or re-engaged customers who hadn’t visited any other Whole Foods in the NYC metro during the same period the year prior. The Daily Shop is doing something the mothership can’t: fitting into neighborhoods where a 40,000 sq ft flagship never would.

  • Small-format is having a broad moment across retail, and grocery in particular. Smaller-format grocery stores under 30,000 square feet saw a 3.2% rise in foot traffic, outpacing larger stores significantly. The winners in grocery right now—Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Aldi—all share a smaller, more curated footprint philosophy. Same-store foot traffic growth in 2025 was led by Trader Joe’s (up 10.4%), Whole Foods (up 9.8%), and Aldi (up 8.3%), with the industry also noting an ongoing trend toward more frequent, shorter grocery trips and smaller baskets. Consumers aren’t doing one big weekly haul anymore. They’re stopping in multiple times a week, and small-format stores are built for exactly that behavior.

Funding

• Not your average makeup wipe. 4AM Skin raised $4M+ in an oversubscribed seed round led by CAVU Consumer Partners. Alongside the raise, the brand is launching their newest product Clean Sheets, a serum-grade facial wipe, in 1,745 Target stores.

  • The brand launched back in 2021 with serums an eye patches. It saw success with these products but, the space was crowded. Then, last year the brand decided to launch its take on a makeup wipe, Clean Sheets. These instantly were a hit, they saw a 4x year-over-year revenue growth and four sold-out production runs! The virality of this new product led to Target DMing them about launching in their stores.

• The kids bev space is booming. Roxberry raised an undisclosed round after growing ~900% since its January Walmart launch, with distribution now expanding from 2,200 to 3,300+ Walmart stores, plus a recent launch in H-E-B.

  • We talked about this last week, but this category is really heating up. Countless brands (especially canned kids drinks) are launching and raising capital to expand nationally. The kids are eating (and drinking) good these days.

• High protein! Probiotic! Seed oil free! Rogue, a new snack brand with chips and puffs that feature all of the above, just raised a $2.5M pre-seed, led by Science Inc.—the studio behind Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death—with Uncommon VC and Simple Food Ventures joining. The brand launches in 2,800 Walmart stores in July.

  

  • I’m sorry y’all, but this is the most AI-coded brand I have seen in a MINUTE. There is zero human life behind this brand.

• Eggs aren’t enough anymore. Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg company in the US, acquired Van’s Foods waffles and other assets from Sara Lee Frozen Bakery (owned by PE firm Kohlberg) for an undisclosed amount, expanding into gluten-free frozen breakfast. The deal is expected to lift Cal-Maine’s prepared foods annual sales by ~10%.

  • As commodity prices remain volatile, it makes sense to transition into products that are ready for retail to diversify its portfolio.

• From $50 strawberries to $150 Million. Oishii—the Jersey City-based indoor vertical farm best known for its premium Japanese-varietal Omakase strawberries—raised $150M in Series C financing led by SPARX Asset Management, bringing total funding to $370M, as it expands distribution across 18 states and opens its first international retail market in Toronto.

  

  • Oishii was founded in 2017 the goal of bring Japanese fruit culture, specifically the omakase strawberry, to American consumers while using that as a trojan horse to prove out what indoor vertical farming could do. They went viral for selling their Omakase Berry for as much as $50 a pack (they’ve since come down significantly in price), using the premium positioning as a showcase for what’s possible when you grow pesticide-free, non-GMO strawberries year-round in climate-controlled smart farms blending robotics with centuries-old Japanese techniques.

  • Oishii’s raise is notable in an industry that’s had a rough few years. Bowery Farming—once one of the most well-funded vertical farms in the country—shut down entirely, while Plenty shuttered its massive lettuce facilities to pivot toward higher-value crops. The core issue was that lettuce is a low-margin commodity that can’t justify the energy and infrastructure costs of indoor farming. Strawberries and tomatoes, both of which Oishii currently exclusively focuses on, have far better economics.

• The “healthy Snickers” play gets more muscle. Harken Sweets raised from Taste Tomorrow Ventures and grt sht ventures to expand its date-sweetened line of chocolate candy bars into Costco and further build out inventory and ops. This plant-based, low-sugar candy bar brand is currently in 7,500 doors and posted 50x QoQ revenue growth in 2024.

  

  • This marks Taste Tomorrow Ventures’ second bet in the better-for-you indulgent snacks category —a signal that investors are starting to treat this not as a niche but as a real aisle opportunity. Harken isn’t alone: Behave (low-sugar gummies) has gone viral on TikTok and Instagram, Blobs has expanded into Whole Foods and regional retail on a clean-label gummy play, and Protein Candy launched earlier this year marketing itself as the “world’s first super candy” with 14g protein per bag. The better-for-you candy shelf is getting crowded fast.

  • The consumer intent is there, even if the follow-through is spotty. 62% of consumers now recognize that better-for-you confectionery exists, but only 10% frequently purchase it —which means the gap between awareness and habit is the whole game. Brands like Harken that lead with taste and lean on a recognizable format (chocolate bar, Snickers-adjacent) have a better shot at closing that gap than brands that lead with health claims. Only 16% of Americans trust on-pack health claims, so “date-sweetened” has to taste good before it gets to be virtuous.

• Do we have the next BuzzBallz on our hands? Sazerac acquired an equity stake in SIPMARGS, the RTD sparkling margarita brand backed by Alix Earle and Palm Tree Crew, and will serve as its exclusive national distributor.

  • Sazerac has been on a tear in the RTD space. The playbook here mirrors what it did with BuzzBallz in 2024—pick up an influencer-driven, social-first RTD brand and plug it into professional national distribution infrastructure. Since then, Sazerac acquired Dirty Shirley (March 2026) and took an equity stake in Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila (April 2026), becoming its exclusive US distributor.

  • Zoom out and it’s clear why: spirits-based RTDs are the fastest-growing segment in alcohol right now, hitting 80 million cases in 2025—up more than 10 million cases year-over-year. The category is currently dominated by E. & J. Gallo’s High Noon at around 24 million cases. So, tather than launch a new brand from scratch, Sazerac is assembling a portfolio of culturally relevant brands to compete in this category—BuzzBallz, Dirty Shirley, 818, SIPMARGS — each built around a different consumer hook, and then of course plugging them into its national distribution network to scale out fast.

• More $$$ for consumer brands on the horizon. S2G Investments closed Solutions Fund I at $1B—its largest fund to date—targeting growth-stage food and energy companies with $25–$100M checks. The Chicago-based firm, founded in 2014 by Walmart heir Lukas Walton, now manages $2.8B in AUM across 120+ portfolio companies.

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Next week, the Express Checkout team will be attending The Lead Summit (May 20-21) and their DTC Symposium (May 21st) at Pier 36 in NYC!

The Lead is one of the few industry events I make time for every year. The team does an incredible job curating insightful discussions and stacking the speaker lineup. Two days, 3,000+ attendees, and 150+ speakers including Dr. Dennis Gross, Supergoop!, Simple Modern, Caraway, Amika, Bero, and a lot more.

Alongside the main show, they’re hosting the DTC Symposium—a co-located program built specifically for DTC practitioners across marketing, ecommerce, retail, and ops. And capping off Day 2 at 4pm is a pitch competition featuring eight amazing brands, including Niramaya, Cob, Doze, and Pinkie.

Brand and retail folks attend FREE! Register HERE and drop our name in the “how did you hear about us” field.

For non-brand or retail friends, you can use this link for 25% off.

We know so many of you will be at Sweets & Snacks at the same time next week in Vegas! While we’re sad to miss it, we can’t wait to hear about the show! Email us with any of your best finds or new launches you’re excited about :)

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups! →

Jenna’s Pickups:

The “hardly trying, but with great taste” party snack lineup

I’ve hosted many friends in the past two weeks (’twas my birthday last week!) and have been repeatedly reminded of the sheer joy of gathering—and the special role that food plays in centering a gathering.

While I want to think a function’s vibe is solely determined by its attendees, we all know that the brands on a table play a hand in shaping a soiree. A smattering of store-brand chips and haphazard BigCo dips may technically get the job done, but it offers precisely zero added joy. But when you—the host(ess) with the most(ess)—take the tiny extra step of curating fun snacks, you offer a quick hit of joy and an easy conversation starter among guests.

When you’re known as the “snack friend,” there is a lot of pressure to curate the just-right lineup of party snacks. I’m still working on mine (it is a never-ending endeavor), but these four were hits this past week:

• Boulder Canyon x Grillo’s Pickles Wavy Classic Dill Pickle - This was a crowd fave. Boulder Canyon’s chips are always thick-cut, insanely crunchy, and wavy (read: a textural dream), but I just love how they executed this Grillo’s collab. Sometimes, pickle-flavored items are too dill-y, but these are more of a briny flavor—kind of like a salt & vinegar chip with an added hint of pickle goodness. And, for the god-fearing seed oil haters out there, these are made with avocado oil!

• Late July Sea Salt & Lime Tortilla Chips - Thin and crispy—the perfect contrast to Boulder Canyon—these are an addicting, perfectly dippable rendition of a classic “hint of lime” chip. There are so many tortilla chips to choose from, but these feel closer to restaurant-style than many of their aisle companions. They’re familiar, yet elevated.

• Siete Churro Strips - Another crowd fave that just so happens to be safe for the inevitable gluten-free, vegan, and paleo guest! They’re this delightfully surprising hybrid between a salty + sweet snack: similar to tortilla strips, but churro flavored—light, crunchy, sweet and a tiny bit salty. Though all guests will likely be addicted after their first bite, you can safely reassure them that eating the entire bag is probably fine because they’re made with an alternative flour, a non-seed oil (avocado, duh!), and no refined sugar (coconut sugar and agave syrup instead, which basically makes them a fruit).

• Fancypants Cookies - Never have I ever met a more snackable cookie. These cookies are the perfect sweet party snack: they have the most satisfying, crispy snap, but somehow taste homemade. They’re incredibly buttery, rich, and delightful. I was raised in a household that shudders at the idea of serving a snack out of its package (it must be transferred into a bowl or platter), but this package is so adorable and joy-inducing, you can toss it straight onto the snack table with pride. I also just love the brand story and have written about them before—check it out here!

Where to buy: I bought the first three at Costco, all in party size! Fancypants can be purchased at stores across the US or online.

Nate’s Pickup:

PupGum by Spot & Tango

I’ve been giving Ginger (my little 2-year-old Jack Russell-Chihuahua mix) Greenies basically since we brought her home. And boy does she love those damn things—like full-on spins and zoomies when I take one out. They’ve helped with bad breath and dental health, but I’ve had my eye on PupGum since they launched late last year. Boy am I happy that I switched over. Well, that Ginger switched over….

• Quick Facts: A daily dental chew made with a patent-pending postbiotic clinically proven to reduce bad breath in 7 days. Built with human-grade turkey, blue spirulina, and flax seeds (which physically scrape plaque off teeth). Comes in three sizes (7.5g, 15g, 30g) based on your dog’s weight.

• Reasons to love:

  • It actually works. I can be a bit of a skeptic. So, of course, I was curious to see how these worked for my little girl. I’ve been giving Ginger a Greenie a day for well over a year now, so I know intimately what those do. I know what to compare PupGum to in terms of efficacy. I have noticed a significant difference since switching over to PupGum for the past 2 weeks, and Ginger seems happy with the results. And I’m extra happy her teefs are being taken care of because Chihuahuas are notorious for bad teeth later in life, so this is top of mind for me.

  • It doesn’t smell like a dog treat. One of my biggest gripes as a dog parent: those damn treats. They can be so freaking stinky! I get that they’re not for me (even when the bag says “human-grade”). But my god, some of these treats smell god-awful. Thankfully, these don’t. There’s a smell, but nothing pungent or offensive every time you crack open the bag. And they make Ginger’s breath smell even better!

  • It’s blue. And I think that’s fun. (shoutout blue spirulina)

Where to buy: Online at pupgum.com

This week, we have one of our most fascinating interviews yet: Dr. Mastaneh Sharafi, SVP of Science & Innovation at Ritual, a supplement company known for its science-backed formulas. She answers some of our biggest questions around the most controversial category in CPG: supplements. →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

This week, we have one of our most fascinating interviews yet: Dr. Mastaneh Sharafi, SVP of Science & Innovation at Ritual, a supplement company known for its science-backed formulas. She’ll be answering some of our biggest questions around the most controversial category in CPG: supplements. Let’s get into it!

Quick note: There’s some background clicking noise in the first few minutes, but it goes away quickly! Stick with us, it’ll be worth it :)

Share feedback on the pod!

The breakdown:
0:00 Intro + Dr. Sharafi’s background
1:58 Ritual’s evolution and mission
3:59 Evaluating efficacy claims & misinformation
13:11 Women-specific supplements & clinical trials
18:43 Why people turn to supplements
23:02 Why Ritual doesn’t make gummies…
25:45 Consumer demand and innovation
29:22 Four ways to spot misinformation in supplement marketing

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If you happen to be in London June 3-5… we are incredibly jealous. Because our friends at Wayflyer are putting on what will likely be the event of the summer.

It’s three days, featuring the founders behind some of the UK’s best consumer brands like SURI (a fave interviewee on The Curious Consumer) and Trip (the magnesium drink that inspired this newsletter), talking about what’s worked and what hasn’t. With panels ranging from “Understanding the Modern Female Wellness Consumer” to “What Creator-Led Brands Know That Traditional Founders Don’t” there’s something for everyone to learn at this iconic summit.

If you’re in London… you need to go. Your attendance is the only cure for our rampant FOMO.

We can’t wait for the event to come to New York later this year—who wants to in?

Apply To Attend Here

CPG & Consumer Goods

• CPG is officially in its avocado oil era. What was a fringe wellness obsession two years ago is now a packaging callout, a funding thesis, and—increasingly—a retail requirement.

  • Ayoh, Molly Baz’s flavored mayo brand, reformulated its full lineup, swapping high-oleic sunflower oil for avocado oil. The new formula rolls out to 4,000+ doors (Whole Foods, Target, Sprouts) this month.

    • Per Ayoh’s CEO David McCormick (via Modern Retail), avocado oil is two to three times more expensive than the high-oleic sunflower oil Ayoh was using. For SKUs with high oil concentrations—like the plain mayo—COGs jumped 50% on the oil swap alone. Ayoh chose to absorb the hit rather than raise its $8.99 shelf price, betting that premium positioning + flavor improvement + the seed-oil-free callout justifies the margin compression.

    • McCormick framed it as a flavor decision first (”creamier texture, more neutral base”), but also acknowledged that retail buyers were asking for a seed-oil-free version. And when buyers start asking, reformulating stops being a brand-values move and starts being a shelf-survival move.

  • Jesse & Ben’s, the seed-oil-free frozen french fry brand (with avocado oil and a beef tallow SKUs), closed a $10M Series A led by Greycroft after posting 1,100%+ growth in 2025 and becoming the #1 frozen potato brand at multiple retailers.

  • Doughbrik’s WAVERS, David Dobrik’s snack brand, relaunched domestically with a fully reimagined formula made with avocado oil, no seed oils, and a redesigned package that puts “made with avocado oil” on the front.

  • … and, despite what you may or may not feel about seed oils (we think the whole thing is a tad overblown, but alas) the data supports these reformulations:

    • The Seed Oil Free Alliance launched a Seed Oil Free Certified® seal that requires lab testing for “adulteration,” which is common in avocado oil. SPINS reported that sales of Seed Oil Free Alliance–certified products rose 216% YoY in Q1 2025.

    • A Cleveland Clinic–adjacent survey put the share of US consumers actively avoiding seed oils at 28%.

