We’re coping with some serious residual FOMO, because Wayflyer’s inaugural Visionaries Summit in London was a huge success (listen to the panels featuring the UK’s best brand founders here).

It spanned across 3 days, 9 panels, 30+ founders of brands including Trip, Suri, and Candy Kittens, 500+ guests—exploring topics like how to build credibility in a crowded wellness space, the art of creating a brand universe, and how to take market share from legacy brands.

Lucky for us, they’re now bringing it stateside (cue Stateside by Zara Larsson) the last week of August, and—trust us—you will NOT want to miss this one!!

Want to participate? They’re collecting requests for panel speakers in LI post comments and IG post comments!

Get notified when registration opens!

News of the Week

Elementary schoolers are about to have entirely new goods to barter at recess… because the new lunchbox is officially here!

In the past week alone, we saw two launches specifically targeting the school-age childhood demographic:

• Beech-Nut Nutrition Company, owned by Swiss company Hero Group, just launched its Goodies line in the US—clean-label snacks (bars, poppable bites, potato sticks, etc)—for kids four-and-up, now at Walmart and Kroger. Hero already sells Goodies across nine other markets; this is the brand finally betting on the American lunchbox.

• And the founding duo behind Yasso launched a new functional snack brand: Snack Buddies—mini muffins with 5g protein and 4–5g fiber, essentially a better-for-you Little Bites.

We’re watching a complete overhaul of what’s actually going into kids’ lunchboxes. Dyes, high-fructose corn syrup, gluten? We don’t know them. Today’s lunchbox is the cleanest it has ever been—and it’s only going to get cleaner (and more functional, protein-ified, fiber-rich, and whatever-the-next-thing-is) from here.

For years, while better-for-you products in the baby and toddler aisle saw steady growth and innovation (organic purées! single-origin everything! entire fridges dedicated to HPP baby food!), “kids’ food” meant one of two things: an afterthought (a smaller, sadder version of an adult product) or effectively candy in a trench coat (fruit snacks that are functionally gummy bears, “juice” that’s 10% juice… you get it).

How’d we get here? The defining lunchbox food of the last 40 years was invented in the late ‘80s by an Oscar Mayer exec whose literal assignment was to find a way to move more bologna (imagine earnestly being tasked with selling more baloney…). When he needed $30M to build the assembly lines, he had to pitch the board of the company that had just bought Kraft… which was Philip Morris. Yes, the Marlboro people. The lunchbox staple a whole generation grew up on (including us) was, functionally, a scheme built and marketed by Big Tobacco.

Kids’ food was an afterthought by design.

So why is everyone suddenly racing to fix it? A couple of things clicked into place at once.

• The adult better-for-you shelf is basically full. Every category has its clean-label darling, the white space is mostly gone, and the millennial parent who reorganized their own pantry around “no junk” has now turned that exact lens on their kids. Kids are the last open frontier, and the parents buying for them already shop this way for themselves.

• And the place that lens lands hardest is exactly this age. The CDC’s latest numbers shows that American kids aged 1-18 get 61.9% of their daily calories from ultra-processed food (UPF)—more than adults (53%), and peaking at a rough 64.8% for ages 6–11, which is exactly the lunchbox demographic.

• There’s a regulatory tailwind, too. The clean-label, no-synthetic-dye positioning that every one of these brands leads with maps onto the current policy mood around kids and UPF—which is exactly why “no dyes, no seed oils, no high-fructose corn syrup” has become the front-of-pack table stakes rather than the differentiator.

• But the reality is, processed food isn’t going anywhere—convenience is non-negotiable for most busy parents. So the play was never “no package,” it’s “better package”: if the kid is going to get the majority of their calories from something wrapped, make the wrapped thing as good as it feasibly can be.

Will parents actually pay for all this? The toddler aisle already answered that. In February, Jennifer Garner’s Once Upon a Farm IPO’d on the NYSE, raising ~$200M and popping 17% on day one to an ~$847M valuation. Little Spoon crossed $150M in net revenue and ran the biggest food launch in Target’s history.

The parent who happily spent $7 a pouch on organic purées does not suddenly stop caring on the kid’s fourth birthday—if anything, it’s a values decision that compounds, right up until the kid starts packing their own lunch.

So what’s actually in the new lunchbox?

• The main event (the Lunchables slot): Sunnie, refrigerated snack-pack “dippers” made to be a balanced mini-meal, free of seed oils, refined sugar, and gluten, now in ~500 Target stores. A serious upgrade from baloney’s dark past.

  • OR the PB&J: JAMS, DropOut Companies’ cleaner Uncrustables—10g protein, no seed oils (side note: DropOut just brought on Andrew Strife, the co-founder and CFO of LesserEvil, as CEO).

• The snack stack (a crowded slot, which tells you something): Happy Wolf‘s nut-free, fridge-fresh bars made from ingredients you’d recognize in your own kitchen; Skout Organic‘s shelf-stable, school-safe bars with seven-or-fewer organic ingredients; Cadootz‘s 5g-protein whole-food crackers; and Yumi, the toddler-snack brand parents admit to eating themselves.

• The drink (heating up fastest): Jubilee’s shelf-stable whole-milk boxes with hidden veggies and no added sugar, plus NoBiggie, Wave Kids, and Roxberry racing to own the sparkling/functional kids drink—a slot that barely existed before Poppi made “better soda” aspirational for the under-12 set.

• The treat: Sweet Nothings‘ spoonable, no-added-sugar smoothie; the Yasso founders’ Snack Buddies; and Gruns‘ kids gummy vitamins replace the traditional fruit snacks (functional or bust).

• The fun: Noshi—”food paint,” naturally colored fortified frosting, showing how the category has moved past pure nutrition and into experience.

Where does this go next? Every nostalgic kid SKU gets its clean remake—Lunchables → Sunnie, Uncrustables → JAMS, soda → NoBiggie… you get the gist.

The functional arms race follows the adult playbook down on a lag (protein and fiber now, gut health next). And next, the incumbents will stop building and start buying—Once Upon a Farm’s IPO and Beech-Nut’s Goodies move both signal that the next wave likely exits to a strategic rather than scaling alone.

For 40 years, kids’ food was the afterthought. Now, the same parents who fixed their own pantries are looking to reflect their values in their kids’ meals. The lunchbox was always ripe for disruption—now, it’s finally happening.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• The yogurt wars rage on. Danone has sued Chobani, alleging it uses a 6.7-ounce serving size—vs. the 5.3-ounce industry standard—to claim 20g of protein per serving on its 32-ounce tubs, when FDA rules would put that figure at 18g.

  • This is not the first time that Danone has sued Chobani… there have been lawsuits between the two brands for over a decade now. Back in 2016, Danone convinced a court to get Chobani to take down ads that implied Danone’s Light and Fit contained chlorine. In 2019, Danone failed to sue Chobani over claims its yogurt had 33% less sugar than Dannon’s Danimals line. Then in 2025, Danone filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in New York against Chobani over its La Colombe cold brew coffee line. Someone give these poor yogurt lawyers a BREAK!

  • Regardless of the outcome, Danone is clearly feeling the pressure from Chobani’s massive success. Chobani is well positioned to be the next century spanning brand. Over the past 20 years, it has evolved from scrappy startup operating out of a shuttered Kraft Foods yogurt plant to controlling 26% of the overall U.S. yogurt market and is valued at nearly $20 Billion. They single-handily drove interest in greek yogurt from less than 1% of the US yogurt market to over 50% of the entire market in 10 years.

  • Highly recommend reading our deep dive on why we think Chobani is the next 100 year brand!