• The battle for bar relevance. Luna Bar launched “Easy to Love,” its first major creative campaign in seven years, featuring Jessica Alba as inaugural brand ambassador. The effort spans TikTok, Meta, and national retail display ads, timed to the debut of new Berry Bars—the brand’s first bar innovation in six years.

  

  • We don’t usually cover marketing campaigns, but Luna is a name we genuinely haven’t heard in years, and the relaunch is worth unpacking. If you didn’t have an Almond Mom in the early 2000s, here’s the lore: Luna was widely considered the first nutrition bar designed specifically for women, launched by Clif Bar in 1999 with sub-200-calorie portions and added iron, calcium, and folic acid. It was ahead of its time on both formulation and positioning—female-targeted bars weren’t really a category yet. Within a year of launch, Luna became the #1 energy bar in natural foods stores with 17% market share, beating out parent brand Clif Bar (13%) and every other competitor in a category with 700+ products.

  • Then Luna got stuck. The bar space exploded with higher-protein, cleaner-ingredient entrants (RXBar, Perfect Bar, Quest, etc.), and Luna’s soy-protein-isolate-and-rice-syrup formula started reading less “for women” and more “for women who haven’t updated their pantry since 2008.” A persistent internet rumor that the bars contained added estrogen (they didn’t—it was soy protein) didn’t help. Clif was acquired by Mondelez in 2022, and Luna has been quiet ever since. It survived on legacy distribution and the loyalty of customers who'd been buying LemonZest since college, but as a cultural force, it was effectively dormant.

  • So why the comeback now? First, the bar category is bigger and more lucrative than it's ever been (David, Built, Aloha, GoMacro all hitting peak relevance), and a name with Luna's brand equity is too valuable to leave sitting. Plus, the conditions are finally right: women-targeted CPG is no longer a fringe positioning bet, it's the dominant thesis driving growth across food and beverage (see: Olipop, Poppi, Gorgie, Bloom…). Luna invented this lane 26 years ago… it’d be borderline negligent not to try to reclaim it.

  • And re: the Jessica Alba of it all… she’s the perfect mix of millennial nostalgia and the current clean-CPG-founder archetype (her Honest Company era). Luna is demonstrating that it wants to be taken seriously as a wellness brand again rather than a relic of low-cal nutrition. The harder question is whether a refreshed berry bar can hold its own next to 20g-protein candy bars.

• Another. Celebrity. Wellness. Brand. Carrie Underwood, the iconic country music star, launched HiNote, a women’s wellness brand, with a debut nutrition drink mix featuring 20g protein, 5g fiber, and no added sugar or caffeine. Her fit52 app is also rebranding as HiNote Life.

  • HiNote joins an increasingly crowded roster: Kylie Jenner’s k20, Alex Cooper’s Unwell (which now comes in stick packs too), Amanda Kloots’ Proper, David Beckham’s IM8, and Ian Somerhalder and Nikki Reed’s The Absorption Company, just to name a few. And this doesn’t include the countless wellness brands (especially drink mixes) that are endorsed by celebrities and influencers. The pattern is the same every time: a recognizable face and the implicit promise that drinking this is part of becoming a certain kind of person, and gaining access to their lifestyle.

  • The HiNote product itself, though, does feel different than a lot of other nutritional drink mixes on the market: It’s merging multiple different products in one to be a true supplement to someones diet. It’s a protein drink, fiber supplement, greens powder, and collagen supplement all in one—but it (cleverly) isn’t positioned as a meal replacement. Assuming this doesn’t become another celebrity’s forgotten brand, this product might have legs.

• One in five energy drinks is now a Celsius Holdings product. Despite all the new players in energy, Celsius’ growth remains strong. Celsius Holdings reported $782.6 million in Q1 2026 revenue—up 138% year over year—after its $1.8 billion Alani Nu acquisition and Rockstar pickup from PepsiCo gave it ~20.9% dollar share of the US energy drink category.

  

  • We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: energy drinks are for the girls. Celsius and Alani Nu—now under one roof—are two of the most explicitly female-coded energy brands on shelf, with branding, flavor profiles, and influencer ecosystems built for the Pilates-and-pre-workout crowd. Together they’ve effectively built a parallel energy category that doesn’t look anything like the Monster/Red Bull aesthetic that defined the space for two decades.

  • The legacy energy playbook—extreme sports, neon, masculine bravado—missed an enormous portion of the population. Celsius read that white space early, leaned into a wellness positioning (the “burns body fat” claim, the cleaner ingredient deck), and rode the female-focused functional beverage wave that Poppi, Gorgie, and Bloom have all since validated. The Alani acquisition was essentially Celsius consolidating its own category.

• And while Celsius takes over the US, Monster takes over the world. Monster Beverage reported Q1 sales of $2.35 billion, up nearly 27%, with international revenue topping $1 billion—up 45%—now 45% of total sales, led by affordability brands Predator and Fury in emerging markets.

• Kid’s deserve fun new brands too! NoBiggie, a new kids’ sparkling drink brand from former Glossier CMO Ali Weiss and Vita Coco veteran Aytunc Atabek, launched with four flavors containing up to 5g of natural sugar and no artificial sweeteners or dyes.

  • The better-for-you kids beverage space is heating up fast. NoBiggie will compete with Wave Kids, Roxberry, Caliwater’s new kids electrolyte line, and Capri Sun Hydrate (which is, you guessed it, regular Capri Sun with electrolytes). And it’s not just beverages—the better-for-you kids category is exploding across supplements, milk, and snacks. The same upgrades adults have been getting for years are finally trickling down to the lunchbox.

  • What’s most interesting about NoBiggie specifically is the format. Sparkling drinks have historically been adult territory, but the cultural cachet of brands like Poppi has rewired how kids think about soda. When the cool older kids are wearing Poppi merch and drinking prebiotic soda at lunch, sparkling becomes aspirational for the under-12 set in a way it wasn’t a few years ago. NoBiggie is betting that the next generation of soda drinkers wants bubbles, fun branding, and parental sign-off—all in the same can.

• A sticker for your tummy troubles. Barrière is launching Dear Dairy (fantastic name), the world’s first lactose intolerance patch—$13 for 36 patches, using 2.5mg lactase enzyme delivered transdermally. It launches at Walmart and DTC, with the brand projecting ~$1 million in sales through end of 2026. Barriere already offers a line of transdermal stickers, from Vitamin D and Vitamin B12 patches to a “beauty” patch with biotin.

  

  • My prediction for the next supplement deliverable: Gummies are dead, patches are in. Patches are alllll the rage right now, with brands like Kind Patches and The Good Patch delivering supplement patches (particularly NAD+ patches—we’ll get into this buzzy supplement at another time…) and reminding consumers that transdermal delivery is an option—and one that feels, perhaps, more chic than swallowing a pill.

    • While putting a sticker on yourself was likely seen as an adult faux pas just a few years ago, the popularity of pimple patches has made it socially acceptable to show up to a function with a sticker on your face. After all, wellness is performative. No one can see you taking your pills or applying your creams, but your lifestyle aspirations can clearly be revealed with a simple sticker. - Jenna

• Cold-pressed goes public. Suja Life, the beverage company known for its organic, cold-pressed juices and functional wellness shots, raised $187 million in its IPO, selling 8.9 million shares at $21 each—toward the lower end of its target range.

  • Suja Life was founded in 2012, when wellness shots and juice cleanses were at their peak. The brand basically started the cold-pressed juice trend

  • Suja is now a house of brands, with Suja Organic (flagship juice; the #1 brand in cold-pressed juice category), Vive Organic (doctor-crafted wellness shots), and the revived Slice (prebiotic soda). All production was brought in-house, with an in-house innovation engine that allows them to go from concept → product quickly. When they bought the dormant Slice trademark, for instance, they were able to bring a better-for-you soda to market in just 9 months.

  • But the IPO reception was (clearly) rough. SUJA opened at $18—down 15% from its IPO price—and closed its first day at $17.85. Suja is unprofitable, posting a $23.3M net loss on $326.6M in revenue last year, and 76% of the proceeds ($141.3M) are earmarked for debt repayment rather than growth. This feels a little less “ready to be public” and more “PE owner needed a partial exit.”

  • That doesn’t mean CPG IPOs can’t work, though: Contrast that with Once Upon a Farm, which IPO’d three months ago and popped 17% on day one. Both companies were unprofitable at IPO, but Once Upon a Farm had narrowing losses, 66% sales growth and a path to profitability, and a clear founder-led story. Suja had widening losses, slower growth, and a balance-sheet cleanup framed as a growth story, and evidently, public investors noticed.

• From soda shop to can. Slice Soda (a Suja Life portfolio brand) launched its first ready-to-drink dirty soda—Dirty Orange and Dirty Strawberry—now at Target nationwide. The cans use coconut-derived MCT oil for creaminess instead of artificial cream flavoring other brands use, with 4 grams of sugar and a prebiotic/probiotic/postbiotic blend.

  

  • For those who don’t know: the dirty soda trend commercially started in the Mormon community with the chain Swig back in 2010 and quickly gained a fast following across the state. Sixteen years later, with help from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives popularizing the “dirty soda” trend and the subsequent explosion on TikTok, and Swig now operates across 16 states with plans for roughly 500 locations over the next five years.

    • Side note: Do we need to do a piece on how Mormon culture is shaping CPG? Between dirty soda and Ballerina Farms/Nara Smith, we’re seeing so many innovations revolving around this community.

      

  • Fast food chains have also hopped in on the trend. McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and even Dunkin’ all have their own versions of “dirty soda”—and Big CPG already saw this trend coming: PepsiCo was early to the game, launching the Dirty Mountain Dew line last month, Coca-Cola launched the Coca-Cola Cherry Float (technically just a vanilla flavor with no real cream/fat component), and CoffeeMate launched Dirty Soda Creamers (Coconut Lime made for Dr Pepper, and Orange Creme Pop made for Crush).

    

  • In the increasingly crowded modern soda category, Poppi, OLIPOP, Culture Pop, and more (preferably without “Pop” in their names…) are competing on the same prebiotic-functional-better-for-you axis. So instead of trying to out-functional the category leaders, Slice is leaning into the cultural moment with an entirely new line extension, featuring a quality layer (MCT oil instead of synthetic cream, low sugar, gut blend). It’s also a flex of Suja Life’s vertically integrated innovation engine—Suja has consistently gotten products from concept to shelf in under a year, a timeline most CPG brands physically can’t match.

eCommerce

• DK-beauty is taking over TikTok. TikTok Shop generated nearly $1 billion ($928.5 million to be exact) in U.S. beauty sales in Q1 2026, a 96% jump year-over-year, putting it on pace to exceed $4 billion annually. K-Beauty brands Dr. Melaxin ($46.3M) and Medicube ($44.3M) led the platform.

Retail

• Temu wants to be your…. butcher? Temu is expanding into food and grocery via U.S.-based sellers, adding 700+ categories including frozen steaks and pantry staples—a pivot away from its direct-from-China roots after the de minimis exemption was closed.

  • Temu’s entire value proposition was direct-from-China factory pricing made possible by the de minimis loophole (which let packages under $800 enter the US duty-free). When the Trump administration closed that loophole in 2025, Temu’s cost advantage essentially evaporated overnight. Around the time of the loophole closing, Temu also enabled Shopify merchants to sell their wares through Temu’s worldwide customer base.

  • Now, it seems to be attempting yet another strategy to stay afloat in the US… and a really strange one at that. “With the addition of local sellers, Temu’s marketplace now offers more than 700 categories, from footwear to furniture to food,” a Temu spokesperson said in a statement. “Food is one of the newer additions, and food sellers on the program are U.S.-based businesses fulfilling from U.S. inventory. We don’t break out category-level data publicly, but food has grown quickly since launch and includes everything from pantry staples to specialty and regional brands.”

Funding

• Grocers get their very own AI co-pilot. Vori, a company building the AI powered operating systems for grocery stores, has raised a $22 million Series B led by Cherryrock Capital, with Greylock Partners and The Factory also participating.

  • If you haven’t seen their launch video, we highly recommend it! It perfectly explains why this is such a huge opportunity and why it’s so needed in the world of grocery. Grocery is a $1.5 trillion market domestically—nearly every American interacts with it daily. It’s a massive category, and one that has stayed mostly analog.

  • Vori has processed $500M+ in payments across 55 cities since launching in January 2024, serving 1M+ consumers. Payments account for 60–70% of revenue—the model that’s worked for Toast in restaurants and Shopify in eComm: bundle software with payment processing, keep upfront costs low for operators, monetize on transaction volume.

  • Walmart and Amazon control about 25% of the US grocery market. Vori is going after the other 75%—the independent grocers, neighborhood markets, ethnic grocers, and specialty stores that have been completely underserved by tech. The pitch: bring AI to the operators who can’t afford to build their own engineering teams, and give them the tools that let Whole Foods and Kroger run circles around them on margin and inventory.

• Brain health gets its moment. MOSH, co-founded by the celeb mother-son duo Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, raised $13 million in Series A funding led by Main Street Advisors, with participation from Great Circle Ventures and Rogers Healy of Morrison Seger. The round is funding a nationwide Target rollout and the launch of MOSH High Protein—a new bar with 20g of protein, creatine, and its Signature Brain Blend. The brand now sits in over 2,000 retail doors, with its retail channel on track to triple in 2026.

  • This benefit list of protein, creatine, and a Signature Brain Blend feels destined for capital, because it sits at the intersection of every functional trend currently driving growth in CPG. Cognitive health is an especially interesting piece here—it’s the wellness frontier with the most demographic tailwind: aging millennials worried about Alzheimer’s, Gen Z worried about screen-induced brain fog, and everyone in between worried about “optimization.”

  • As we covered last week, “brain boosting” ingredients are having their moment in the beverage aisle. Brands like Neutonic even feature the same key ingredient as MOSH: Cognizin Citicoline, a branded, patented form of citicoline (CDP-Choline) designed to support brain health.

  • Andddd then there’s the Target rollout, which is likely the biggest inflection point for a brand that built itself on DTC and specialty retail.

• Speaking of brain food… Bel Group (brand beyond the iconic Babybel and GoGo squeeZ) acquired Ingenuity Foods, maker of Brainiac functional fruit snacks—which saw triple-digit sales growth last year. The purchase price was not disclosed.

  • This is yet another data point in the better-for-you kids gold rush. Brainiac plays directly into the same parental anxiety that’s driving every other launch in the space: parents who want shelf-stable, lunchbox-friendly snacks that don’t feel like a nutritional compromise. Triple-digit growth tells you the demand is real, and Bel is making a smart bet that adding a functional snack to a portfolio anchored by Babybel and GoGo squeeZ gives it a more complete play in the kids’ snack aisle.

  • Bel is worth watching more broadly. Earlier this year, the company announced a $200 million investment to double Babybel production capacity at its South Dakota plant, and partnered with food tech company Foodberry to develop a line of snacks using real fruit. For a legacy player, Bel is moving with surprising speed—building capacity, acquiring growth assets, and partnering on innovation all at once. That’s a meaningfully different approach than the wait-and-watch approach most BigCos take when an emerging category gets hot. 🤷‍♀️

• The “skinification” of hair. Crown Affair has raised a Series C led by Stride Consumer Partners—the firm’s first prestige hair investment—joining existing backers True Beauty Ventures who led a $5M Series A in 2022 and a $9M series B round in 2024. The round size was undisclosed.

  • We’ve been tracking a wave of investment in prestige hair care. Everist, the waterless hair brand, closed a Sandbridge Capital-led round in early 2025; KilgourMD secured a Series A led by Prelude Growth Partners in March 2026 for its dermatologist-founded scalp serum line; and Henkel agreed to acquire Olaplex for $1.4 billion while signing a separate deal to acquire Not Your Mother’s—which had around €190 million in 2025 sales—within weeks of each other.

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We’ve been curious about something lately: what are the coolest people in CPG actually shopping for themselves? So, we started a fun new series to find out (with the help of our incredible intern, Natalie!).

ICYMI, we’ve been going grocery shopping with some pretty cool folks recently—and this week, we had an especially fun guest take us through his weekly shop: the Tom First, Founder of Culture Pop (and former co-founder of Nantucket Nectars)!

We’ll be putting these out more regularly, so if you know someone in the NYC area whose grocery cart is worth a peek, email us at hello@expresscheckout.co!

P.S. We’d love to hear from YOU 🫵: if you have any feedback on our recent content, ideas for future content/events/activations, or just want to tell Nate he looks pretty in his most recent TikTok, please fill out this quick form!

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickups:

Nose Dive (aka one of my new favorite home fragrance brands)

There’s truly nothing better than finding the perfect home fragrance solutions that just work for you: candles, room sprays, diffusers…all of that jazz. And now, I have another one to add to my ongoing roster of fragrance brands that I love. On top of Nose Dive, I’m also a huge fan of Ranger Station, which I’ve talked about before, and Realm, which is more of a Febreze competitor. And now we have Nose Dive!

I actually first heard about Nose Dive from an event I attended. I got one of their candles as part of their gift bags. It turns out they work with a publicist friend of ours, Morgan Kilmer (she’s amazing)! She invited me to their launch event for their new room sprays where I got to test out the rest of their candle line up and all the room sprays that had just launched. I’m now a huge fan of the entire brand.

I currently am using the Nightcap candle and the Home sick and Soft Petrichor Room Mists in my home.

• Quick Facts: Nose Dive is a Minnesota-based fragrance brand that creates high-end candles and room mists designed to capture specific moods and nostalgic memories. Their scents focus on “sensory anchors” like the smell of a slow morning or a rainy afternoon.

• Reasons to love:

  • A scent for everyone. A lot of fragrance companies don’t have a really good variety of scents. Many of them may have one or two that smell really good, but not the entire line. Each of Nose Dive’s scents feels crafted in a thoughtful, unique way. It’s not the same scents as everyone else, they feel designed for the moment.

  • These sprays LAST. My god do these room sprays work so well. I feel that with some of these new, cleaner brands they don’t always perform as well as they should. The smells might not linger or they might leave oily stains on furniture and linens. This is one of the first room sprays I feel not only lasts a long time but smells great too. I learned why it works so well, it has alcohol in it. A lot of the new “cleaner” fragrance brands avoid that one ingredient. But it provides so much to the efficacy of the product! Alcohol is commonly used in fragrance dispersal, it’s not a bad ingredient. It helps ensures spray disperses and evaporates quickly without leaving a greasy residue and acts as a preservative to prevent microbial growth.

    • But the products are still vegan, paraben and sulfate free!

  • The perfect middle ground. Nose Dive sits in a perfect middle ground of brand and price. Many products are positioned either higher or lower, or more masculine or more feminine. These products occupy that same middle ground, making them accessible to a broad audience who want something that looks good, smells good, and doesn’t break the bank.

Where to buy: Online

Jenna’s Pickup:

Mary & Jane - Dreamy Melts

Over the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been having the same convo with different people on loop: everyone‘s struggling with falling asleep, staying asleep, or getting enough sleep more broadly. Whether you blame it on some astrological, inescapably moon-derived funk or (less likely) the blue light constantly pouring into our eyes, sleep feels trickier for many of us these days.

Personally, I’ve been struggling with the staying asleep thing—which is unfortunate as someone who needs 8+ hours of sleep for basic functioning, but also is literally afraid of melatonin (shoutout to my fellow melatonin-induced vivid nightmare girlies <3). Most sleep supplements either contain melatonin or kinda just… don’t work. Mary & Jane’s Dreamy Melts, though, are my new favorite exception to that rule.

I was first introduced by Mary & Jane last year, when we were working on a piece about THC. It was the first “microdosed” THC product I’d heard of, specifically positioning THC as a wellness/lifestyle product for an older population. I’ve loved following the brand since then, and was so thrilled to feature them in our IN SEASON event in the THC trend section!

• Quick Facts: Mary & Jane was founded by two moms and best friends who wanted to find a better way to incorporate cannabis into their lifestyle and wellness routines. Their Dreamy Melts are a calming blend of cannabinoids, botanicals, and minerals designed to help you unwind, fall asleep faster, and wake up refreshed—made without melatonin.

• Reasons to love:

  • The melt format. This is the first product I’ve tried in a “melt” format, which is a small tablet that melts in your mouth. It dissolves gently—a far more calming action than swallowing a hard pill—and has a light, lovely cherry flavor. And because melts absorb through the mucous membranes in your mouth, you don’t have to wait to digest them to feel the effects (unlike a gummy).

  • A thoughtful layering of ingredients. Dreamy was designed for the reality that sleep is complicated, so the ingredients address more than just one potential cause of sleep challenges. Made with CBN (cannabinol: a mildly psychoactive, sedative byproduct of aged THC) and a microdose of THC (just 1mg, it won’t get you high!), these were designed to support your endocannabinoid system and ease you into sleep. The addition of tart cherry and magnesium reduce inflammation and calm the nervous system, while reishi mushroom reduces stress.

    • CBN is the real powerhouse here. In human clinical trials, participants taking CBN experienced meaningfully fewer nighttime awakenings and less overall sleep disturbance compared to placebo, with no impact on how they felt the next day.

    • Side note: Because these only contain 1mg of THC, they’re legal for domestic travel!

  • They actually work. The promise of a better sleep and “no grogginess” is a big one—especially for those who have relied on melatonin or higher-dose THC products in the past. But for me, these actually uphold their claims. I take one melt ~30 minutes before bed, reliably sleep through the night, and wake up feeling incredibly well-rested and refreshed—sans the melatonin nightmares.

Where to buy: Mary & Jane’s website!

This week we sit down with Stacey Hartnett, SVP of Marketing at Chomps to talk about their biggest product launch yet: chicken sticks.

Then, we dive into the week’s biggest CPG news. The L-theanine and caffeine combo taking over the functional beverage space, colostrum soda, the booming luxury laundry detergent category, and more. Let’s get into it! →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

This week we sit down with Stacey Hartnett, SVP of Marketing at Chomps to talk about their biggest product launch yet: chicken sticks.

Then, we dive into the week’s biggest CPG news. The L-theanine and caffeine combo taking over the functional beverage space, colostrum soda, the booming luxury laundry detergent category, and more. Let’s get into it!

Share feedback on the pod!

Check out our deep dive on L-theanine:

https://www.expresscheckout.co/p/everyone-needs-to-calm-down

The breakdown:
0:00 Interview with Stacey Hartnett, SVP
of Marketing at Chomps
12:43 Feedback & podcast updates from our offsite
13:19 The L-theanine + caffeine trend
27:01 Armra's colostrum soda
30:43 Popwtr: Lemon Perfect founder's new sparkling water bet
37:27 Luxury laundry
45:08 Thayers' creator-led product launch and what brands should learn from it
51:04 Wrap up

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Last week, we spent a few days on our company offsite in Austin, planning out the future of Express Checkout. We’ve got a lot of exciting things in the works, and can’t wait to share with you!

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The new wave of caffeination is calm.

Or, at least, that’s the new messaging adopted by both BigCos and emerging brands alike: This week, Pure Leaf—Pepsi’s famed iced tea brand—launched its first functional sparkling line, “Mental Focus” packing in ~70mg caffeine and added L-theanine. In the same week, the creator-founded beverage brand Neutonic raised $6M at a $60M valuation on the back of a caffeine + L-theanine stack.

Both followed a string of recent L-theanine moments: Neuro (the energy gum + mints brand built on the same combo) returned to Shark Tank in March, becoming the first company in show history to come back after rejecting a deal and secure investment on a second appearance. And just last week, LAM Beverages launched a line of L-theanine coffee syrups marketed for “crash-free” focus for the at-home barista.

Wherever there’s a new energy product, it seems, L-theanine will make its way to the label. So let’s back up: what is it, and where did this cult combo come from?

• L-theanine is a non-protein amino acid found almost exclusively in the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. Discovered in 1949 and isolated from gyokuro tea leaves (a shade-grown tea, similar to matcha) in 1950, researchers spent the following decades documenting what tea drinkers had long described anecdotally: that green tea produced a different kind of alertness than coffee.

• Studies in the 80s and 90s linked L-theanine to alpha brain wave activity (the relaxed-but-awake state) and showed it counteracted some of caffeine’s stimulant edge.

• The problem was, extracting L-theanine from tea directly was inefficient and prohibitively expensive. So in the late 90s, Japanese ingredient supplier Taiyo International developed Suntheanine, a patented enzymatic process that mimics how the tea plant produces L-theanine naturally.

  • Suntheanine made L-theanine commercially viable as a standalone ingredient for the first time and—fun fact!!—is still the dominant form on most labels today.

L-theanine supplementation isn’t all that new. By the late 2000s, L-theanine was the functional darling that was supposed to define the next generation of energy drinks—Big Beverage placed real bets, and press covered it as a sure thing. From a 2009 article in the Cape Cod Times, aptly titled “New beverages with L-theanine come into focus” (disclaimer: it didn’t age well…):

Certain formulations of SoBe Lifewater and Vitamin Water contain L-theanine, as does a new beverage called ViB. And Gatorade recently introduced a drink with the amino acid as well. That product—Tiger—was named for and marketed by golfer Tiger Woods.

“Focus and concentration is the next generation of the energy drink,” said Scott Smith, vice president of Taiyo International (editor’s note: same Taiyo as above!).

The ingredient was ready… but the market was not. Spoiler: None of the bevs pictured above exist today. The concept flopped (we’ll only partly blame the celeb partnership…), and brands momentarily ditched the concept of “calm energy,” quietly retiring L-theanine to the back of the sleep aisle, where it spent the next decade buried in nighttime stack labels alongside magnesium and GABA. “Wind down” gummies and “sleep tonic” tinctures became the primary homes for L-theanine—functional, but exclusively after dark.

• The pivot to sleep made sense at the time. Selling L-theanine as a daytime focus ingredient required consumers to recognize a sensation they didn’t yet have a reference point for. “Calm energy” was an abstraction without anything to map it to.

• But selling it as a relaxation aid slotted neatly into an existing category consumers already understood: things that help you sleep. Magnesium, melatonin, chamomile, GABA. L-theanine just needed to clear the much lower bar of “this helps me wind down,” and the marketing wrote itself.

Once a supplement is relegated to the sleep aisle, shifting association back to sleep’s opposite—energy—reads as a near-impossible feat.

Flash forward to 2026, though, and our girl L-theanine is back, front-of-label and paired with caffeine under banners like “calm focus” and “calm energy.” How has this ingredient managed such a drastic 180?

One word: matcha. Matcha, which naturally contains high levels of L-theanine and caffeine, has skyrocketed in popularity over the past two years.

• In a wildly short time, matcha has gone from niche, Japanese tea ritual to mainstream beverage. Within just two years, matcha has gone from a specialty café drink to an expected menu item at QSRs like Dunkin, Starbucks, and even Jack in the Box (that one was not on our Bingo card). The global market hit $4.17 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $4.61 billion in 2026 at a 10.6% CAGR, with North America the fastest-growing region.

• With its rise, matcha gave consumers a vocabulary for a feeling they didn’t previously have language for. Coffee = wired, decaf = nothing, but matcha = alert but not anxious or jittery.

• The reason matcha feels different, of course, is L-theanine, but consumers learned the sensation before they learned the ingredient. Now, brands are reverse-engineering the sensation into formats matcha can’t reach.

• The behavioral data backs this up. Today, Gen Z consumes more tea-based beverages than coffee, drinking significantly less coffee than Millennials, Gen X, or Boomers. Matcha taught a generation that energy could feel different, and once people felt the difference, they stopped wanting the alternative.

The result is a generational reset on what energy is supposed to feel like. Consumers still want the boost, just with mindfulness baked in. And now, beverage brands are racing to deliver that feeling without requiring anyone to pick up a bamboo whisk:

• Pure Leaf “Mental Focus”: While PepsiCo may have bombed its Gatorade x L-theanine attempt circa 2009, it’s ready to give the ingredient another shot. This time, through its Pure Leaf brand—and PepsiCo is pulling out every stop to communicate the “focused energy” message. The new functional tea launched in a three-way partnership with Olympic gold medalist Jordan Chiles (the face of athletic performance) and Brick (the viral phone-locking device that’s become shorthand for digital focus)—energy and attention, packaged together.

• Neutonic: Two influencers, James Smith and Chris Williamson, launched this L-theanine, caffeine, and citicoline beverage as a “Productivity Drink”— selling 7.5M+ cans since its 2023 launch.

• Spacetime Energy: an L-theanine energy drink marketed as “energy for your mind” that just launched into retail at Hy-Vee last month.

  

• LAM just launched new L-theanine based coffee syrups, which bring the combo into the at-home barista category.

Which gets at the real lesson here: An ingredient can be too early. L-theanine in 2009 was a science story without a sensory hook—consumers had no reference point for what “smooth caffeine” was supposed to feel like, so the marketing had nothing to anchor to. Not even Tiger Woods could sell a feeling no one had felt yet (🙃).

What changed is that matcha gave consumers the experience before brands had to explain the mechanism. Once people had felt L-theanine working (without knowing they were feeling L-theanine), the ingredient finally had a story consumers could place themselves inside.

Functional ingredients don’t break through on clinical claims alone, they break through when consumers can map them to a sensation they already trust. Shoutout matcha for paving the way.

Stay on the lookout: we predict a whole lot more front-of-pack L-theanine and “calm energy” claims in the next few months.

Side (but related) note: We’ve also been seeing a lot of “adderall alternative” positioning, and I (Jenna) am currently working on a longer report exploring this phenomenon!

If you know anyone building in the drug-free ADHD support space, email me at jenna@expresscheckout.co

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Feels like we’re just vibe coding sodas now. ARMRA launched a colostrum soda—yes, you read that right—in four flavors (Huckleberry, Spicy Lime, Pear Ginger, Pomelo Basil). Each 12 oz can apparently delivers the same colostrum dose as one scoop of the brand’s powder supplement.

  • ARMRA essentially created the consumer colostrum category, popularizing the idea that a single bovine-derived powder—a substance critical to calf development—could double as a cure-all for everything from gut health to skin barrier function in adult humans.

  • Founded in 2020 by Dr. Sarah Rahal, the brand reportedly hit ~$150M in annual revenue by early 2024 on the back of a heavy DTC and influencer playbook, and expanded into national retail at Sprouts in late 2024. A soda SKU is the natural next move—broader format, broader audience, broader use occasion.

  • It also slots ARMRA into a now-familiar pattern: every supplement that breaks through gets a soda treatment. Fiber sodas (obviously), then protein sodas, then creatine sodas, now colostrum. Modern soda is becoming the gummy supplement of beverage—a sticky, crave-able vehicle that makes daily supplementation feel like a treat instead of a chore. The format is the moat.

• Kids need protein too! Nurri, a protein ready-to-drink beverage launched Nurri Kids, a protein drink for children with 10g of protein, 140 calories, and nine vitamins and minerals in an 8oz carton, available now at Sam’s Club in a 12-pack.

  • Once protein became the main character of CPG 🙄, expansion into the kids’ aisle was inevitable—and kids’ nutrition has historically been the late-but-lucrative chapter of every wellness trend, from organic to clean-label to gut health.