• We just love this collab!! For the first time in 150 years Campbell’s is launching a gluten-free canned chicken noodle soup using Banza chickpea pasta. This is their 3rd gluten-free soup they’ve made since launching the line in 2023.

  

  • According to data cites by Campbell’s, about 30% of the US population is actively seeking out gluten free options and the market is projected to grow nearly 10% annually over the next decade. That’s a good amount of people wanting good GF options to add to their cart.

  • Sure, it makes sense for a growing number of gluten-free consumers. But this collab represents something much larger: When a legacy brand—with significant visibility, accessibility and distribution—collaborates with an emerging brand—with built-in consumer trust and a better-for-you halo—both benefit immensely. A consumer who may have moved away from the Campbell’s brand in an effort to clean up their cart could be swayed to return, while a consumer who couldn’t justify Banza’s premium prices can now trial the brand in an accessible format.

  • As Banza’s co-founder, Brian Rudolph, told us:

    “Campbell’s came to us with the idea, and recognizing how iconic the product is, we jumped at it. Our goal is to make chickpea pasta as common as traditional pasta, and there’s no better way to signal it’s here for the long term than teaming up with a brand that’s thrived for over 150 years.”

  • And (though this is entirely speculation), this could be Campbell’s testing the waters for an acquisition 👀

• Gen-Z won’t be bought—they’ll be recruited.1 poppi just opened applications for its Fall 2026 College Ambassador program. In other words: a brand now big enough to buy any shelf in the country is still hand-recruiting 19-year-olds to hawk soda at their sorority formals, because campus is where consumer habits get set for the next 40 years.

  • But... what does it actually take to reach college students at scale? One of our favorite finds lately has been Muses, the agency running some of the most recognized campus programs out there, for brands like Lucky Energy, Blank Street, and Hop Wtr. Making Gen-Z deem something “culture-worthy” is notoriously hard. These are the people who actually know how.

  • Check them out if you want in with college students!! Fall recruiting season is heating up right now—the smart brands are locking in their campus play before move-in. Book a FREE consultation with Muses and walk away with a campus blueprint for your specific brand.

• A great week for the Soy Boys:

  • Whey is expensive; soy is not. Mondelēz International announced Alpine Bio in its 2026 CoLab Tech accelerator to co-develop high-protein snacks using the startup’s fractionated soy protein isolate—a whey substitute as whey protein concentrate prices have surged over two years.

    • Alpine Bio’s OG moonshot product is molecular farming (genetically engineered soybeans to grow casein, which I mentioned here). But Mondelēz is not working with the genetically engineered casein. Instead, they’re working with FSPI (fractionated soy protein isolate), a separate product made from non-GMO soybean flour—a neutral-tasting, highly soluble complete protein designed to “do whey’s job.”

    • The rest of the 2026 cohort (precision-fermented fat maker Nourish Ingredients, GLP-1 prebiotic fiber startup Arkasa, clean-label emulsifier firm Ruby Bio) shows Mondelēz casting a wide net across ingredient resilience, not committing to soy.

  • And the most well known soy milk brand, Silk, is launching a plant-based protein yogurt and its first shelf-stable RTD protein shake across US retail this summer. The yogurt delivers 13g of complete soy protein per serving (a new target for Danone’s legal endeavors? 🙃), 2x twice the category average, while each shake bottle packs 30g.

• Good Culture fans, rejoice! Fewer out-of-stocks might be coming for the famous cottage cheese brand. Michigan Milk Producers Association announced a partnership with Good Culture to produce cottage cheese at MMPA’s newly opened Remus, Michigan facility (acquired last year), expanding the co-op’s processing capabilities and helping Good Culture scale supply and reach more shelves nationwide.

• The sunscreen aisle might look different soon. For the first time in more than 20 years, the FDA cleared an ingredient for use in U.S. sunscreens. Bemotrizinol—a UVA/UVB filter commonly used in Europe—can now be used at up to 6% after DSM Nutritional Products petitioned the agency.

  • We asked Emily Doyle, DUNE Suncare’s Co-Founder and CEO, for her insights on this suncare milestone:

“It’s a genuinely exciting moment for the industry. Bemotrizinol has been a trusted UV filter in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia for years—formulators in those markets have had access to more advanced sunscreen technology than what’s been available in the U.S. for a long time. The approval of bemotrizinol matters not just as an ingredient, but as a signal. It suggests the U.S. regulatory environment is beginning to evolve in a way that can support real innovation in sun protection.”

“The opportunity gives indie brands access to a UV filter that global formulators have trusted for years, and it opens the door to new textures, protection profiles, and formats that simply weren’t always available or easy to achieve with the existing (and relatively limited) U.S. filters. For brands like DUNE, it’s a chance to build on an already strong foundation rather than solve a performance gap. The challenge is that novelty isn’t a strategy. Incorporating a new sunscreen active requires significant investment in formulation, testing, and validation. The harder question is whether bemotrizinol genuinely elevates a product or whether a brand is reformulating just to capitalize on the moment. For smaller indie brands especially, those resources are finite—so the bar for ‘why this, why now’ needs to be high.”

• At the same time, sun care is getting a tech upgrade. The90 just launched the Gem, a $299 wearable that tracks UVA and UVB exposure in real time via a photodiode sensor, marketed to women as a skin-care device. The startup raised ~$3 million led by influencer Lauryn Bosstick, with Ulta Beauty and Sephora as eventual retail targets.

• Nestlé USA officially goes fully dye-free. Nestlé USA announced the removal of all certified artificial colors from its U.S. portfolio, fulfilling a mid-2026 pledge made under pressure from the White House and RFK Jr. General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and Campbell’s have made similar commitments.

  • In June 2025, Nestle announced that >90% of its US portfolio was already dye-free, but decided to fully commit to the bit by mid-2026—following similar moves from Kraft Heinz and The Campbell’s Company, as well as retailers like Target.

• K-food’s seaweed supply chain gets future-proofed. CJ Foods announced plans to build a land-based gim (a roasted seaweed) cultivation facility in South Korea, opening in 2027, as rising ocean temperatures threaten supply. Bibigo posted 1,100% retail sales growth from 2020 to 2024.

  • Korean beauty walked so Korean food could run. K-beauty exports grew from $7.57B in 2020 to $10.23B in 2024, carried by the same Hallyu engine—K-pop, K-dramas, the TikTok algorithm—that’s now moving Korean pantry staples into mainstream carts. K-food exports hit a record $13.62B in 2025, with instant ramyeon becoming the first single category to clear $1.5B (up nearly 22% year-over-year). Food is running beauty’s playbook a few years behind.

  • Clearly, CJ Foods is betting that this is more than a fad. Climate-proofing a supply chain is a serious business, and happens only when a category has become mainstay.

• Michelob Ultra is carrying the whole bar tab. Anheuser-Busch announced a $20M investment in its St. Louis brewery and a Missouri can plant to scale up Michelob Ultra production, now the top-selling U.S. beer by volume, as part of a broader $600M manufacturing commitment.

  • Bud Light long held the crown as America’s top-selling beer, but following conservative boycotts in 2023, sales slipped. Modelo Especial stepped into the vacancy, overtaking Bud Light in off-premise dollar sales that June. Modelo’s dominance has since cooled, partly because of the Trump administration’s immigration policies dampening enthusiasm for Mexican imports. Beer is political, and there’s no denying it.

  • Michelob Ultra’s ascent can’t be separated from its relentless sports sponsorship strategy—the NBA’s first-ever global beer sponsor, official beer of the FIFA World Cup 2026, and a 30-plus-year partnership with the PGA Tour.

  • Interestingly, some of this may be fueled by the NA boom: Just one year after launching in January 2025, Michelob Ultra Zero became the #1 top-selling and fastest-growing non-alcoholic beer in America, overtaking Heineken 0.0. Circana named it the #1 innovation across the entire U.S. beer industry for the year. Michelob Ultra Zero accounted for 54% of all NA beer category growth year-to-date.

• Eat mor chikin. Archer Meat Snacks is launching its first-ever chicken product—Oven-Roasted Chicken Mini Sticks—at Target this month, as the brand bets a new protein will fuel growth in the booming meat snacks category.

  • In March, Chomps made the same move—debuting its chicken sticks after 10 years of development. We had Stacey Hartnett, SVP of Marketing at Chomps, on The Curious Consumer podcast to tell us more about the decision to go all-in on chicken—listen here!

  • We’ve covered the massive meat stick boom before. It only makes sense that as these on-the-go protein snacks boom in popularity, consumers will look for an alternative (and leaner) protein source. When all meat stick companies seem to be copy-pasting formats, flavors, and protein sources from each other, it’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top.

Retail

• Everything is a retailer now. Faire is opening its wholesale marketplace to hotels, offices, and non-retail businesses, a pivot from pure resale that follows a pilot with ~5,000 buyers. Brands like Simply Gum are already using it for hotel mini bars and client gifting.

  • As Jen Burke, Faire’s CRO, shared with us on The Curious Consumer, everything is becoming a retailer now. Faire built its business on independent retailers, but that pool is finite, and you can only grow GMV so far by signing more of the same buyer. Hotels, offices, gyms, and salons already purchase product in volume—they were just never counted as “retail.” Running a ~5,000-buyer pilot before opening the gates signals this is a deliberate land grab for an entirely new buyer base, not a one-off experiment.

  • The deeper shift is that commerce infrastructure has been commoditized. Shopify made anyone a store, retail media turned every retailer into a media company, and Faire is now making every business a buyer. “Retailer” was never a fixed identity—it was whoever owned the customer relationship and the rails to transact, and now everyone has the rails. For brands, that translates to demand without the usual cost of chasing it: a major tech office stocking protein bars in its kitchen is a recurring, higher-margin reorder and a discovery moment in a setting the brand could never buy its way into.

• K-Beauty boom continues. Olive Young, the world’s largest K-beauty retailer, just opened its second U.S. store location at Westfield Century City, following its first Los Angeles opening in May 2026.

Funding

• Hot dogs…for golfers? Gleezy Dog, the self-proclaimed premium hot dog company by golfers for golfers (there really is a niche for everything…), raised a $2 million seed round led by The Club by Old Tom Capital. The North Carolina–based brand has sold over 1.5M hot dogs to date (cannot validate how much or how little was consumed by Joey Chestnut).

  • The branded meat space is ripe for disruption, and bets are starting to be placed. Earlier this month, The Sausage Project hit Walmart as part of an expansion to roughly 3,266 stores nationwide. The DFG Ventures–backed chicken sausage brand (from the team behind goop kitchen and Cravings by Chrissy Teigen) went from about 280 doors to more than 3,000 in just over a year—a sign there’s real appetite for fresh takes on the refrigerated meat aisle.

  • In January, ButcherBox made its first big retail move, rolling fresh, 100% grass-fed beef into more than 1,400 Target stores—stepping off its DTC subscription roots and onto the retail shelf.

  • And in April, Lottie’s Meats brought its sister-founded pork sausage line to Target across Northern California, Washington, and Oregon—its biggest retail expansion yet, on top of 300-plus existing doors.

  • So, why now? It’s the same force reshaping every other aisle: consumers want upgrades to the products they already love—real food, sourced better, and with bigger flavor. ButcherBox’s Target launch was explicitly tied to the retailer’s health-and-wellness push, and all three brands adopted the same playbook as the rest of packaged food—free from additives, preservatives, and anything artificial, plus cleaner sourcing and better branding.

• Smoking hot fundraise. Algae Cooking Club raised $11.6M to scale its fermentation-derived algae-based cooking oil, which boasts a 535°F smoke point and an omega-9 fatty acid profile—positioning squarely at the intersection of the anti-seed-oil movement and premium kitchen staples. The new capital will be used to scale its retail footprint, having recently launched nationwide in Target.

  • Even if the anti-seed oil debate fades after 2027, premium cooking oils are likely here to stay. Consumer perception of cooking oil has been fundamentally reprogrammed over the last decade—from an undifferentiated pantry stable to a considered purchase, or even luxury gift (shoutout Brightland for building that frame, and Graza for democratizing it).

  • Zero Acre, Brightland, Graza, and Algae Cooking Club are all building thoughtfully in the non-seed-oil-oil category, but building differently. Brightland and Graza are the brand-equity plays; Zero Acre (cooking oil made by fermenting sugarcane into oil) and Algae Cooking Club are the IP/technology plays. Those are two different acquirer profiles—one is a Unilever or Kraft Heinz wanting a premium brand on shelf, the other is a Cargill or ADM wanting the fermentation tech.

• Protein from thin air. Solar Foods raised €77.8 million ($89.2M) in grants and loans for Factory 02, its first commercial-scale plant for Solein—a protein grown by feeding microbes hydrogen, CO2, and nitrogen instead of sugar, so the raw inputs are essentially air, water, and electricity rather than farmland or livestock.

  • The CEO is openly pitching Solein as a whey hedge (sensing a theme, here?): stable supply, no price volatility, cost-competitive. That’s the same pressure pushing Mondelēz toward soy isolate—the whey squeeze is quietly underwriting the entire alt-protein-ingredient pitch.

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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The Summer Fancy Food Show is right around the corner, and we have so many exciting events to share with you surrounding the show. First up: Hummingbirds’ is bringing the first public taste of their new launch to NYC on Saturday, 6/27 at 12-4pm!

They’ll be featuring live, shoppable Nests curated by us (yay!), plus our friends Amrit from Indie CPG and Emily from Hummingbirds. Nest is basically a product discovery board that consumers and creators can build, share, and earn from in real time—a digital storefront designed specifically for brands that sell through retail.

You’ll see exactly what that looks and feels like IRL, and how it’s the future of measurable word of mouth at the shelf!

Come connect with fellow CPG friends, enjoy great food, discover products from our curated Nest, and kick off your Fancy Food Show weekend.

Come hang with us!

Welcome to Real Receipts.

We have a very exciting, special edition of Weekly Pickups this week: Real Receipts, powered by Hummingbirds—the brilliant platform that helps brands activate everyday creators in targeted markets and at real points of purchase.

Real Receipts exposes the actual grocery carts of real consumers across the country. If you often find yourself snooping on the grocery cart of the person in front of you at checkout, this one’s for you—and this time (thanks to our friends at Hummingbirds) it’s solicited. 🤝

Time to cart snoop. →

Meet Sam Hughes, an everyday creator on Hummingbirds. She’s a 31-year-old new mom, lives in Kentucky (the ‘burbs of Cincinnati), and self-describes as “a little bookish, a little cookish.”

First, let’s see the receipts:

For Sam, this Kroger $216 haul represents one of her “big paycheck runs,” meaning she had budgeted for this shop, coupon-clipped for some savings, and meal planned out some of the items so nothing would go to waste. It contains items like Spindrift, Liquid Death, Grey Poupon Mustard, and Bonne Maman jam, plus store-brand frozen veg and tons of fresh produce. A full restock of pantry goodness + the building blocks of weekly meals.

Sam is also a Costco stan—partly because it’s cost-conscious, and partly because… “samples and a food court?! That little motivation NEVER misses!” We hear you, Sam.