• Expect much much more of this. Simple Mills launched two regenerative organic certified oat flour baking mixes—a cinnamon swirl muffin and cake mix and a pancake and waffle mix—available at Whole Foods, Amazon, and Thrive Market.

  • Regenerative has been bubbling at the brand level for a few years—Lotus Foods, Alec’s Ice Cream, General Mills’ regenerative oats commitment—and the Simple Mills launch signals that established better-for-you brands now see it as a meaningful badge worth putting on-pack.

  • The open question is consumer pull. Regenerative still carries less recognition than “organic” or “non-GMO,” and most shoppers can’t articulate the difference between regenerative and sustainable. For now, this looks like a supply-side story—brands and retailers betting the category will eventually earn its premium—rather than evidence that consumers are actively seeking the certification at shelf.

• Frozen food continue to rip. Ripi, the restaurant-quality frozen pasta brand, launched in over 1,100 Targets nationwide. They also launched a target exclusive flavor, Basil Pesto Raviloli!

• Creatine is booming, baby! Clean Simple Eats launched a Creatine + Glutamine supplement powders with 5g creatine monohydrate and 5g glutamine, available in three flavors: Pink Burst, Frosted Lemonade, and Unflavored.

  • We told you the other week, people want creatine.

• The next-gen can. Re:Lid USA and L.A. Libations launched a resealable aluminum canned water—closable up to 14 times—now available at Gelson’s Markets in Southern California.

  • L.A. Libations is a beverage incubator, accelerator, and brand builder based out in Califonria started in 2009 by former Coke executives Danny Stepper, Dino Sarti, and Pat Bolden. They also have an investment arm, Taste Tomorrow Ventures, launched a $30M fund in 2025. They’ve worked with brands such as Plezi, Bero, Happy, Juni, Once Upon a Coconut, Cann, Odyssey, Zoa energy, Pretty Tasty.

• If it tastes like soda, is it soda? Yanni Hufnagel, former founder of Lemon Perfect, is launching POPWTR, a sparkling water brand bridging modern soda (flavor) and electrolyte-infused water—zero sugar, seven essential vitamins, four flavors. It’s his second act after a turbulent year at Lemon Perfect.

  

  • Lemon Perfect was a darling of the enhanced water category for years—Beyoncé-backed, $42M+ raised at a $100M+ valuation, and on track to surpass $100M in retail sales in 2024. But then… the wheels have come off. In October 2024, Hufnagel stepped back from CEO into an Executive Chairman role, handing the reins to former Vita Coco president Jeff Popkin. Then in January 2026, an investor-driven restructuring cut staff to fewer than 25 people, parted ways with Popkin and the CMO, and moved Hufnagel out of operations entirely as sales fell well short of projections.

  • POPWTR is, on paper, a sharper bet for this moment. Lemon Perfect competed in flavored water—a category increasingly squeezed between cheap private label (Aldi, Walmart) and the modern soda boom (Olipop, Poppi, Culture Pop). POPWTR is going at the modern soda category head-on, but with a hydration positioning that hasn’t been fully claimed yet. Whether the lessons Yanni learned scaling Lemon Perfect translate to a more crowded, more functional-obsessed category is the open question.

  • Back in January 2025 Liquid Death followed suit launching a “Soda-Flavored Sparkling” sub-line — Killer Cola, Doctor Death (a Dr. Pepper riff), and Rootbeer Wrath, lightly sweetened with agave and stevia, 2g of sugar per can. They’ve since added Killbert Grape, Sinister Ginger, and MTN Don’t. The marketing literally reads “you won’t believe it’s not soda.”

• The tobacco playbook, for snacks. Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, and 10 other major food companies have been named in a $1 billion consumer lawsuit alleging ultraprocessed foods are scientifically engineered to be addictive. This is the second such case after San Francisco’s government suit back in December 2025.

  • The complaint named 12 Big Food cos, including Kraft Heinz, Mondelēz International, Post Holdings, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle, Kellanova, Kellogg, Mars, Conagra, and Unilever.

  • Honestly, none of this is shocking. The cultural groundwork has been laid for years—Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People sitting on bestseller lists, MAHA rhetoric putting Big Food squarely in the crosshairs, and a constant slew of social content casting legacy CPG as the villain of the modern American diet.

  • What’s notable is that consumer lawsuits—not just regulatory action—are now the vehicle. The “tobacco playbook” comparison in the complaint is doing real work: it reframes UPFs from a personal-responsibility issue into a manufacturer-liability one. Whether or not these cases win, the discovery process alone could surface internal documents that reshape the conversation, the same way it did for cigs.

• Body care continues to get the facial treatment. Ex-Kenvue and Church & Dwight execs Kathy Widmer and Barry Bruno launched Dewsy, a masstige body care brand using proprietary mini-molecule technology. The line debuts with a $19.99 lotion and $35.99 serum.

  • Dewsy isn’t alone in treating body skin like face skin. Jones Road Beauty launched a five-product ceramide-enriched Body Collection in January 2026; Amika expanded from hair into body care at Sephora earlier this year; NYX Professional Makeup launched a body care line in April 2026; and Tower 28 has also been expanding beyond facial products into body care with its SOS Rescue + Relief Body Wash.

• Luxe laundry heats up. Lindsey Boyd, founder of The Laundress (acquired by Unilever in 2019), is back in the luxury laundry game. She just launched Lindry Lab, a self-funded luxe laundry brand with 17 SKUs—including six detergents at $45 for 32 ounces, oh my—built around clean ingredients, functional fragrance (a term we are hearing a lot more of), and sustainable packaging.

  • The movement in the laundry care space is nothing short of impressive. Laundry Sauce just hit 300 Target stores in March, their first national retail break after years of success on DTC. Mozi Wash has built a whole brand on TikTok with cologne-inspired scents and metal bottles. DedCool became Sephora’s first-ever laundry SKU back in 2022 and is still the only standalone laundry brand on those shelves. Snif has a full laundry collection translating its fine fragrances into detergents and scent boosters.

    

  • And there are so many converging trends fueling this: fragrance is booming, affordable luxury, skincare-level ingredient scrutiny, and the home as self-expression. We’ll do a full deep dive on this soon.

• Speaking of functional fragrance. Maesa, a beauty incubator, has launched String Theory, a new functional fragrance brand built around Phero-Mimetic™ Technology—a pheromone-mimicking formula designed to “enhance confidence and attraction.”

  • The Nue Co. has been working this exact territory for years—its Functional Fragrance line includes Us Pheromone+, which leans on the same pheromone-mimicking premise alongside other “sensory supplement” SKUs marketed for stress, focus, and mood. String Theory is entering a category Nue Co. effectively built.

  • It’s also the natural extension of a broader pattern: every consumer category eventually gets the functional treatment. Soda did it, snacks did it, beauty did it… fragrance was always next, and pheromones—an ingredient story with built-in mythology and zero on-pack dose-checking—are an especially clean fit for the playbook.

• TikTok made them do it. Thayers launched a Hydrating Milky Mist after creators Nina Pool and Shelby Ann Bell went viral DIY-ing a sprayable version of the brand’s existing milky toner. The product quickly became Amazon’s No. 1 new beauty release within 24 hours of its product page going live.

  

  • Trend-spotting is one thing, but what was really cool here was how Thayers handled the creators behind the trend. Instead of just formulating the spray on its own, Thayers brought the two creators on as brand consultants, flew them in to the brand’s lab, and shot the campaign content with them. Crediting and compensating creators for their IP is rare, and a smart (and ethical!!) differentiator.

  • This is also a reminder: the most useful product research is happening in public!! Creators DIY-ing solutions to gaps in your line are essentially running free focus groups; the brands paying attention can compress R&D cycles dramatically. The Hydrating Milky Mist went from a viral DIY to Amazon’s No. 1 new beauty release—that’s not a product development timeline most legacy beauty brands could match without this kind of input.

• Acne care has never looked this good. Experiment launched Continuum, a daily multi-clarifying breakout treatment formulated with dermatologist Angelo Landriscina, MD, FAAD, featuring encapsulated salicylic acid and azelaic acid.

eCommerce

• Live shopping just got serious. Whatnot, the livestream shopping app, launched a direct Shopify integration, letting merchants sync products, inventory, and orders automatically to its platform. Beta users—around 30 businesses—generated more than $10 million in sales across nearly 20 categories in the past year.

  • With this partnership, live shopping is showing no signs of slowing down. It’s already reached an estimated $22 billion in sales across North America and Europe, with Whatnot alone commanding nearly 60% of that market share. On Whatnot alone sellers drove $8 billion in live sales (globally) in 2025 2x from the year prior.

Retail

• Ulta and Sephora are on notice. Because Walmart is expanding its dedicated “Beauty Expert” store associate role to 425 U.S. locations by year-end, paired with a Beauty 2.0 redesign that moves the category to the front of the store.

  • This is yet another signal that Walmart is taking the store experience more seriously—and appealing to more than just the “budget-conscious” shopper.

  • The retailer is staying toe-to-toe with its mass competitor, Target, which recently announced its own deeper focus on beauty with an in-store “Beauty Studio” featuring prestige beauty brands.

Funding news

• The Casamigos boys are back, this time sober. Crazy Mountain, a non-alcoholic beer brand co-founded by George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman, raised $15 million in a Series Seed led by CAVU Consumer Partners, with participation from Coatue and Discovery Land Company.

  • With this fresh powder, alongside the team that built and sold Casamigos, and the former CEO of New Belgium, Steve Fechheimer, running the whole operation, this brand is poised for some significant growth over the coming years. And CAVU knows how to scale consumer brands—they backed Poppi, Bai, ONE Brands, and Vital Proteins, among many others.

  • But the competition is very real and coming from every direction.

    • Athletic Brewing built this category (and still owns it), it’s currently the best-selling NA craft beer brand in the U.S. with 52% market share and wide national distribution.

    • Celebrity brands are multiplying: Tom Holland’s BERO just secured PE backing at a valuation over $100 million. Easy Does It, co-founded by Erik Ellington—an influential skateboarder—just launched a Mexican lager. Charlie Sheen launched Wild AF Brewing in early 2026, and John Mulaney owns Years NA Beer as of October ‘25.

    • And the legacy brewers aren’t sitting out either: Coors just launched its first NA beer, and Guinness, Blue Moon, Heineken, Peroni, Stella Artois, Samuel Adams, and Corona all have NA options on shelf.

• A 76er bets on clear protein + hydration. Wet Hydration raised $10M with NBA star Paul George joining as investor and brand partner, bringing total funding to $18M. The brand sells protein waters and electrolyte waters in slim cans, currently at Vitamin Shoppe and Walgreens.

  • (Side note: Absolutely wild that there are two brands in the hydration space called Wet Hydration and DryWater…)

• Celebrity tequila will never die. Sazerac invested in Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila for an undisclosed sum, becoming the brand’s exclusive US sales and distribution partner.

  • They’re not the only celebrity tequila brand making moves. Dos Hombres just launched tequila and also raised $15M, Kevin Hart’s Gran Coramino Tequila is one of the fastest growing tequila brands selling 3.6 million bottles and generated $85 million in total sales in 2025, and the Rock’s Teremana Tequila is still seeing continued growth.

  • Tequila in general is also still growing, albeit slower than in previous years. While overall spirits sales are down, Tequila keeps rising. US spirit volumes fell to 1.4% to just under 60.4 million cases in 2025, with sales down 2.8% at $13.21 billion. Meanwhile, tequila volumes grew 2.2% leading to a 0.2% increase in sales to $2.51 billion.

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With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickups:

So this week I don’t have anything specific to share…because I’m currently at my friend’s bachelor party just outside of Austin!!

But, of course, I couldn’t come empty handed. I am the snack guy after all. I decided to test out a new service called Onbrand (*not sponsored*)

Basically Onbrand is a two-sided platform that matches hosts with brands. Hosting a bachelor party, a baby shower, a run club, a corporate offsite, a sorority rush, a hotel pop-up? All you do is build a profile and apply to the brands you want and products will ship right to you. This is especially a great opportunity for brands. You get product into real-life moments with target customers. And you can get some incredible UGC content that feels organic, because it is.

For 15 guys eating and drinking through four days on the lake, I think we landed a pretty perfect lineup:

• Grüns for some semblance of nutrition between beers

• Ryse (Frosted Lemonade and Root Beer) for the morning fuel

• Dude Wipes, need i say more??

• Taste Salud (fruit punch Jarritos collab) so we can actually make it to day four

• Slate Milk (Vanilla Ultra Protein Shake and Classic Chocolate shake) to keep us satiated and our muscles strong

Other things we got that brands didn’t send

• Garage Beer Lime: I had to see what Jason and Travis Kelce were up to. (The boys liked it a lot)

  • FUN BRAND FACT: Garage Beer is currently Ohio’s largest craft brewery by volume and ranked the 12th largest nationwide!!

    

• A metric ton of Diet Coke: nothing like a fridge cig!!

• Lots of snacks: Kettle chips from HEB, Doritos, Hint of Lime tortilla chips, Like Air popcorn (Cinnamon roll), pretzels, a big ass bag of popcorn

• Candy! Jolly rancher chews (the best candy ever) and a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids.

• Tteok Bokki from bibigo. AN INCREDIBLE LATE NIGHT SNACK

• Nowadays bottle (10mg), because not everything can be beer.

• And like +/- 10 cases of beer….sorry mom

  

Jenna’s Pickup:

Esprizio - Tangerine Chocolate

Editor’s note: Please mentally prepare for a stark transition from bachelor party shenanigans to a boujee bev described haughtily :) - J

There has been SO much innovation in the ready-to-drink coffee space lately, and I am so here for it. Newer brands have kicked off a wave of craft, culturally-inspired coffee bevs in RTD formats—like Sang Coffee and Nguyen Coffee (Vietnamese), Cafe Bustelo (Latin American), and Yeri Coffee (Indian). These brands are spanning beyond coffee origin, introducing entirely new flavors and mouthfeels, whether that’s a creamy rich deliverable (Sang and Nguyen) or a fruity, light flavor (Yeri’s Coffee Shandy), or even Nate’s recent Weekly Pickup, Esspo’s espresso soda. Are we officially in the fifth wave of coffee yet?

This week, I tried a brand-new ready-to-drink coffee innovation that got me extra excited about this category. It blends Italian flavors and rituals (espresso in the morning, spritzes in the afternoon) into a gorgeous ready-to-drink that will easily earn a spot in my summer coffee rotation.

• Quick Facts: Sparkling espresso spritz made with organic ingredients, real fruit, and fair-trade coffee.

• Reasons to love:

  • Tastes like vacation. I often find myself craving an afternoon “treat” coffee, something a little sweet with a kick of caffeine. But my go-to sweet, creamy latte just doesn’t quite suit a warm afternoon; it feels too heavy, too rich for a sunny day. Esprizio offers a new, incredibly refreshing way to drink coffee that still feels like a treat. The tangerine chocolate flavor blends rich espresso with subtle notes of smooth chocolate and pronounced, zippy tangerine—all emphasized with light carbonation for that summery, Italian-inspired “spritz” effect. It’s such a perfect summer bev, I swear it tastes like vacation.

  • Barista-quality. Other ready-to-drink coffees or at-home coffee options often feel like a second-best option, a budget replacement for the better, barista-made alternative. But Esprizio feels luxurious—from its classy, gorgeous packaging to the thoughtful ingredients.

Where to buy: Online

Because we spent the week on our ~ offsite ~ in Austin, we paused on recording The Curious Consumer for a week! Excited to come back next week re-energized with a fun interview. In the meantime, enjoy our last episode.