To supplement her bigger grocery runs at Costco or supermarket chains (Meijer, Publix, or Kroger—all of which have saved “astronomically” thanks to her couponing prowess), Sam loves Whole Foods and Fresh Thyme as “treats”.

When she succumbs to the pull of a natural or specialty grocer, she tends to shop a little differently, too: “Whole Foods, Fresh Thyme, and Trader Joe’s are all shops where we add things to the cart more based on vibes,” she told us, like “internet fads or interesting ingredient lists.”

In general, reading nutrition labels is a relatively new thing for Sam. “As a new mom, you can never be too careful. We’re always on the lookout for nutrients like folate, choline, magnesium, potassium, and, of course, fiber and protein!”

No matter where she’s shopping, Sam self-describes as very brand-loyal. “We don’t skimp on products we love with generic or store-specific brands.” A few tried-and-true favorites are:

1. OLIPOP: “Strawberry Vanilla or Crisp Apple, ALWAYS (and never Poppi). Whether it’s a case or just one, it’s a nice, sweet lil treat for braving the grocery store crowds.”

2. Little Spoon Smoothies: “Baby Henry needs some bribing to sit in a grocery cart, but I’m happy about the healthy substitution as a form of bribery.”

3. Kefir and Noosa Yoghurt: “GOTTTTA STAY CULTURED AND FULL OF FIBER.”

4. Duke’s Mayo: “It’s got that TWANG!”

5. Spindrift: “The quality never strays.”

6. Good Culture: “It’s just better than the rest.”

Shoutout to Sam for sharing her Real Receipts with us and offering a glimpse into what she buys for her family of three! Stay tuned for the next Real Receipts edition, thanks to our friends at Hummingbirds.

Hummingbirds is a community-powered retail velocity platform that connects CPG brands with a community of discovery-driven shoppers and everyday creators. Through creator campaigns, brands drive localized awareness, in-store trial, and real purchase data. The same platform that produces authentic content also closes the loop on what actually moves off shelves. One dashboard, one investment, one story: from community to shelf. Learn how it works or chat with the team to see it in action!

And if you want to see what they’re unveiling next week around retail velocity... grab a spot here.

PS. Check out our most recent episode of The Curious Consumer, where we get into e.l.f's foray into haircare, Tom Brady's Good Nut (this is not a joke), how AG1 is striving to stay relevant, the bubble-free boom, and the derm-as-creator skincare brand that's taking off in Target.

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

Chapters:
0:51 e.l.f. enters haircare
8:40 Tom Brady's Good Nut and coconut water's rise
16:32 AG1 Pro and the greens powder wars
25:13 Svedka's new soda water
29:03 REMEDY's $20M raise

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The DTC-to-retail crossover is the defining growth move in CPG right now. We constantly share stories of the buzziest DTC brands finally finding themselves on shelves—but turns out, there’s a lot more to the story than we realized.

immi—the totally viral, high-protein, low-carb instant ramen that sold out on launch and built a cult following—is now in Whole Foods, Wegmans, Sprouts, and The Fresh Market. And when the POs started coming in, the spreadsheet that had carried them through their legendary DTC era started getting clunkier… and soon near-impossible to manage.

We spoke with Silas Ang, Director of Operations at immi, about what it took to get the back end under control—and how Jampack AI got them there: 40 hours saved per week, 5–9% back on freight, and rate shopping from days to seconds.

Read it here, thanks to our friends at Jampack AI.

How a viral brand manages ops

Food for thought.

We’re doing something a little different this week. Instead of diving into one news story, I’m giving you a few things to chew on (metaphorically, I’m sorry).

Please enjoy this series of recent CPG-related happenings in my (Jenna’s) life. They won’t inform you of any news, but they’ll offer a moment to slow down and consider the downstream impacts of the industry we play in. Each headline we cover inevitably moseys its way down to real lives; these stories offer a glimpse into that trajectory.

(If you are really only here for the news, scroll down—we’ve got you covered!)

Growing up on modern soda. This weekend, I found myself getting a haircut next to a 9-year-old girl, accompanied by her mother. To pass the time, the girl rifled through modes of entertainment: first TikTok (until she hit a limit), then Instagram (another limit), only to be followed by an actual, physical chapter book. Her mom patted her back when she begrudgingly picked up the book, admiring her daughter’s reflection in the salon mirror.

”Think we can get these curls to last through tomorrow?” She asked. The stylist offered hairspray. “She has a big double-digit birthday party tomorrow.”

I couldn’t help but insert myself: ”What does that entail these days?”

”A big sleepover, with lots of treats,” the mother shared. Of course, I had to inquire about said “treats” involved. “Nerds Gummy Clusters and soda,” she sighed, drawing out “soda” with an eye roll.

”It’s not normal soda, Mom,” the birthday girl finally chimed in, peeking up from her book. “It’s Poppi.”

”Yes, Poppi,” her mother repeated, “we’ve had to ration them on this stuff. Only one can per girl.”

The daughter whipped around in her chair. ”Only one? Can we please have more?” This was met with a knowing glare. “But Mo-om, they aren’t even bad for you!” Her mother doubled down, further dipping her chin and raising her eyebrows. I watched the girl continue to flip through her book in defeat, locks of her long, shiny hair weaving in and out of a round brush and falling in perfect rings on her shoulders.

I have a feeling she had a great 10th birthday party. Her curls stayed intact, secret-revealing ensued, and her friends each sipped on a Poppi throughout the night—nursing the low-sugar soda like a too-potent cocktail, feeling very adult with their carbonated bevs in hand and newly minted double-digit status.

She might even grow up to remember her 10th birthday party, looking back fondly on the day she picked Nerds gummy out of her molars, stayed up giggling until 4 AM (ah, the days before Sleep Scores), and surreptitiously consumed more than one Poppi. She’ll laugh, recalling the great lengths she went to break her Poppi ration—now unable to recall the taste, but beaming at the feeling of merely holding that brightly colored can.

How to know you’ve finally made it: The other day, I saw a crushed can of Bloom Sparkling Energy smushed into the sidewalk. The illustration and copy were distorted by car tires, but I could still make out that it was the Raspberry Lemonade kind (solid choice, but not as good as the Crisp Apple, I thought). It was glimmering in the sunlight, this metal trash, its emblematic lavender sheen now just as much a part of the landscape as a weed. What a feat, I thought, for your brand to grow so large, it becomes as ubiquitous as trash.

On injecting yourself with mysterious drugs. On a recent beach trip, a friend-of-a-friend was very excited to tell the group about his recent discovery: peptides.

He used something called BPC-157 to recover from a muscle tear, and swore it made a difference. He told us about his source, a certain “eternal peptides dot com,” which was vetted exclusively (but, he assured us, thoroughly) via Reddit threads.

“Now I’m trying a GLP-3 again,” he shared, puffing his chest.

“What does the ‘three’ mean?”

”Uh, just that it’s not one?” he shrugged. “I lost like 10 pounds the first time I did it. I only stopped because it made my heart beat weirdly fast, and I got crazy night sweats. But it’s probably fine this time.” Probably.

”So you’re injecting yourself with this stuff?” someone asked. He nodded, mimicking the motion—pinching a slab of belly fat with one hand, stabbing a syringe with the other. “Weren’t you not such a fan of the COVID vaccine?”

He went on to explain his thought process: it wasn’t the vaccine itself, necessarily, but more the rollout—the development was all too rushed, he said.

”And peptides… aren’t? There aren’t even studies on them yet.”

”Fair, but at least no one is telling me I need them. I want to make my own decisions about my body, do my own research, not have the government mandate what I do.”

The logic, at least, was sound.

If any of these stories stirred something in you or brought up a CPG-related happening from your own life, please reply to this email! I would love to continue to collect and share these vignettes, reminding us how this industry trickles down to real moments + lives. Now, onto the news! - Jenna

CPG & Consumer Goods

• e.l.f. launches haircare. e.l.f, the affordable beauty brand (literally stands for “eyes lips face”) officially has entered its haircare era. The new haircare line promises “instant transformation with prestige-quality formulas at an accessible price point,” and includes six pieces, from a glossy treatment oil to a humidity-repelling styling spray and everyday wash essentials (shampoos + conditioners).

  

  • Haircare, like fragrance, seems to be the next frontier for beauty brands. We’ve seen a ton of M&A action around the category recently (ex. Not Your Mother’s and OLAPLEX acquired by Henkel) and continue to see VC money get poured into the category (just last week: California Naturals raised a Series B, Filament raised a seed round). Launches over the last year include Cardi B’s Grow-Good Beauty, Kitsch launching into liquid hair products, Kerativ (derm-developed scalp care), and more.

  • In the press pitch (shared with us via email), the brand emphasized its key ingredient in multiple SKUs: creatine. Upon further research, I learned that creatine is actually a common ingredient in topical products, known to help prevent breakage and retain moisture. This is the first time I’ve seen it proudly emphasized, though—likely because it is finally a recognizable ingredient to the average consumer.

• Brady goes nuts for hydration. Tom Brady and Gopuff launched Good Nut (incredible name, if you ask us), a line of organic coconut water available exclusively on Gopuff. The lineup includes the first certified organic chocolate coconut water alongside a still and sparkling can. Consumers are vying for hydration, on GoPuff alone coconut water sales are up 115% YoY! So pair this with the GOAT and you have yourself a winning formula.

  

  • Almost a year ago to the day, Tom Brady and Gopuff launched their first product together, GOAT Gummies—a line of better-for-you candy that covers all the bases. They’re organic, vegan, gluten-free, contain no artificial dyes or sweeteners, and use real fruit juice. All they’re missing is protein!

  • It’s no surprise that they decided to go the beverage route, and it’s even less surprising that they went with coconut water. The category is on a tear—just look at Vita Coco, where coconut water net sales grew 42% in Q1 2026 and coconut water led all major U.S. beverage segments with 31.3% dollar growth, outpacing energy drinks, sports drinks, bottled water, and soda. Part of the appeal is that it’s a natural product, made with “real ingredients,” a callout that appeals to a growing number of consumers. But it also happens to actually work, with electrolytes that make it genuinely effective at hydrating. And the hydration market broadly is booming. Consumers are reaching for functional, hydrating beverages like never before—electrolyte mixes, RTDs, even banana waters.

• Target’s biggest food bet of 2026 is a kids cracker. Cadootz!—the organic kids cracker brand started by creator and investor Rachel Mansfield—just landed nationwide in Target (its first retail partner) only six months after launching online and selling out fast. The brand has raised over $3M led by Selva Ventures (who were early investors in Grüns).

  • The Cadootz timeline is fast. Most emerging brands earn nationwide Target after years of grinding—see: Little Spoon, which spent seven years and built up to $150M in revenue before its 23-SKU Target rollout last Fall (the largest F&B rollout in Target’s history). First Day, a kids-focused supplement brand, launched in 2019 and didn’t hit Target shelves until December.

    • The DTC-to-nationwide jump in <6 months is certainly a testament to the product itself, but also seems to be pulling on the creator-led playbook, fueled by Rachel’s 1.5M+ follower base (which de-risks the velocity question of most emerging brands).

  • This is also a testament to the new “clean lunchbox” wave, which has been taking off in the past few years. But where the aisle was once split (clean baby + toddler brands like Serentiy Kids and Cerebelly vs. school-age snack brands like Annie’s that didn’t really cut it for some BFY-focused parents), Cadootz is closing that gap. The real competitive set is arguably less about kids brands and more about adult clean-label crackers (Simple Mills, Mary’s Gone Crackers) that these parents already buy and share with their kids anyway.

• It’s creatine’s world, we’re just living in it 💪

  • AG1 announced AG1 Pro, a creatine-infused version of its Next Gen powder, also including calcium-HMB (for muscle building) and zinc carnosine (”advanced gut barrier function”). The launch follows AG1’s expansion into Ulta Beauty, Target, and Costco, as the brand crosses $600M in annual revenue.

    • At this point, it really feels like AG1 is doing anything it can to stay relevant as more and more buzzy supplement brands start to steal its limelight. In the last year alone, the brand launched a sleep supplement (AGZ), multiple flavors (AG1 Next Gen), and now it’s getting into creatine. Frankly, it feels a little late to the creatine game—which is one of the most researched and scientifically validated nutritional supplements in the world.

    • What we find especially interesting here is the “Pro” positioning. AG1 as a brand always had an air of superiority—the supplement to end all other supplement stacks, the all-in-one formula used by the most elite athletes and wellness-minded consumers alike. Now, it seems like the brand is repositioning its hero SKU, AG1 Next Gen, for the everyday consumer, while AG1 Pro is an upsell for the real fitness gurus.

  • Meanwhile, Create Wellness teamed up with Kendall Toole (ex-Peloton, NKO founder) for a national, multi-platform campaign to spotlight creatine’s benefits. While this is not a new creatine product launch, it’s another sign creatine is being repositioned from a hardcore bodybuilding supplement into a mainstream wellness ingredient—marketed around benefits like cognition, recovery, energy, and everyday performance. This is a markedly different approach than pinning the word “Pro” to a creatine product.

    • We dove into creatine’s rise and Create’s $20M funding round in our recent issue Creatine’s big break back in April.

• The next wave of RTDs is….non-carbonated? Sazerac launched Svedka Vodka Water, claiming the title of “world’s first transparent canned vodka water.” A mouthful. The non-carbonated RTD comes in four flavors—strawberry, peach, pineapple, and lime—with 90 calories per 12oz can.

  

  • Consumer preferences are shifting away from carbonation, and brands on both sides of the bev-alc/non-alc line are cashing in:

    

    • Surfside has become one of the fastest-growing alcohol brands right now, hitting 11.1 million cases in 2025.

    • NOCA is an iced tea-and-vodka RTD that built its name around the absence of bubbles—it literally stands for “no carbonation.”

    • Celsius, the energy drink known for its fizz, just expanded its fizz-free line.

    • Leisure Hydration, a non-carbonated enhanced water, closed an oversubscribed Series A on the back of 1,300% revenue growth over two years and the #1 dollar velocity in its category, and is now expanding nationally.

    • And look at Beatbox, a flat non-carbonated party punch that sold to Anheuser-Busch for nearly half a billion dollars.

• Protein pretzels go domestic. CRISP POWER opened a $15M production facility in Stafford, Texas, shifting from an Israeli import model after triple-digit year-over-year growth. The brand now sits in 3,000+ doors with Costco, H-E-B, Wegmans, and Hy-Vee.

  • The founder, Gilad Zilberberg, owns the Israeli bakery (Meir Bagel) that’s been producing these since he acquired it in 2000—so this isn’t a brand that outsourced manufacturing and is now reshoring. It’s more about replicating his own factory, but stateside.

  • This is a sleeper brand: after building a following through DTC, Amazon, and TikTok shop, the brand has launched into traditional retail, hitting 3,000 doors (Costco, Vitamin Shop, Meijer, and more).

• In legal CPG news….

  • Another infant Nara Organics recalled its organic, European-manufactured whole milk powdered infant formula—sold at Target and DTC—after three babies in across the country were hospitalized with botulism in April and May.