We sat down with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of Suri (short for Sustainable Rituals)—the UK-based electric toothbrush brand that caught Gwyneth Paltrow’s eye organically before landing in Erewhon, and now Target stores nationwide. (Check out our piece on UK brands entering the US!)

We also covered the week’s biggest CPG news—new updates to the THC regulatory saga, Beyond Meat’s pivot into beverage, Gatorade’s biggest refresh in 60 years, and the Finnish Long Drink’s $325M acquisition by the makers of White Claw. Let’s get into it! Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

Reporting live from a hot and humid day in Austin, Texas! 🤠 YEEHAW.

We’re so excited to have our (cowboy) boots on the ground for a few days in one of the coolest CPG cities. While we’re here, we’ll be hosting an event with our Austin community (in partnership with our friends at JPMorgan!) and spending some dedicated time planning the future of Express Checkout.

Yea, you read that right: we’re on a ~ company offsite ~ right now, which we’re not entirely sure you’re allowed to say as a two-person team, but we’re leaning in nonetheless.

As we dig into our larger strategy, we’d love to hear from YOU 🫵: if you have any feedback on our recent content (this newsletter, our socials, or The Curious Consumer podcast), ideas for future content/events/activations, or just want to tell Nate he looks pretty in his most recent TikTok, reply directly to this email.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• BTS, the K-Pop legends and CPG collaborators? Apparently so! Korean F&B conglomerates Paldo and hy launched ARIH, a Western-Korean fusion F&B brand developed “inspired by” boy band BTS, exclusively at Walmart US. The line includes stir-fried noodles in 7 flavors, called “Modern Noodles” and “postbiotic” energy drinks and “dual biotic” sodas (what a bizarre combination of products?!)

  • And there so many SKUs. The noodles are launching in a total of 7 flavors and 14 SKUs (7 pouch types and 7 cup types), the postbiotic energy drinks comes in 7 flavors, and the “Dual Biotic Soda” also comes in 7 flavors.

  • There’s such a disconnect here. If the brand is supposed to be “inspired by BTS,” why does it feel like a soulless private-label attempt at staying relevant in the growing—and wildly separate—modern soda + instant noodle categories? Beyond Korean-inspired flavors, there is absolutely zero connection between BTS and these product categories—let alone technical-sounding, wellnessy callouts like “dual biotic.”

  • We’ve seen many celebrity-backed brands succeed, but there’s a common thread: the celebrity’s personal brand needs to match the ethos of the products. Otherwise, it reads as glorified merch (see our additional thoughts on building the perfect celebrity bran from a few months ago).

• Pickles will never die. Because Grillo’s, the king of pickle collabs, partnered with Burt’s Bees to launch a limited-edition lip balm called Fresh Cucumber Dill in Walmarts nationwide.

  

  • Add this to the list of “collabs that don’t need to exist.” While we love a fun, gimmicky collab positioned for virality, it often feels like just that—an attempt to get people talking, not to create a genuinely innovative, usable product. We’ve especially seen this kind of clickbait collaboration (do I coin that?!) come from bigger brands like Velveeta, or in this case, Burt’s Bees. It’s cool to see that the BigCo brands are realizing they can’t create their own clout—it needs to come from a buzzy emerging brand—but at what point are brands just pushing out products for the sake of relevancy, and not true innovation? - Jenna

  • I, however, love pickles. KEEP EM COMING, BABY. - Nate

• Hydrate or diedrate, friends. Capri Sun launched Hydrate, an electrolyte drink made specifically for kids, with 50% less sugar than leading sports drinks and no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives, rolling out to Walmart, Target, and Amazon.

  • They’re not the only ones moving into kids functional hydration. Hiya Health and Cure Hydration launched kids electrolyte drink mixes in 2025. And Kinderlyte has been in the kids oral electrolyte solution space since 2019, founded on the argument that existing OES products were packed with artificial sweeteners and dyes. We covered the broader kids wellness wave—from snacks to supplements to beverages—in our February newsletter.

• THC what?! Stir The Pot, a new cannabis brand, launched a hemp-derived THC-infused coffee syrup in 10 mg sachets, co-founded by former Jones Soda COO Eric Chastain and Grammy winner Kevin Smith, with initial rollout in Texas, Illinois, and Florida.

  • The cannabis market, despite some potential tumultuous headwinds (which we talked about last week), is truly blossoming. We’re seeing brands move beyond the seltzer can and into occasion-specific formats designed to attach to existing daily rituals. BRĒZ launched a cannabis and mushroom-infused spirit built for mixing and social occasions; Cann moved upmarket with a aperitif format; and Clebby’s launched hemp-derived cannabis baking mixes.

  • But what’s most interesting about this launch is how nonchalantly it communicates the new positioning of THC—it’s now a wellness ingredient, intended to be part of consumer’s everyday routine (in this case, coffee). While THC coffee syrup may sound insane at first blush, it’s a strategy that we’ve seen before: Stir The Pot isn’t asking consumers to adopt a new consumption habit, it’s asking them to include THC in an existing routine—similar to how companies like Ryze and Everyday Dose popularized adaptogenic mushrooms in coffee. It all feels part of a larger wellness trend of “calm focus” (see: rise of L-theanine, nootropics, “adderall alternatives,” etc).

eCommerce

• Beauty goes agentic, on Google’s turf. Ulta Beauty announced a partnership with Google to make its assortment shoppable inside AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app via Universal Commerce Protocol, while also launching Ulta AI, a Gemini-powered on-site shopping assistant built on Gemini Enterprise.

  • While other retailers go for ChatGPT, Ulta is not like the other girls. Makes sense, especially after Sephora launched an app within ChatGPT. But what’s especially smart about going for Gemini—though it may not be as popular of a chatbot as ChatGPT—is that Gemini also feeds the answers for “AI Mode” on Google Search. So if a shopper googles “best moisturizer,” the AI Mode will likely populate with a pick from Ulta.

Retail

• The OG home shopping experience is coming to an end. QVC Group has announced a prepackaged Chapter 11 restructuring that will cut its debt from $6.6 billion to $1.3 billion. Revenue fell 8% to $8.3 billion in 2025 as net losses topped $2.1 billion.

  • This was a long-time coming. When your core channel is cable, 2026 is a tough time to stay relevant. Add in ecomm and algorithm-driven discovery platforms, and you have a brutal recipe for a platform that refuses to adapt its long-form segments.

  • While “home shopping” may be over, live shopping is just getting started. As of January, the live shopping market reached an estimated $22 billion across North America and Europe, driven largely by platforms like WhatNot.

• Clean-label pressure reaches the discount aisle. ALDI announced it will eliminate 44 more ingredients from its private label assortment by December 2027, expanding its restricted list from 13 to 57 (!!!)—including BHA, BHT, and titanium dioxide.

  • Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have long promoted their long lists of “banned” ingredients in private-label products, and it’s interesting to see mass-market and budget retailers mimic this strategy. This is part of a much larger movement we’ve been seeing from affordable retailers as they try to meet broader demand for “clean” ingredients and have their private label products compete with better-for-you emerging brands.

    • At the end of last year, Walmart announced its new move to eliminate synthetic dyes and an additional 30 ingredients (certain preservatives, artificial sweeteners and fat substitutes) from its private brand food products.

  • The question that should arise from these announcements is: what are they replacing these ingredients with? Many now-banned ingredients, though they may be harmful in large quantities and certainly sound harmful, have been heavily tested in specific quantities for food products. When manufacturers go to replace them, they may be doing so with ingredients that haven’t been as studied. Just look at what happened when “BPA-free” went viral and brands all started replacing BPA with substitutes that were often *worse.*

• The three musketeers: private-label, protein, and fiber. Meijer, Midwest-based retailer with over 500 supercenters, is launching 300+ new private-label products targeting fiber and protein trends.

  

  • Shocker! Meijer is joining retailers like Kroger, which rolled out 80+ products in its Simple Truth Protein line last September, and ShopRite (Wakefern), which launched a “GLP-1 Wellness Starter Kit” in February.

  • While Meijer’s new products don’t explicitly name GLP-1 shoppers, at this point, the broader “fiber + protein trend” is essentially code for “GLP-1 friendly.”

• Never! Fast! Enough!!!! Sam’s Club launched an enhanced Express delivery tier, promising checkout-to-doorstep in an hour or less across 600+ clubs—no minimum purchase, same in-club pricing. Since the April 2 rollout, ~65,000 orders have been fulfilled at an average of 55 minutes.

  • It seems like every retailer is finding ways to get product → hands ever-faster. Whether its Walmart scaling drone delivery or Uber Direct bringing one-hour local delivery to Shopify merchants, it seems that the only way to stay competitive as a retailer or ecomm storefront is to deliver products near-instantly.

Funding news

• The anti-Gatorade just got funded. Leisure Hydration closed an oversubscribed Series A led by Midnight Venture Partners, with Asahi Group and Nutrabolt CEO Doss Cunningham among backers. The functional hydration brand—up 1,300% in revenue over two years— expanding to Target, Whole Foods, and HEB in 2026.

  • Leisure was wayyyyy ahead of the game. Last week, Gatorade announced its biggest brand refresh in 60 years—explicitly pivoting toward non-athletes. Leisure has been building for that consumer since its founding in 2022.

  • We wrote about the electrolyte category more broadly last summer, but the big takeaway is that plenty of other brands have been ahead of this shift, too:

    • Flerish Hydration, backed by Ja’Marr Chase as an equity partner, leads with l-theanine, B vitamins, and zinc rather than a sports formula; Pricklee rebranded from cactus water to “natural hydration drink” and raised $2M earlier in 2026; Coco5, backed by Devin Booker and Charles Barkley, closed $10M led by Loop Capital to push into wellness and hospitality channels beyond sports retail.

    • Meanwhile, DryWater, the real-fruit electrolyte powder brand founded in 2023, is already pushing $100M in annual sales and is sold across 22,000 doors nationwide including at Walmart—one of the fastest ramp ups the category has seen. Liquid IV, now under Unilever, still dominates the packet format. Cure has built a base around oral rehydration science. And Cadence, a UK-born electrolyte brand, just launched at both Walmart and Target with RTD drinks and sachets.

    • And there are so many more emerging hydration brands out there: Buoy, Corpse Reviver, DripDrop, Waterboy, Promix, Taste Salud…deep breath…Instant Hydration, Magna, Saps, LMNT, Prime, HY.Q, GoodOnya, Sparklinuts, Farmwell, Unwell, Rally (pickle juice shots) all the different coconut water brands, and even Plant People has an electrolyte gummy.

  • All this to say, plain water is dead fam.

• Cold. hard. ice cream cash. Frozen One raised a $2 million seed round led by Supernatural Ventures and The Angel Group, with Tonic Ventures and Lucinda Capital also participating. The Austin-based high-protein, low-sugar ice cream brand will use the funding for retail expansion and manufacturing scale.

  

  • If you have eyes, you know protein ice creams are everywhere. Swoop launched at Target nationwide earlier this year with a protein-first, low-calorie pint; Protein Pints closed a $2M debt round and landed in 2,150 Kroger stores; and brands like Sweet Gains, Smearcase, Natty, and Rivo have all been building in the same lane and seeing varying levels of success. And, according to a literal truck sighting at Expo West, soon, we’ll see David Protein launch its own high-protein ice cream to join the club.

  • The difference between these protein ice creams and the OG “diet ice cream” trend (see: Halo Top)? This new wave of brands is actually nailing flavor and texture. And instead of focusing on super-low-calorie or dairy-free formulations, these brands are mostly emphasizing what they’re adding (protein).

• Laird Superfood is on a superfoods shopping spree. Laird Superfood acquired Terrasoul Superfoods for $48M cash—the third acquisition in its Nexus-backed platform build. Terrasoul posted ~$65.8M in net sales in 2025, with a vertically integrated supply chain and strong e-commerce positioning.

  • Jason Vieth, CEO of Laird Superfood, said this is “a significant step forward in our mission to build the premier platform in superfoods and functional nutrition.” Key word: platform. Superfoods/adaptogens as a product’s core selling point has largely been fazed out—but Laird is making a bet on the superfood supply chain as a whole.

• The new wave of makeup brands is here. Westman Atelier, a luxury makeup brand launched by celeb makeup artist Gucci Westman, raised $15 million from existing backers Prelude Growth Partners and Imaginary Ventures—bringing total funding to ~$52 million—as the ~$100M-revenue brand, ranked third-fastest-growing makeup brand by creator impact, positions itself for a likely strategic exit.

  • Prelude and Imaginary have both been deploying aggressively across beauty. Imaginary recently backed Alix Earle’s Reale Actives, Mikayla Nogueira’s POV Beauty, Sweet Chemistry, and Lore (which raised $5.5 million in 2025). Prelude led KilgourMD’s Series A in March 2026, put $20 million into OneSkin last year, and closed its third fund at $600 million in 2025, more than double its $250 million second fund.

  • Both firms are doubling down on Westman Atelier at a moment when the makeup M&A market is gridlocked. And that the exit queue is long and slow-moving: according to Beauty Independent, Makeup by Mario, Merit, Saie, Rare Beauty, Fenty Beauty, Kosas, Victoria Beckham Beauty, and One/Size by Patrick Starrr have all been tracked as potential deals.

  • More broadly, there’s been some big moves in beauty M&A. Henkel agreed to acquire Olaplex for $1.4 billion in March 2026 (55% premium to its trading price) and Estée Lauder and Puig confirmed they are in merger talks for a combined entity valued at more than $40 billion. And last year, e.l.f. Beauty acquires Rhode (Hailey Bieber’s brand) for ~$1 billion.

• David Dobrik’s chips go global. WAVERS BY DOUGHBRIK’S, the chip brand co-founded by YouTuber David Dobrik and Veggie Straws creator Jerry Bello, announced a strategic partnership with Capital Q® Ventures to fund global expansion. It also reformulated to non-GMO, gluten-free ingredients and avocado oil, like every other chip brand in 2026.

  • Though he’s a sometimes controversial figure, David Dobrik has maintained his relevance as an influencer, recently named Creator of the Year at the 2026 Snapchat Awards. Makes sense that Capital Q Ventures would see the potential for global scale, but it feels a smidge ambitious for a brand that has yet to gain brand recognition at a national scale.

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We celebrated 4/20 (IYKYK) with an ode to some of our favorite CPG trends right now: the *budding* hemp-derived THC category, dates in everything, and the new age of flavor-packed sauces + dips.

It was insane to fill a room—the gorgeous Air office, that is (shoutout Air)—with ~100 CPG founders, investors, industry partners + friends from our amazing NYC community.

Thank you immensely to our partners Glimpse for making this possible, and NOWADAYS for being our featured beverage partner (and introducing its brand-new low-THC drinks line), and to the iconic list of brands who all shared their innovative, delicious, occasionally ~functional 🍃~ products for the occasion:

• THC Trend: Dad Grass, Cann, Mary & Jane, The High Confectionary, Clebby’s

• Dates Trend: Harken Sweets, Gato Dates, datefix

• Dips & Sauces Trend: Cotto, BEZI, Little Sesame, Tursh, BESTO®, Maazah

• …and all of the brands that we enjoyed alongside our trends: Freestyle Snacks, Gotcha Focaccia, S'NOODS, Posana, , Zesty Z - Fiber Pita Chips, Ancient Crunch, Goldilocks, Curious Elixirs, Bjorn Qorn

Perhaps most importantly, there was the brain behind the whole aesthetic experience (AKA our fabulous event planner): Erica Bonelli, founder of Philo Studios! Philo is a full service event planning, design and production studio that creates beautiful and meaningful activations for CPG & tech businesses. She is an absolute creative genius, and we cannot wait to work with her again on our quarterly event series!