    • This follows another recall late last year involving similar botulism concerns from ByHeart. That recall was linked to 48 cases of infant botulism across 17 states

  • Texas AG Ken Paxton has announced an investigation into Celsius Holdings and its Alani Nu brand for marketing energy drinks with 200mg+ of caffeine to teens, after a 17-year-old’s death was allegedly linked to the product.

eCommerce

• Everything is Amazon. Pinterest signed a $4 billion deal with AWS—the largest in its history—to power AI visual search and discovery infrastructure through 2031, accelerating its push to become a more personalized, shoppable platform.

  • $4B through 2031 works out to roughly $700–$800M/year (depending on exactly how it’s spread across the 5–6 year term), which is ~16–19% of Pinterest’s 2025 annual revenue ($4.2 billion). This is the new economics of consumer platforms in the AI era: either build it yourself (like Meta) or write a check the size of a small acquisition every year to rent it.

  • Pinterest has been a high-intent, low-conversion platform for years. If this plays out the way Pinterest intends, brand teams might have to consider it as another social commerce destination.

Retail

• The drone takeover continues. Walmart and Wing announced seven new metro markets for drone delivery—New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the Bay Area, Salt Lake City, and Memphis—targeting a 2027 launch as part of a 270-plus-store national expansion plan.

  • We dove into retailers’ larger drone strategy here!

• Walmart+ goes global. Walmart launched Walmart+ in Canada at $89/year—its first international expansion—offering same-day delivery on orders over $35 and free shipping with no minimum. Walmart+ members in the US spend four times more than non-members.

Funding

• L Catterton bets on the derm-founded wave. REMEDY, Dr. Muneeb Shah’s skincare brand, raised an oversubscribed $20 million Series A led by L Catterton (already backs Merit, TULA, Kopari—also derm-founded brands), with Norwest and Sonoma Brands Capital participating. Launched March 2024, now in Target nationwide—and it’s this mass distribution that Shah claims connected him to L Catterton in the first place.

  • Shah is an interesting anomaly, boasting 21M+ followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube—a built-in audience few emerging skincare brands can match. The derm credential matters, but here, it might be the derm-as-creator model that’s really different.

  • REMEDY has been profitable since year one, and is on track to hit $50M in sales just this year (at only two-years-old).

  • The brand part of a fast-growing masstige (mass + prestige) sub-category, including brands like Byoma, Good Molecules, and Naturium (acquired by e.l.f.).

• We’re all betting on meat sticks these days. Second Nature Brands (owners of Brownie Brittle, Sahale Snacks, and more) acquired Tillamook Country Smoker, a $175M+ clean-label meat snack brand known for zero-sugar jerky and beef sticks, from Insignia Capital Group—its first move into the protein snacks category, which it values at over $5 billion.

• Beauty + braun. Stars + Honey, a collagen protein bar brand, raised a $24M minority growth equity round from VMG Partners to fuel national retail expansion and a new 60,000 sq. ft. facility. The brand hit 300% growth last year exclusively on Amazon and DTC, and is targeting ~$50M in 2026.

  • Stars + Honey bars deliver 15g of protein in 18 chef-inspired flavors, like Espresso Vanilla Cinnamon and Cherry Chocolate Waffle Cone. They’re formulated with Type I and Type III grass-fed bovine collagen peptides, intended to “support skin elasticity, hair health, and joint comfort to optimize health.” But flavor variety and innovation is clearly a key focus for the brand, which emphasizes its culinary appeal with sensory imagery.

    

  • If you’re thinking “18 flavors sounds like a lot,” fair. That was all made possible by in-house-led flavor development and vertical integration of the brand’s supply chain, giving Stars + Honey end-to-end control of production and innovation.

• Microgreens, macro moves. AeroFarms, the leading U.S. microgreens supplier, has been acquired by an affiliate of Palm Ventures, an Austin-based family office. The deal—completed April 2026, terms undisclosed—brings new CEO Gustavo Burger (ex-Kraft Heinz, AB InBev) and a push to expand beyond its current ~2,000 retail locations.

• Instant coffee, but make it gourmet. Diamond Brew raised an oversubscribed seven-figure pre-seed for its “brewless,” flash-frozen espresso pods (a craft-made version of instant espresso), with backing from G/7 Venture Studio, CPG operators, and NFL players including DeAndre Hopkins and Sean Clifford.

  • This is a brand that attributes a lot of its growth to an emerging platform: live shopping. In 2025, Founder & CEO Douglas Yu spent over 2,000 hours on TikTok Live. There, he gathered insights on his customers’ shopping behaviors that informed his whole strategy with the brand.

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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Whitelisting, Spark Ads, Partnership Ads—they’re your highest-ROI channel in 2026. And minisocial is the fastest way to scale them.

Heres what a brand recently had to say about their results with minisocial:

“minisocial helped us cut through the sameness of traditional digital advertising with authentic creator content and high-performing whitelisting partnerships. The results gave us one of the strongest returns we have seen from a paid media initiative; a 30x ROAS!” - Taylor J. Shafer, SEO & Digital Advertising Manager

With minisocial, it’s easy:

Just submit your brief, approve your hand-picked creators, and watch as content fills your dashboard for you to review and approve before it gets posted by high-quality creators, and you have access to the fully-licensed content AND permissions to run the posts as partnership ads/whitelisting ads!

Plus, for the next month minisocial is giving Express Checkout readers 15% off their first project!

Ready to turn creators into your best-performing ad channel? →

Get started!

Now, onto the goods 👇

Nate’s Pickups:

Joolies Date Sours

I can safely say that these are some of the best things I’ve had all year. Top 5 at the very least! Joolies already has some of the best, juiciest, softest dates you can buy at a regular grocery store, so when I got these I was already expecting to be impressed. And guess what? I was more than impressed, I was shocked. This product fits nicely alongside all the other whole-date candy products out there like Smood Sweets, Gato, and True Dates.

• Quick Facts: A better-for-you alternative to sour candy, combining organic, pit-free Medjool dates with nostalgic candy-inspired sour coatings. They offer the soft, chewy texture of whole fruit with a puckering, sour finish, zero added sugar, and no sugar alcohols. Available in Watermelon, Blue Raspberry, Peachy, and Cherry Cola.

• Reasons to love:

  • Flavor blasted. I don’t know how they did it but each flavor is so good, so powerful, and perfectly sour. You’ll pucker a bit, sure, but these aren’t so sour they knock you on your ass. If you ask me, which of course you are, they picked the best flavors to launch with. These are iconic candy flavors and pair just so well with the dates. Honestly, mixing them all together tastes even better. Plus the flavor and sweetness of the dates still come through all that citric acid and flavoring. They’re just perfect.

  • They’re soft. And I mean this in a good way. Joolies has some of the best packaged dates on the market. Every one is so soft, flavorful, and huge—these are BIG dates—they look and feel incredibly fresh. This quality and texture luckily carries over to this new product. Biting into one is just as satisfying, but instead of a regular date you get a sour punch of candy flavor!

  • A tasty play on candy. There are a ton of better-for-you candies out there. Like, so so so so many. And I am so grateful that Joolies decided to step in and lay claim. As I mention any time we discuss a candy product: I eat so much god damn candy, it’s a really bad habit. But a satisfying one I don’t plan on kicking any time soon (sorry to my dentist). So it’s nice to know that when I get a candy craving (which is often) these will actually satisfy that itch and leave me feeling a little better about my little addiction. Hey, these do have lots of fiber after all!

Where to buy: Online at Target and in select Sprout stores

Jenna’s Pickup:

Sfizi - Fennel Taralli

In case you haven’t heard, we have officially entered picnic season. The days are long and the evenings are balmy—by conditional logic, that means: the people want to crack open a chilled Lambrusco with various crunchy vehicles + creamy dips on a picnic blanket in their nearest grassy area (Mt. Joy humming from a portable speaker nearby).

Unless you are an absolute SQUARE of a picnic attendee, you should probably start dreaming up your seasonal picnic snack offering. And I’d like to throw in my first suggestion from a shiny new brand: Sfizi (pronounced sfeet-see—we cannot have you looking like a newb with this posh pick).

• Quick Facts: Traditional Italian snack crackers made in Italy, purveyed by a husband-and-wife duo, Joe Fiorenzo and Sheela Prakash (cookbook author, recipe developer, and food writer).

• Reasons to love:

  • Authentically Italian. Each batch of Sfizi is made by two Italian brothers in Puglia who left their desk jobs to follow their passion for culinary heritage. They make their taralli the authentic way, boiling them before baking (kinda like a pretzel). It results in this delightfully crumbly, crispy, light-as-air cracker—how taralli is meant to be experienced.

  • Thoughtful ingredients + fantastic taste. Made with just a few simple ingredients, these achieve the most spectacular taste and texture. They are the perfect in-between of sweet + salty, pairing a nutty, buttery, olive oil base with the warm, delicately sweet, licorice-adjacent flavor of fennel. They would pair beautifully with a creamy goat cheese, whipped feta, or even hummus.

  • Look at that packaging! Sure, it’s what on the inside that counts, but I would be remiss not to mention the stunning packaging here. The colors are bright and inviting, the typefaces blend modern and traditional, and the tiny window offers a peak into the fun-shaped crackers inside. The box makes these feel like a real luxury—a hosting gift or (of course) picnic offering that feels elevated.

Where to buy: Online!

Check out our most recent episode of The Curious Consumer. We were joined by Priyanka Ganjoo, founder of Kulfi Beauty—the first South Asian female-owned makeup line to be carried at Sephora. Priyanka shares her journey building an inclusive beauty brand, and the power of a strong emotional and cultural moat.

Plus, we’re chatting about the boom of Erewhon lookalikes (and how they’ll survive when mass-market becomes a discovery channel), the water brands capitalizing on fear of microplastics, one brand’s attempt to legitimize peptides, and more. →

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

In today’s CPG world, winning a Walmart order is the dream—and also… one of the fastest ways to run a perfectly healthy brand out of cash.

That’s the story we rarely tell: that giant Walmart purchase order comes with a giant bill, and it lands months before Walmart pays you. You’re fronting supplier deposits, a full production run, and freight on Net 60-90 terms, which leaves a 120 to 150 day gap between “we won Walmart!” and a single dollar actually hitting your account. Worse, the gap scales with the win—the bigger the order, the deeper the hole it digs before it makes you a cent (cool, cool, cool).

We got curious about how brands actually cover that gap, so we went deep on the real options—equity, PO financing, factoring—and what each one quietly costs you. The move almost everyone reaches for first tends to be the most expensive money on the table.

We wrote the whole breakdown for our friends at Bridge, the direct lender behind Walmart’s PO financing program. If a Walmart or Sam’s Club order is anywhere in your future, read it before you accidentally hand over equity you never needed to give up.

Read now before you sign that PO →

And speaking of brands winning at Walmart—today's deep dive is about one buzzy newcomer pulling it off right now. More on them below!

News of the Week

Don’t tell your single friends, but turns out… it pays to be boring and cheap.

Or at least, that’s the learning we’ve gathered from Smash Kitchen, the organic, better-for-you pantry line co-founded by actor Glen Powell, Sean Kane (ex-The Honest Company) and Sameer Mehta (ex-Jinx, -Casper) and backed by Collaborative Fund. The brand is officially on track to hit $100M in revenue by end-of-year and enter 15,000 more stores… just one year after launching.

The brand originally launched into Walmart nationwide with a handful of organic BBQ related condiments in the most generic-possible packaging with utterly nondescript branding at shockingly low prices, comparable to generic brands. At launch, we earnestly thought this was a sneaky move by Walmart: launch a private-label condiment line with a celebrity attached to it, giving it the clout of a celebrity CPG brand and the accessibility + scale of private-label.

But now, the joke’s on us: this is a very real, standalone brand now boasting distribution at Target, Sprouts, Albertsons, and soon in Kroger, on-board American Airlines flights—and it’s launched nearly 60 different organic SKUs across aisles, from dessert sauces to salad dressing, cooking oil, and chips. No fancy flavors or novel formats, but a consistent throughline of accessible pricing and organic, “simple” ingredients.

It feels like Smash Kitchen is breaking every rule of modern, buzzy CPG brands: its packaging is anything but standout, it lacks focus (rapidly expanding across categories and aisles), and it’s wholly rejecting the classic better-for-you playbook (grow through natural channel at premium prices then achieve mass-market appeal).

Smash Kitchen went boring, unfocused, cheap, and mass-market out the gate… and it looks like it’s working.

• In its first three months on the market, Smash’s revenue hit $3M… and then it crossed $10M by six months.

• The brand is targeting profitability this year—its first year on the market.

So… how is this even working? We spoke to Andrew Montgomery, Partner at Collaborative Fund, and Smash Kitchen’s Co-Founder and CEO Sameer Mehta to get the scoop.

On being boring: The last decade of better-for-you ran on one rule: earn your spot in the cart by looking like nothing else on the shelf (Poppi’s loud cans, Sauz’s nearly-neon pasta sauce jars). Smash looks like everything else on the shelf—and that’s the entire point.

• “Many better-for-you brands look disruptive for the sake of being disruptive,” Sameer told us. “We wanted shoppers to instantly know what the product is while still delivering taste and quality.”

• “The simple, familiar packaging is intentional. The team wanted products that feel approachable and mainstream, not niche or ‘health food,’” said Andrew. “The goal is mass adoption, not just appealing to natural channel shoppers.”

• Even Glen himself fits the thesis (we love you, Glen, but let’s be real). The instinct with a celebrity brand is to pick someone whose persona is the product, but a strong POV cuts both ways, narrowing the brand to the fans who buy the worldview. Glen is the opposite play: an affable, all-American face broad enough to sell ketchup to literally anyone, with no politics or polarizing personal brand to alienate the shopper who just wants ketchup.

  • He brings the reach and the built-in trust of a celebrity without asking you to opt into anything—which, for a brand whose whole bet is “you already know what this is,” is exactly the right amount of famous.

On being broad: Most CPG advice preaches focus—pick an aisle, and stick with it. Smash ignored this conventional wisdom, basically sprinting from condiments into dessert sauces, dressing, cooking oil, chips, and (this week) pasta and pizza sauces inside a single year.

• “Consumers don’t think in categories; they think in trust,” Sameer said. “If they trust us for ketchup, they’re willing to try our olive oil, pasta sauce, or chips. Look at brands like Siete, Annie’s, and private label.”

• And look at those brands, we will 👀: Annie’s rode mac-and-cheese trust into dozens of categories before General Mills bought it, and Siete went from one almond-flour tortilla to a $1.2B PepsiCo exit across snacks, salsas, and seasonings. The differentiator is sequencing—they earned trust first and expanded later, while Smash is proving product, brand, and scale all at once, each new category as evidence for the next.

On being… cheap: This is the part that’s hardest to copy: Smash attempts to convey “premium” in its organic ingredients and callouts, but its pricing evokes some cognitive dissonance. Its ketchup runs $3.97 for 20 oz against roughly $3.19 for the same bottle of (high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden) Heinz, and nothing in the line tops $4.97—pennies above the conventional brands sitting right beside it. The organic tax that quietly files a brand under “special occasion” simply isn’t there.