We cannot wait to turn this into a quarterly event, featuring our favorite CPG trends of each season. If you want to partner on the next one, feel free to reach out!

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Good Greed Candy

I’ve said this many many many times before. I LOVE CANDY. I honestly might have candy almost everyday. Please don’t tell my dentist. And guess what? It makes me happy, and happy people are healthy. So there’s some quick maths for you. But other than loving candy, I love discovering new candy brands. And my god are there so many new ones. One of those new entrants to the space is Good Greed. Yes they are another low sugar better-for-you candy brand, but they have a little trick up their sleeve that I love. Let’s get into it 😉

• Quick Facts: A better-for-you candy brand specializing in gut-friendly, low-sugar gummies. Founded by university friends Alana, Carolyn, and Sabrina, Good Greed was developed alongside a registered dietitian.

• Reasons to love:

  • My stomach is NOT in knots. Good Greed skips the ingredients that typically mess with your gut— think sugar alcohols like erythritol, allulose, IMO, and the massive doses of prebiotic fiber most “healthy” candies lean on to hit a low-sugar callout.

  • A well-rounded candy. Flavor-wise, they’re having fun here. Peach is the more conventional pick, but cherry is where it gets interesting. I really think that not enough brands are leaning into cherry, and that’s a shame—it’s tart, sweet, and sour all at once. Each gummy is also made with real cherry or peach purée, so the flavors actually taste like the fruit they’re named after. And because the sugar load is lower, you skip the blood sugar spike-and-crash that comes with a bag of conventional gummies.

  • Built with an actual expert. There are a lot of brands out there claiming to be better-for-you, or at the very least just a better and “healthier” product. But you don’t often see one actually go out of its way to verify that, to formulate the product from the start with experts to make it better. Good Greed partnered with Abbey Sharp, one of North America’s top dietitians, to formulate the product—specifically to avoid the “gut wreck” most better-for-you candies cause. If you’re going to slap health claims on a package, might as well actually bring in the experts. More brands should really be doing this, especially as consumers increasingly want to know the claims they’re seeing are coming from a legit place.

Where to buy: Available Online and at select stores in NYC

Jenna’s Pickup:

Posana Mango Coconut Turmeric Protein Bar

🚨New (actually good) protein bar alert!🚨

I don’t need to be the one to tell you: There are SO many protein bars out there. By numbers alone, the category appears saturated—but the reality is, there’s still a lot of room for innovation. If you’ve been trying to sneak more protein into your diet (how unique and novel!), you know: a lot of protein bars kind of suck. They either A) taste like a candy bar but are hiiiighly processed and full of tummy-disrupting ingredients, or B) are “natural,” but dry, chalky, loaded with sugar, and/or taste like cardboard smattered with dusty chocolate chips.

But Posana, which was one of the many wonderful brands that sampled at our IN SEASON event, has presented a new protein bar that fits into the very exclusive Category C (one that Samsara Nutrition, an Expo West fave, also belongs to).

• Quick Facts: Plant-based protein bar featuring 20g protein, 9g fiber, and 0g sugar in a delightfully fruit-forward flavor. Posana is the brainchild of Adi, a current Nutrition student at UC Berkeley who’s passionate about flavor and nutrition in equal parts (and it shows).

• Reasons to love:

  • The FLAVOR. I’m so tired of seeing a protein bar aisle filled with “cookie dough” and “peanut butter chocolate.” In 2026, most other grocery store aisles feature a breadth of flavors… while protein bars have stayed relatively uninventive on the flavor front. A tropical, fruity flavor might seem blasphemous next to artificial “birthday cake” flavoring—but it is utterly delicious. The Mango Coconut flavor is bright, summery, and tastes like real food (because it is), and the almond butter base and hint of vanilla offer a satisfying pastry-like sweetness.

  • Super simple ingredients. The base is Posana’s plant-based protein blend—made of pea, rice, and almond protein powders—almond butter and chicory root fiber. It’s sweetened with allulose and stevia leaf extract, and flavored with real mango powder, shredded coconut, vanilla, and turmeric!

  • Texture is spot on. While other protein bars unnaturally mimic candy bars or require a jaw workout to chew, these are soft and chewy, almost like a soft-baked cookie. Plus, they’re dotted with pea protein crisps and real shredded coconut for textural variety.

Where to buy: eatposana.com

This week, we sat down with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of Suri (short for Sustainable Rituals)—the UK-based electric toothbrush brand that caught Gwyneth Paltrow’s eye organically before landing in Erewhon, and now Target stores nationwide. (Check out our piece on UK brands entering the US!)

We also covered the week’s biggest CPG news—new updates to the THC regulatory saga, Beyond Meat’s pivot into beverage, Gatorade’s biggest refresh in 60 years, and the Finnish Long Drink’s $325M acquisition by the makers of White Claw. Let’s get into it! Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co

We also cover the week's biggest CPG news—new updates to the THC regulatory saga, Beyond Meat's pivot into beverage, Gatorade's biggest refresh in 60 years, and the Finnish Long Drink's $325M acquisition by the makers of White Claw. Let's get into it!

The breakdown:

0:00 Interview with Mark Rushmore, co-founder of SURI
14:30 Recap on our 4/20 event!
18:01 Updates on the THC ban + new proposed regulation
28:03 Beyond Meat’s pivot into… protein soda?
32:20 Gatorade’s newest brand refresh
35:40 Why White Claw owners are betting on The Finnish Long Drink

Check out our full interview with Long Drink co-founder Evan Burns here:

https://www.expresscheckout.co/p/the-best-drink-youve-never-heard

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It’s 4/20 🍃, and for those who partake, this 4/20 looks a whole lot different than those of Aprils past. Instead of securing the (literal) bag(gie) from a shady smoke shop or sketchy neighbor, THC enjoyers can grab their luxe, wellness-coded hemp-derived goods from entirely legitimate and legal sites and brick-and-mortar stores—from Target (all locations in Minnesota) to Total Wine and even Edibles.com’s new flagship THC retail store in Atlanta.

Evidently, there’s been a lot of movement in the THC space over the past few years—it’s now a $28 billion industry with over 300,000 jobs. The industry has grown up a lot in the past few years. And this was all (largely) possible thanks to something called the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized “hemp” defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight.

• Important caveat: the law was designed to support hemp farming, not to create a market for products that get you high. But (conveniently), it only specified delta-9 THC and measured concentration by dry weight rather than by serving, which meant a 12-ounce beverage could legally contain around 10mg of delta-9 THC—a fully psychoactive dose—and still qualify as “hemp.” The perfect gray zone for an entire market to blossom.

But, as of this 4/20, hemp-derived cannabis is seven months away from being federally illegal.

Wait… what’s going on? Last November, Trump signed a spending bill to end the government shutdown—and it included a sneaky provision effectively banning most hemp-derived THC products.

• This new law caps products at 0.4mg of total THC per entire container (for context: a 1mg single gummy is considered a “microdose”). It’s set to go into effect this November, and if it does, it would eliminate roughly 95% of existing hemp products.

• To be clear, it wasn’t standalone legislation—it was a rider on a must-pass funding bill. And it was championed by Mitch McConnell, the same senator who authored the 2018 Farm Bill (and apparently regrets it… 🙃).

  For the past five months, the industry has been operating business as usual in hopes that this legislation will somehow… disappear. New brands are still launching, existing brands are expanding distribution, and retailers are leaning in despite legislative uncertainty. Why? Because the consumer data says they should:

• Nearly 40% of current alcohol drinkers also consume cannabis, CBD, or THC, and over 60% say it directly impacts how often they drink. Meanwhile, alcohol sales declined across every category in 2025: beer and cider down 3.3%, spirits down 4.1%, wine down 6.1%.

• Target’s THC pilot in Minnesota came after several quarters of flat or declining same-store sales—THC gives them a way to drive foot traffic in a category growing double digits while alcohol shrinks.

• Total Wine is stocking THC seltzers at over 100 locations across nine states, and the THC beverage market exceeded $1 billion in national sales last year.

After months of turning a blind eye to the legislative reality, there’s suddenly a beacon of hope. Last week, there Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Joni Ernst (R-IA) introduced the Hemp Safety Enforcement Act Marijuana Moment—a bipartisan bill that lets states opt out of the federal ban as long as they enforce age limits and ban synthetic cannabinoids. The strategy is to attach it to the 2026 Farm Bill.

For brands, it’s a lifeline… but a complicated one. Ben Starmer, founder of Dad Grass, sees both the opportunity and the operational reality:

“It’s encouraging to see movement toward a more defined regulatory path for hemp-derived products. Giving states flexibility is an important step and reflects how much this category has already evolved.

At the same time, the system needs to work in practice. The fastest-growing channels for us—grocery, convenience, and liquor—rely on national infrastructure like banking, payments, and multi-state distribution. Even if a state allows these products, the ancillary systems that make modern retail work—banking and payment processing—operate at a national level and tend to follow federal rules. Large retailers depend on those systems, so when they don’t align, it becomes much harder to actually sell and scale the product, even where it’s legal.”

• That’s the real challenge. A state-by-state patchwork doesn’t just mean 50 different compliance environments—it means the infrastructure that enables modern retail operates under federal rules that could make these products effectively unsellable, even where they’re legal.

Looking ahead: Whether the shelves at Target and Total Wine stay stocked past November comes down to what happens in Congress over the next seven months. What’s already clear is that consumer demand is real, retail validation is real, and the cultural shift from “weed” to wellness is probably irreversible—regardless of what the law says.

As Starmer puts it: “Net-net, this is progress, and progress over perfection. We’re optimistic about where things are heading—but unlocking the full potential of the category will require better alignment between state-level frameworks and the broader systems that enable scale.”

Happy 4/20. We’re celebrating tonight at In Season, Express Checkout’s new quarterly event spotlighting three trends shaping CPG (spoiler: THC is one of them for Spring—and we’ll be featuring brands like Dad Grass, The High Confectionary, Clebby’s, Mary & Jane, and more).

Celebrate responsibly 🫡

CPG & Consumer Goods

• The blue box is sweating. Kraft Mac & Cheese is rolling out its new “Restaurant Edition,” a supposed elevatedline featuring three flavors: Parmesan Pesto, Romano Cacio e Pepe, and Monterey Jack Caramelized Onion.

  • Kraft is starting to lose the boxed mac and cheese game it invented back in 1937. According to the WSJ, buzzy upstarts like Goodles and supermarket private-label knockoffs are eating into Kraft’s market share. When Goodles first hit shelves in 2022, Kraft wasn’t especially worried. Now, Goodles controls 6% of the mac and cheese market, is driving 79% of the category’s total growth, and sells 3 boxes every second. With this new premium line and Kraft’s introduction of a protein line, PowerMac, the other week, it looks like Kraft is desperately attempting to differentiate and reclaim market share.

• From fake burgers to fizzy protein water. Beyond Meat, now rebranded as simply Beyond, officially launched its new line of sparkling plant protein drinks, Beyond Immerse, into NYC retail through a distribution deal with Big Geyser. Three flavors (cherry-berry, peach-mango, strawberry-lemonade) are hitting 26,000+ outlets this summer, packing 10–20g of protein and 7g of fiber per can.

  • Just last month, the company dropped “Meat” from its name entirely, rebranding to Beyond The Plant Protein Co—its response to US retail sales of plant-based meat plummeting 26% over the last two years. Beyond’s revenue dropped 14% in the first nine months of 2025, its stock has been trading well below $1, and it had to publicly deny bankruptcy rumors after getting a Nasdaq delisting warning. CEO Ethan Brown is betting that if consumers won’t eat the burgers, maybe they’ll at least drink the protein, riding the GLP-1 and “fibermaxxing” trends. A protein bar is also set to come this summer.

  • I had a chance to try this at Expo West…these were sadly not good at all 😳 - Nate

• Gatorade without the Gatorade colors? PepsiCo is giving Gatorade its biggest refresh in 60 years…removing artificial dyes from its top flavors (Fruit Punch, Lemon Lime, Orange), launching a new “Advanced Hydration System” portfolio, and rolling out its highest-electrolyte RTD offering yet called Gatorlyte Longer Lasting. The brand is also expanding beyond sports into everyday hydration occasions.

  

  • Gatorade’s neon colors are iconic. In many ways, they are the brand, so swapping to fruit and vegetable-derived colors while trying to keep that bold look is a tightrope walk and we’re curious to see how consumers react. But the bigger story should sound familiar. Just like Kraft in mac and cheese, Gatorade has been slowly losing market share and share of voice to upstarts that market themselves as more hydrating, more effective, and healthier. DryWater, for example, launched in early 2024 and is already pushing $100M in sales, sold nationally in Walmart. Brands like Prime, Liquid IV, and LMNT have reshaped what consumers expect from hydration. And in the every day hydration space, startups like Leisure are beginning to command market share.

• David is back in the news. David Protein is ramping up production of its alt-fat ingredient EPG by five times, aiming for $300 million in revenue by 2026. As the brand, which passed $100M in gross revenue last year, expands into national distro in Walmart and Target in Q1, this figure doesn’t feel too far off.

  • For context: Last May, David acquired Epogee, the foodtech startup that produces the patented ingredient EPG (looks and functions like fat, but doesn’t get digested). Post-acquisition, David cut off EPG supply to Epogee’s other customers, which then led to a monopoly lawsuit.

  • We’re still waiting for the brand’s official ice cream launch, which was teased at Expo West via truck ads.

• Pickle collabs are everywhere. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Grillo’s Pickles are shaking things up with a limited-edition pickle beer launching May 4th at retailers nationwide, blending the classic lager’s maltiness with Grillo’s dill-forward flavor (hmmm….).

  • Grillo’s has made a name for itself in collaborations. Grillo’s VP of Branding (and the brand’s first employee) Eddie Andre has played a big role in that: with a background as a musician and artist, he knew a thing or two about collaborations, and went all-in on them early.

  • From pickle bouquets for Valentine’s Day to a literal pickle toothpaste made in collaboration with Boka and a Pop-Up Bagels collab for the ages, this brand is so much more than a pickle company—at this point, it’s a lifestyle brand.

• Now entering: Cold brew szn. happy®, the brand co-founded by entrepreneur Craig Dubitsky (hello, eos, method products) and Robert Downey Jr, is making its debut in the refrigerated coffee category with a new 48oz Cold Brew, available first at Kroger stores.

  

  • happy’s existing portfolio includes ready-to-drink lattes and cold brews. But as consumers increasingly bring the barista experience to their homes, brands like happy have been responding by shaping innovations for at-home occasions.

  • In the crowded coffee space, happy stands out with its distinctive packaging. Love these bottles:

• Women’s hormone health is all the rage. And Amulet, a new hormonal wellness brand backed by Maria Sharapova and Gabriela Hearst, is responding with the launch of its flagship product, Daily Cycle Support gummies. This supplement, formulated with “bio-identical lactoferrin” and creatine, aims to sync with women’s hormonal rhythms.

  • Lactoferrin = a iron-binding protein found in milk and colostrum (which is found naturally in human breast milk or bovine milk) that supports the immune system.

  • Its interesting to see these ingredients promoted specifically for women’s hormone health. Colostrum (and lactoferrin) has had its moment as a gut health and immune booster, and creatine (as we covered last week) has only recently been promoted for women’s health—and not just a supplement for bodybuilders.

eCommerce

• The anti-algorithm play. ShopMy is launching Noir, an SMS-based personal shopping concierge that pairs its highest-spending shoppers with real human curators. Shoppers text in what they’re looking for, answer a few questions (budget, preferences, vibe), and get matched with a creator who hand-picks product recommendations from across ShopMy’s catalog.

  • Tiffany Lopinsky, co-founder of ShopMy, told Express Checkout that they discovered that some of its most successful creators have as few as 2,000 followers yet drive tens of thousands/month in sales by essentially operating as personal shoppers and stylists. Noir productizes the product-discovery piece of that relationship at scale— a lighter-touch version focused specifically on finding the right products—rolling out first to gold and black tier members across fashion, home, CPG, beauty, and gifts.

Retail

• The gentrification of Walmart. Walmart is refreshing its Great Value brand for the first time in over a decade, enhancing packaging across nearly 10,000 items (that is WILD) with a more “modern visual identity and improved shoppability.”

  

  • According to the brand, Great Value products can be found in nine out of 10 U.S. households and save an average family 35% per year.

  • And Walmart chose the right agency to complete this task. They leveraged Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), who recently did their corporate rebrand, to bring Great Value up to par with their other and newer private label brand Bettergoods.

  • This is clearly part of a bigger play. When Walmart launched Bettergoods in 2024—a premium, trend-forward private label line with clean ingredients and elevated packaging—we said it: they’re coming for Target. And now, with Great Value getting the full rebrand, the strategy is undeniable. Walmart is clearly repositioning their entire private label portfolio to compete with the private label juggernaut that is Target (think Good & Gather, Favorite Day, Dealworthy). Pair that with their growing assortment of non-store-brand products that skew younger and more premium, and it’s clear Walmart is gunning for a newer, potentially more affluent consumer—one who might’ve previously defaulted to a Target run.

Funding news

• The new White Claw is here. Mark Anthony Group—owner of White Claw—acquired The Finnish Long Drink, aiming to scale the ready-to-drink brand across North America. The Finnish Long Drink, co-founded by celebrities like Miles Teller, is essentially a canned cocktail inspired by Finland’s national drink, launched in the US in 2018 but with roots in the 1952 Olympics.

  • We interviewed Evan Burns, CEO and co-founder of The Finnish Long Drink, and Long Drink’s “biggest fan,” DJ Waldow, for The Curious Consumer to learn more about how Evan built this new RTD behemoth, why it’s so beloved (by people of all legal ages, as DJ emphasized), and what the future of Long Drink looks like. Check out the episode here!

Express Checkout

The best drink you've never heard of

This week, we're sharing the second episode of our interview series, Brand’s Biggest Fan—featuring Evan Burns, CEO and Co-founder of The Finnish Long Drink—and Long Drink's biggest fan, DJ…

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• Give me the formuoli! Ripi, a chef-crafted frozen stuffed pasta brand, secured $2.4 million in funding to prepare for a national launch at Target, backed by the founder of Freshly.

• Body care is booming… and L’Oréal is taking notice. L’Oréal’s BOLD Venture Fund invested in body care brand Hanni, which offers a streamlined, sensorial product line.

  • Launched in May 2021, Hanni aims to simplify body care while delivering effective results—its hero products include a water-activated moisturizer and an eco-friendly razor. Less than a year after its introduction, Hanni became the first razor partner in Sephora U.S.

  • Hanni has gone viral for its beloved water-activated in-shower moisturizer (perfect for the “everything shower” trend). And other brands are taking notice: Just last week, we pointed out that Dollar Shave Club’s new women’s grooming line looks like a near copy-paste of Hanni’s products.

• The future of senior nutrition is here. Iris Ventures led a multimillion-dollar investment in Lucille, the new brand creating high-protein, high-fiber shakes aimed at older adults. The shakes are now available DTC and via assisted living facilities.

  • We wrote about Lucille in a past newsletter, talked about it on The Curious Consumer, and shared a grocery haul with founder Jess Haghani over on our IG! If you’re not yet familiar with the brand, you’re about to become as passionate about it as we are :)

• Clean x science prevails. AAVRANI, the Ayurvedic beauty and haircare brand, has been acquired by Nivora Group, a consumer private equity firm. With over $15 million raised and a launch in Sephora U.S. and Canada, AAVRANI’s founders will exit post-acquisition as Nivora plans to scale distribution in the U.S. and internationally.

  • AAVRANI built its business on a premise we’ve been talking about a lot: that consumers are looking for a combination of “clean,” natural positioning and science-backed, clinically-proven ingredients in the beauty world. In this case, AAVRANI combined Ayurvedic ingredients with modern formulation standards and supported by scientific testing.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, like, leave a comment, and share it! It helps us continue to bring you the most interesting news + nuance in consumer and retail every week.

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Express Checkout is heading to Austin in T-10 days! We’re throwing a big ol’ CPG party (as we do) on April 28th. If you’re a brand in Austin, we’d love to have you there! And if you’re a company interested in partnering on the event, please reply to this email.

With that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Goldilocks Canned Cocktails

Last week I had the pleasure of demo-ing Goldilocks with founder Erin Barrett at one of the liquor stores she sells at….and I had a FREAKING BLAST. I actually helped Erin sell over 3 cases of her better-for-you canned cocktails! Getting to see the power of sampling firsthand was truly eye-opening. Watching people put down a very well-known brand to spend nearly 2x on something new—something they just tried—was what I can only describe as magical. Now I see why sampling is a business in and of itself. Erin was there for 3 hours putting herself out there, and that’s no easy feat. Add on more locations, spread nationwide, and that’s some genuinely hard work.

It was very fun to berate strangers into trying something tasty 🤷

• Quick Facts: A NYC-based canned cocktail brand crafting drinks for mindful consumption, featuring 5% ABV, only 84 calories, and less than 3g of sugar per can. They round out the formula with functional ingredients like magnesium, sodium, inulin, and prickly pear for a smoother, more balanced sip. Currently available in two flavors: Blackberry Spritz and Coffee Tini.

• Reasons to love:

  • Not sugar bombs. One of the biggest issues with popular canned cocktails is that they’re loaded with added sugar, and way more than they need. And thanks to current regulations, they don’t have to disclose it on the can. Here’s what blew my mind that Erin told me: 10 cans of Goldilocks’ Coffee Tini have less sugar than a single can of Cutwater’s espresso martini (one of the leading canned cocktails in America). For the Spritz, compared to Aperol—roughly 6 cans of Goldilocks contain less sugar than one Aperol Spritz. And Aperol doesn’t even currently report their sugar or ingredients. Most brands bury their nutrition facts deep on their websites because they don’t have to show them.

  • Flavor forward. Both of these cans nail their respective flavors. The Blackberry Spritz blends juicy blackberries, lemon, and a hint of basil and tastes like a premium cocktail you’d order on a rooftop bar or by the beach. It’s light, refreshing, and definitely the fan favorite from the people I sampled to. But my personal pick? The Coffee Tini. I’m a coffee guy—coffee ice cream (the Trader Joe’s one in particular) is my favorite flavor of ice cream, and I always gravitate toward a coffee-forward product in general. This one really delivers. It’s like a boozy cold brew with a kick of cinnamon to finish it off. And the other thing is these do NOT taste boozy. A big issue I have with a lot of canned cocktails is they taste like liquor, bottom-shelf liquor at that. Thank god it’s not the case here.

  • Cocktails, upgraded. Something Goldilocks does differently is what they add beyond the base cocktail to round out the experience. Sodium and magnesium ease up the mouthfeel, making each sip feel balanced and smooth. Inulin (naturally found in chicory root) adds a touch of creaminess and subtle sweetness without piling on more sugar. And prickly pear (a yummy cactus) contributes a little extra sweetness while rounding out the flavor profile. I haven’t seen many boozy drinks be this thoughtful in their formulation.

    • Also if you want the best prickly pear based drink (non-alc), try Pricklee!!

Where to buy: Available Online (ships to 45 states) and at select liquor stores in NYC

Jenna’s Pickup:

Things I like to pair with cabbage. (Dumpling Daughter Spicy Sweet Soy + Soom Tahini)

Sometimes, I go to write my Weekly Pickups and feel like a fraud. While I always love the items I end up picking, I often find myself wanting to pour my heart out over something boring and extremely unbranded, like frozen broccoli or purple sweet potatoes or, as of late, cabbage.

Like every Instagram user with a feed full of seasonal cooking content, I have been on something of a cabbage bender lately. My boyfriend and I have been cooking cabbage incessantly, experimenting with cabbage “steaks,” the shredded + slow-cooked variety, and something a vegan creator brilliantly named “Cabbagio e Pepe”—a recipe that consisted of an abundance of nutritional yeast and, in fact, no pepper (don’t fear: we added the pepper for authenticity’s sake).

But this is a CPG newsletter, and cabbage is not a packaged good (this is a good thing. please protect cabbage’s peace). So instead, today I will be sharing two of my favorite products to have with cabbage, which also just happen to be two of my favorite condiments, period.

Dumpling Daughter Spicy Sweet Soy

• Quick Facts: Per the name, a sweet + spicy soy sauce made for pairing with dumplings, but a truly versatile sauce for all cooking.

• Reasons to love:

  • Hits every flavor note. Sweet, spicy, and umami. Made with just brown sugar, ground red pepper, soy sauce, vegetable oil (yes, a seed oil—how scandalous!), and spices, this simple sauce delights with its underrated flavor complexity.

  • The packaging! Like another oil company we all know and love, this sauce comes in an easy-to-use squeeze bottle. It makes this product a no-brainer to reach for when cooking cabbage steaks—once the steaks are seared on one side, I drizzle this easily over the exposed side before flipping.

  • Sugar = caramelization. This sauce has a special superpower: caramelization. Because it contains brown sugar, it beautifully caramelizes whatever you put it on. And trust me, you want your cabbage caramelized.

Where to buy: Online or in a store near you.

Soom Tahini

• Quick Facts: Really, really good tahini (roasted sesame seeds ground into a luxe, drippy paste).

• Reasons to love:

  • Truly premium. I’ve had a lot of tahini in my days, and I must tell you: not all tahini is created equally. Some tahini is a bit bitter (almost burnt tasting?) and some tahini is cakey and dry. Soom is consistent—the flavor is always smooth, the texture is always creamy and drizzly, and it blends/whisks/mixes perfectly into anything.

  • My go-to ingredient for at-home sauces and dressings. When I’m out of tahini, I am genuinely distraught. I use this tahini in nearly every sauce and dressing I make, especially when it comes to cabbage. There’s something about the creamy, deeply rich nuttiness of tahini paired with the fresh, vegetal bite of cabbage—a real dream team.

    • My favorite combo at the moment is tahini, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and gochujang (measure with your heart), drizzled atop a gorgeous roasted cabbage steak.

Where to buy: In most stores and soomfoods.com

This week, we're sharing the second episode of our interview series, Brand’s Biggest Fan—featuring Evan Burns, CEO and Co-founder of The Finnish Long Drink—and Long Drink's biggest fan, DJ!

This week, Long Drink was acquired by the Mark Anthony Group of Companies, the company behind category-defining beverages including White Claw and Mike's Hard Lemonade. So, we decided it was time to share some of the behind-the-scenes of who built this company... and who's been evangelizing it. Check it out here →

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Last week, we covered Mars Men’s wiiiild $27M raise. This week, we’re diving back into Create Wellness’s recent $20M raise. What both of these have in common?

They’re both Wayflyer customers who closed big funding rounds within days of each other. So… how did they get there?

Wayflyer-funded brands are writing the playbook on how to raise SMALL. The playbook makes sense: self-fund or raise a small seed, use debt financing to cover inventory and marketing through high-growth phases, then raise equity once you have the ARR to demand a valuation worth taking.

Wayflyer covered their working capital needs while they scaled aggressively… with relatively little equity sold. CPG darling Wild ran the same playbook, and was acquired by Unilever for £230 million.

If you're building a high-potential brand with a big exit in mind, this is a funding strategy worth thinking about early.

Chat with growth capital specialists

News from the week

Everyone’s talking about Grüns this week, for good reason—a $1.2B Unilever acquisition of a brand that’s been on shelves for under three years is a genuine outlier, and plenty of really smart folks have already broken down the how and why… so we’re not going to pile on.

We’re more stuck on a story from last week that—in our opinions—everyone moved past too quickly: another gummy supplement raised $20M. Create Wellness, the modern creatine brand.

It doesn’t compare to Grüns in headline dollars, but if you zoom out, it’s a really, really impressive story. Not that long ago, creatine was a sleeper supplement only bodybuilders were taking—and now everyone and their mother is looking for a creatine product to add to their stack. And Create Wellness was brilliantly early to that game.

A few cultural shifts had to converge to get us here:

• The science went mainstream. Creatine has been one of the most-studied supplements in sports nutrition for decades, but it lived in fitness magazines and message boards. Then Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, and the broader podcast-doctor class started talking about creatine for cognition, mood, and longevity—not just muscle. The research wasn’t new necessarily, but the audience was.

• Women got brought into the conversation. For years, creatine was coded male, coded bulky, and (per Create co-CEO Dan McCormick) culturally tangled up with steroids—”Turns out that everyone in the MLB that was taking steroids was also taking creatine, and so in the hearts and minds of the American consumer, creatine was, therefore, a steroid.”

  
  Then, seemingly all at once, female wellness creators dismantled the “lifting makes you bulky” myth (thank goodness), GLP-1 culture sparked an equal and opposite “strong > skinny” reaction (doubly thank goodness), and a new wave of research connected creatine to menopause symptoms, bone density, and brain health (shoutout modern clinical research for including women, for a change). The numbers caught up fast: women now make up 30% of creatine purchases at The Vitamin Shoppe, up from 18% in 2020.

• And consumers got skeptical of supplements generally—which actually helped creatine. 63% of supplement shoppers now say they “always” or “often” research ingredients, brand reviews, or scientific studies before buying. The #1 must-have, per a Thorne survey, is products backed by clinical research.

  • After years of Poppi-style functionwashing, ashwagandha drinks dosed at homeopathic levels, and influencer-led “wellness” cycles that didn’t deliver, consumers are demanding receipts. Creatine—boring, decades-old, hundreds of peer-reviewed studies—is exactly what that consumer wants.

Enter: Create. The story is genuinely wild in its timing. Dan McCormick, a former Away and Parade operator (read: DTC legend), had personally taken creatine for over a decade and was annoyed by the powder format—it’s gritty, it’s a hassle, it doesn’t travel. He started Create with his wife Sienna in December 2022, well before “creatine gummy” was a category anyone was searching for. Twenty-five gummy manufacturers told him the specs were impossible before he found one willing to take it on as an R&D project.

• He also got the science partnerships right early. Create’s scientific advisory board includes two of the leading creatine researchers in the world, with one advisor particularly known for her work on creatine in women. That credibility shows up everywhere—NSF for Sport Certified, Creapure-sourced creatine, third-party testing…

  • …and this was, critically, all credibility that couldn’t be claimed by competitors as they sloppily entered the scene: a 2025 SuppCo report found 4 of the 6 bestselling creatine gummies on Amazon contained low or no actual creatine per serving. Create came out clean—their gummies contained slightly more than advertised.

• The market arrived. Create scaled from $0 to $4.5M profitably in year one, Unilever Ventures led a $5M Series A in 2024, and late last year, Create rolled out nationally at Target, The Vitamin Shoppe, and Sprouts, adding to existing GNC, Wegmans, and Amazon distribution.

• It’s been the #1 selling creatine gummy at Target since launch. The team scaled from 5 to 25, including former AG1 brand leadership and ex-Vital Proteins commercial muscle. And two weeks ago, the Series B—$20M led by Alliance Consumer Growth and Mike Repole’s Impact Capital, with Unilever Ventures following on—plus the launch of Creatine + Electrolytes, exclusive to Target.

Bloom has a creatine gummy now… and so does Lemme, Force Factor, Legion, Bear Balanced, and a growing list of European entrants. Clearly, the category is officially commoditizing. But Create has the early-mover position, the science-backed credibility, the omnichannel distribution, and the Unilever Ventures relationship. The global creatine supplements market was estimated at $1.37B in 2025 and is projected to hit $8.68B by 2033. Whoever owns the consumer’s first creatine purchase—and critically, secures their trust—is going to compound for a long time.

Which brings us back to Grüns. We’d bet money Grüns rolls out a dedicated creatine SKU within the year, slotting it neatly alongside Nütrops (cognitive support) and Jüced (energy) in the same playbook they’ve already run: take a once-niche, once-intimidating supplement category, scrub off the bro-y or clinical coding, deliver it in a format the wellness-curious consumer will actually take daily, and ride the cultural permission shift into a category-leading position.

They did it with greens (a category AG1 made aspirational). They’re doing it with nootropics and adaptogens. Creatine is the obvious next one.

The bigger pattern worth watching: the supplement aisle is being systematically rebuilt for a consumer who didn’t exist five years ago. She’s skeptical of marketing, seeking out clinical research for validation points, and willing to pay a premium for products that meet her where she is (likely, on-the-go).

Create saw her first in creatine. Grüns saw her first in greens. Whoever sees her next—in something nobody’s coded for her yet—is the next billion-dollar exit.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Speaking of creatine... Four Sigmatic, the #1 functional coffee brands according to SPINS data, launched a Creatine Coffee in collaboration with Sony Pictures for the launch of the final season of The Boys. The coffee combined Arabica coffee, lion’s mane, and 5g of creatine. It is available on Four Sigmatic’s website and Amazon for a limited time.

  • This is such a fun collaboration. Of course ~the boys~ want creatine in their coffee—who doesn’t? (see our deep dive 👆, lol). A note here: you’re not going to want to turn this into cold brew, or use an overnight drip situation—once creatine sits for hours in liquid, it can break down into creatinine (one of the reasons that basically every creatine ready-to-drink is functionwashing… fun fact 🤷‍♀️).

  • What’s interesting here is seeing Four Sigmatic lean into such a conventional, science-backed ingredient. Four Sigmatic’s whole shtick is pushing back against caffeine with lower-caffeine products and a boost of nootropics/adaptogens. Creatine has proven its place in both conventional, bro-y supplements and the bro-adjacent, woo-woo alternatives.

• The next Good Culture? We might have the next big cottage cheese brand on our hands here, folks. Mulu is a new cottage cheese brand from Dairy Farmers of America that is launching at Walmart with 18g of complete protein per serving (most cottage cheese is closer to 14g per serving), a proprietary whey-and-casein formula, and a focus on taste, texture, and “performance-driven” nutrition.

  

• The next generation of RTD coffee goes national. Espresso soda startup Esspo is launching at Whole Foods nationwide as it looks to bring its espresso soda into brick-and-mortar shelves. The brand is positioning the drink as a refreshing, moderately caffeinated alternative for people looking for a new afternoon pick-me-up.

• Making mushy moves. MUSH, the ready-to-eat overnight oats brand, is expanding into most Starbucks locations and 7-eleven stores along with bringing its new protein products to more national locations like Target.

  • And the brand is well-positioned for success here. It’s operating in a consumer environment increasingly demanding high-protein, high-fiber, and convenient products made from real ingredients. This ticks all these boxes. Plus it’s a well known brand already having sold 200 million plus cups and are sold in 36,000+ stores nationwide.

  • We’ve loved watching Starbucks slowly but surely update its CPG set. Recently, Khloud Popcorn launched at Starbucks locations, and now MUSH is hopping on board. Clearly, the chain is prioritizing protein (like everyone else…).

• Getting hot in the grill. Hot Ones™, the spicy brand born from First We Feast’s hit YouTube series, is launching four new BBQ sauces, including Original Hot BBQ and Hot Honey BBQ, at major retailers this spring and summer. Developed in partnership with HEATONIST, the line expands the brand beyond its iconic hot sauce into BBQ.

  • We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: we are officially in the new age of condiments. The people want new sauces and dips, and brands are delivering. Excited to see how the Hot Ones brand promotes these new sauces!

• A new tequila, in this economy?! Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are expanding Dos Hombres beyond Mezcal into tequila with a Blanco ($39) and Reposado ($49), debuting May 1 and July 1 respectively. An añejo is also planned for early 2027.

  • The launch comes at a turbulent time for the tequila category. According to IWSR’s preliminary 2025 data, global beverage alcohol volume declined 2% across 22 key markets, with spirits the worst-performing major category—down 4% in volume and 9% in value. The U.S. market specifically fell 5% in volume and 4% in value as inflation, political uncertainty, and cost-conscious consumers pulled back on discretionary spending.

  • Tequila has been hit especially hard. Diageo reported that U.S. tequila sales plunged 23% in H2 2025, with Don Julio sales down over 20%—prompting the company to downgrade its 2026 outlook. Meanwhile, Becle (Jose Cuervo’s parent) saw Q4 net profit fall 12.8% on a 14.1% revenue drop, with the flagship Jose Cuervo brand posting a 15.1% sales decline. Becle is calling 2026 a “transition year” and doesn’t expect U.S. growth to return until 2027.

  • So Dos Hombres is clearly betting on brand equity and a celebrity pull in a category where even the biggest players are struggling. Their relatively accessible price points ($39–$49) could be a smart play given the consumer shift away from ultra-premium bottles—but the headwinds are real, so we will see.

• For the ladies. Dollar Shave Club (which is somehow still around) is making a move into the women’s grooming category, offering razors and shaving aids priced between $5 and $10 on their site and Amazon.

  • Dollar Shave Club is majority-owned by the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management, LP, which acquired a 65% stake in the company from Unilever in late 2023. Unilever previously acquired DSC for approximately $1 billion in 2016. And think about that timeline, a little late to launch a women’s category. Feels like a last hurrah for a once iconic brand that has seriously lost its luster.

  • Oh boy, does this look like viral bodycare brand, Hanni 👀, from the product set itself, all the way down to the colors…

• The US sexual wellness market is booming. Sense, founded by Venezuelan entrepreneurs, is debuting its FDA-approved products at select Target locations. With the market projected to exceed $20 billion by 2030, Sense aims to redefine intimacy as an essential component of health.

• The collagen ready-to-drink space is expanding. Nestle-owned Vital Proteins, known for its collagen powder supplements, is launching a collagen-infused sparkling water in two flavors.

  • Coming off last week’s news about Kylie’s k2o, a hydration-beauty stick-pack supplement, and the previous week’s news of Freaks of Nature launching UV-protecting electrolytes, this almost feels like deja vu. Brands are clearly betting on the hydration x “ingestible skincare” angle.

Retail

• Hemp drinks future might hang in the balance, but retailers are still placing bets.

  • Edibles.com is opening its first flagship store just a year after launching in Atlanta’s Inman Park, marking a new chapter in hemp retail. The store aims to provide a more structured shopping experience for hemp-derived THC products, emphasizing education and, of course, compliance.

    • Edibles was originally launched in 2025 by Atlanta-based Edible Brands (yes, the fruit basket company). The timing is especially noteworthy—the hemp-derived THC beverage market is experiencing explosive growth in the US, with THC beverage sales exceeding $1 billion in 2024 and projected to grow to nearly $6 billion by 2035.

    • BUT, this growth is assuming all the looming regulatory changes don’t go through. The current administration is actively reassessing hemp-derived THC regulation, making this a pivotal moment for companies trying to establish compliant, and more importantly, scalable retail models.

    • Here’s what’s happening: An agriculture spending package passed last year as part of a government reopening deal removed products with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC from the federal definition of hemp—a change set to take effect this November that would effectively wipe out the entire hemp-derived THC beverage and edibles market as we know it. There are plenty of people lobbying for change, but we will see what will happen.

  • And in other THC distro news: after a successful 10‑store trial, Target is expanding hemp‑derived THC beverage sales in Minnesota by securing 72 one‑year licenses, making it one of the largest mainstream retailers betting on the category and potentially helping the space navigate looming regulatory hurdles.

Funding

• Looks like tequila is coming back? Pronghorn, a spirits incubator founded in 2021 with a focus on funding and supporting Black-owned spirits brands, has invested in Humano Tequila, which offers four varieties sold across 11 states.

• Betting on meat sticks. Bullish, the NYC consumer investment firm behind Peloton and Warby Parker, just invested in Singing Pastures—a female-founded meat stick brand using pasture-raised beef, bone broth, and collagen. The brand is already in 800+ stores and growing fast.

  • The meat stick market is nothing to laugh at. Chomps alone holds ~10% of the entire meat snack market and is valued at $1.5B doing around $600M last year alone. Meanwhile, meat snacks have emerged as the clear winner of America’s GLP-1 consumption shift, as high-protein, low-carb options continue to gain share over traditional snacks.

• The kids snack aisle is getting a makeover. The recently launched kids’ snack brand cadootz! secured over $3M in seed funding led by Selva Ventures to expand its reach, aiming for a nationwide debut in June 2026. Known for its savory crackers in Cheddar, Sea Salt, and Ranch flavors, the brand saw its first launch sell out in under two hours!

  • We had the pleasure of having co-founder (and lifestyle influencer) on our podcast to talk about building cadootz! Check it out here.

This week on The Curious Consumer, we sit down with Daniel Solomons, CEO of Update—the caffeine-free energy drink that caught Kim Kardashian’s eye organically before she became a full creative partner. We also cover every Kardashian-Jenner in CPG this week (yes, all of them), the Hershey reformulation saga, McCormick’s $45B acquisition of Unilever’s food business, and more. Check it out here →

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, like, leave a comment, and share it! It helps us continue to bring you the most interesting news + nuance in consumer and retail every week.

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What a week in CPG. Unilever acquired Grüns for a reported $1.2 billion—less than 3 years after its first sale! We’ll be breaking that down and catching you up on everything else you missed this week in Monday’s edition, so make sure you’re subscribed (and pass it along to a friend who needs to be).

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Very excited to share that Express Checkout is partnering yet again with The Lead Summit this year—one of the only events built specifically for brands!

• It takes place in NYC, May 20-21st, and features over 3,000 attendees, 150+ speakers from brands like Columbia, Rhone, Harry's, Coterie, Goop, and L'Oreal.

• The agenda covers everything from building brand identity in a trend-driven world to adapting to agentic AI to driving growth across new channels.

Brand and retail friends of Express Checkout can attend for FREE—just drop our name in the “how did you hear about us” field when you register. (Not a brand or retailer? Use this link for 25% off.)

P.S. Express Checkout is heading to Austin at the end of the month!! We’re planning on throwing a big ol’ CPG party (as we do) on April 28th. If you’re in Austin and want to meet up, or are interested in partnering on the event, reply to this email!

And with that, let’s get into this week’s pickups →

Nate’s Pickup:

Zac’s Sweet Shop (Specifically the new Dirty-O)

I have the biggest sweet tooth known to man. I know my candy. I know my sweet treats. If I could I’d have my way I’d live in the Willy Wonka Factory. Chocolate, candy, and cookies for breakfast lunch and dinner. I mean, in college I literally had a candy drawer. Who needs a sock drawer when you can have one filled with Starbursts? 🤷

And in today’s landscape, sweet treats—real sweet treats—can feel like a dying breed. Everything is low sugar, no sugar, high protein, adaptogenic…you name the function and there’s someone building for it. So it’s refreshing as hell to find a brand that’s unapologetically a decadent sweet treat, no asterisks.

And Zac, real life Willy Wonka, is doing just that with Zac’s Sweet Shop. I’ve got a few ride-or-die favorites from him–cake batter crunch puppy chow, the peanut butter chocolate covered oreos, and the s’mores bark. But my new obsession is his latest drop, The Dirty O, a modern, grab-and-go take on the pudding dirt cup we all inhaled (and often assembled ourselves) as kids.

• Quick Facts: A Black-owned gourmet dessert brand founded by Zac Coughlin, handmade in small batches in LA. Zac’s whole thing is “reinventing the box of chocolates” with bite-sized, nostalgia-forward confections made with high-quality, fair-trade ingredients.

• Reasons to love:

  • Just a sweet treat. I believe there will always be a place for low-sugar, better-for-you sweets, but sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants—and the heart wants the real thing. That’s what Zac’s is serving up to us. It’s just elevated and genuinely crafted with real ingredients and real care. These are decadent delights that even Brad Reese would be proud of (see our deep dive on the Reese’s debacle).

  • Personality baked in. One of my favorite things about this brand is how much of Zac himself is in the product. You can taste it, you can see it in the packaging, you can feel it in the whole vibe. I think when you’re selling nostalgia, and especially when you’re selling a sweet treat, that personal touch is everything. Without it, decadent products like these just feel hollow. And these should be a freaking blast, everything from the wrapper to what’s inside. And Zac nails it.

Where to buy: Online at zacssweetshop.com

Jenna’s Pickup:

POCA - Vanilla Syrup

I, unfortunately, am the very special breed of Gen Z girlie who is addicted to coffee, but cannot, under any circumstances, drink it black. It is entirely possible that I am more addicted to caffeinated, flavored milk (business idea?) than actual coffee, though I will swear up and down that I can taste the “notes of chocolate and cherry” in some overpriced brew just to justify the spend.

I’ve been cursed with the undying need for some sweetness and flavor in my daily coffee. And because I try not to have too much added sugar, I’ve become somewhat of a stevia fiend (cue: half of you scrunching your noses in disgust) and often opt for that one sugar-free syrup at cafes that’s made with god-knows-what. There just hasn’t been a better option… until now.

Two former executives from the wellness behemoth Hims just launched a new way to sweeten your coffee, with flavor and without sugar. Meet POCA.

• Quick facts: POCA is a zero-calorie squeeze-packet flavored syrup made with allulose, monk fruit, and inulin (a chicory root fiber), delivering 3g of fiber per serving.

• Reasons to love:

  • The format. I love when a brand’s packaging is the pitch. A squeeze packet that lives in your bag is wholly a different product than a pump bottle that lives on your counter. It’s so handy to have this on-hand for coffee runs (so you don’t accidentally cave and order the flavored latte with 20g sugar…), and I can totally see POCA living next to sweetener packets on cafe condiment stations. These also are large sachets, and I can get at least two servings out of one—great for sharing with your coffee date :)

  • Entirely plant-based, nothing artificial. Though I personally am cool with a dose of sucralose, I know that isn’t everyone’s jam. And I also know that manyyy possess the “stevia ick.” POCA is made with only organic allulose, water, chicory root fiber, and monk fruit extract—not stevia—and no preservatives, so anyone with a sweet tooth can enjoy.

  • It doesn’t feel like a try-hard wellness brand. POCA’s whole thing is that sweetness should feel fun again—not like a supplement, not like a reward you have to earn. Though it offers fiber, it doesn’t aggressively boast the fiber content, and instead focuses on flavor and vibe. Isn’t that how fun flavored bevs should be?

Caveat: I’m going to be extra honest here: I see a ton of potential in this brand, and I’m genuinely so into the premise, but I’m not 100% sold on the taste of every flavor just yet. Because it’s still so new, I have a lot of faith in its evolution, and I’m excited to see future iterations!

Where to buy: Online at pickpoca.com

This week on The Curious Consumer, we sit down with Daniel Solomons, CEO of Update—the caffeine-free energy drink that caught Kim Kardashian’s eye organically before she became a full creative partner. We also cover every Kardashian-Jenner in CPG this week (yes, all of them), the Hershey reformulation saga, McCormick’s $45B acquisition of Unilever’s food business, and more. Check it out here →

Thanks for reading! Anything you think we should try for an upcoming edition of Express Checkout? Email us at hello@expresscheckout.co