• “A lot of brands are optimizing for premium. We’ve optimized for scale from day one,” Sameer said. “That scale creates purchasing power, manufacturing efficiencies, and supply chain advantages that allow us to invest in better ingredients while keeping prices accessible.”

• Scale is the business model. Premium uses high prices to fund growth, Smash uses scale to fund cheap.

Boring broad and cheap clearly have a place in premium. But then the question becomes… what about private label? Private-label has been seriously upping its game recently: Walmart’s Bettergoods, organic and already in 28% of U.S. households, and Target’s Good & Gather are racing up-market on Smash’s exact axis—clean and cheap—with the structural cheat of being the retailer.

But Smash’s edge is that it’s a brand, with a face and shelves at Kroger and 30,000 feet a house label can’t reach. As Andrew told us, ”Smash is a standalone brand that travels across retailers, so Smash is building a direct relationship with the consumer.” Whether that holds as the store brands close the ingredient gap is the open question hanging over the whole thing.

This isn’t to say this is the formula to success in 2026—plenty of better-for-you brands are winning by leaning on deep innovation, following trends, creating a unique + captivating brand world reflected on its packaging, and launching at premium prices in natural channels. But it is to say that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all path to profitability. The premium-and-disruptive playbook got so codified that it started to look like the only one, when it was really just the loudest.

When everyone else goes wacky, focused, and premium—there will always be a dark horse going boring, broad, and cheap. And the truth is, they just might win.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• Nothing is safe from protein. PopCorners launched their very own protein line with 9 grams of protein per serving in three flavors—Hickory BBQ, Zesty Cheddar, and Cinnamon Delight. It’s made with pea and rice protein and is currently in select retailers and going nationwide in July.

  • Back in October 2025 PepsiCo announced a massive push into functional, protein-enriched foods and beverages. This covers nearly their entire portfolio from protein Doritos, to clear protein Propel, to protein Quaker Oats, protein Starbucks RTDs, and of course Muscle Milk as well. The BigCo also launched new brands in the category, like Good Warrior, a meat stick brand.

• It’s a shandy summer. BERO, Tom Holland’s non-alcoholic beer brand, launched a limited-edition shandy line in four fruit-forward flavors—lemon lime, grapefruit, elderflower, and blackberry yuzu. Hitting Target shelves June 14, with broader national retail rollout July 1.

  • While this new product is absolutely delicious, the best part about this is that Tom specifically formulated for Zendaya. Holland revealed on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast that because Zendaya has never been a drinker, she never developed a taste for regular beer and disliked the original BERO non-alcoholic lineup. So he wanted to create something that she could enjoy with him!

  • This is why Girl Beer is a thing, too—the fruit-forward light beer that just raised $5M and landed in Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons. Most alcohol consumers under 30 are women, and a large share say they don’t drink beer because the category doesn’t offer flavors they want—something lighter and more fruit-forward. A fruit-forward beer drink like a shandy hits that mark and can bring in many new consumers (whether or not they drink alcohol).

• Hitting the rhode. Hailey Bieber’s rhode Beauty—now part of e.l.f. Beauty—is expanding globally, launching in Mexico (its first Latin American market) and seven new European countries. Timed to their summer collection debut on June 9, the move follows rhode’s ~$390M net sales, up 80% YoY.

  • This is the e.l.f. playbook becoming visible. e.l.f. didn’t buy rhode for the existing revenue—it bought the distribution upside, and international is the most obvious lever. rhode built that $390M almost entirely DTC and through a tightly controlled Sephora rollout, which means the white space outside the US is enormous for a brand this size.

  • The interesting tension is that some of rhode’s brand equity is scarcity and Hailey’s personal taste, and global expansion is the thing that historically dilutes both. Glossier learned this the hard way. It’ll be interesting to see whether e.l.f. can scale rhode’s footprint without scaling away the founder-intimacy that made it work.

  • Worth flagging that 80% growth is decelerating from rhode’s earlier numbers, which is exactly when you’d expect a new owner to reach for geography.

• Barebells goes full platform. Barebells just launched a Swedish-style soft candy line in three flavors—Watermelon, Sour Cola, and Peach Rings—at 100 calories per bag and, notably, no protein.

  • Barebells built its name on protein bars, then expanded into protein milks and protein sodas (which sneakily pack in 200mg caffeine on top of the 10g protein; the brand just launched its Cola variety). The candy launch is the first time the brand has stepped fully outside its protein identity—low-sugar, better-for-you, but with none of the functional hook it’s known for.

  • Reading it as Barebells trying to become a platform brand rather than a protein brand. The throughline stops being “protein” and becomes “indulgence without the guilt,” which is a much bigger tent to stand under and a much more crowded one.

• Everybody wants to be Cheez-It. Two brands launched “better-for-you” versions of the nostalgic cult classic—but for two very different consumers:

  • Back to Nature launched two new Cheezy Crackers flavors—White Chedda and Hot & Spicy—made with plant-based, non-GMO ingredients, no artificial flavors or synthetic colors and available at Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Amazon.

  • And on the opposite (omnivore) side of the world, Wilde launched Protein Crackers that also look a whole lot like our good friend Cheez-It but made with chicken breast, bone broth, and real cheese.

• The worlds most controversial ice cream frozen dessert. David—the high-protein brand best known for its bars (and, yes, cod)—just launched its long-teased Protein Pints, and they reportedly sold out in a mere 28 minutes. Each pint has, like its bars, unheard of macros packing 30g of protein and less than 2g of sugar, and all powered by their EPG fat alternative.

  

  • As with everything from this brand, people had a lot of opinions. Go to any video reporting on this product (like Nate’s) and you’ll see a mix of praise and a bunch of critiques: “they can’t even call it ice cream,” “they’re monopolizing EPG,” “it’s 15$ per pint” (okay yea fair), “it’s all chemicals and gums.” Moral of the story is, if you’re looking for “clean,” don’t look to David. David claims macros above all else—there are plenty of other, “cleaner” options like Smearcase in the changing ice cream aisle.

• The new Fig Newton. Mondelez refreshed Newtons’ packaging with bigger type, sharper graphics, and a “made with real fig” tagline. The update aims to bring the 130-year-old fig bar to a new generation while keeping its signature yellow packaging.

  • On its own this isn’t the most exciting news to hit this newsletter, but it’s a clean example of a real trend: legacy brands changing packaging rather than formulas to meet the MAHA-era consumer. The “real fig” was always there—Mondelez is just signaling “better-for-you” by pointing at it, without doing the reformulation work to actually make a better product.

  • Fun fact: The first time I tried a real fig, I said, “wow, this tastes just like a Fig Newton!” which 1) how embarrassing and 2) shows how deeply removed we are from real, real food, no matter how much CPG brands want to make us think that’s what we’re eating. 🙃 - Jenna

• Skincare straight from the vineyard. Beauty Crush Skincare is launching DTC with a four-product line built around patent-pending Falanghina grape exosomes and ingredients from founder and clean beauty pioneer Karen Behnke’s organic Sonoma vineyard. Products range from $36 to $68; industry sources project first-year sales to surpass eight figures.

  • Karen Behnke was the founder of Juice Beauty, known as a pioneer of the clean beauty movement (founded in 2005). After 20 years in business, Juice Beauty was liquidated last year after the business struggled during the pandemic, citing supply chain hurdles and heightened competition in the clean beauty space. It’s a classic example of being too early to a trend: Juice Beauty built its brand on the “no nasties” concept, a differentiator at the time, but one that has quickly become a baseline expectation for consumers.

  • As consumers grow more skeptical and seek the science behind skincare, Beauty Crush is presenting a new answer to their needs beyond “clean.” It’s relying on science-forward copy (”regenerative biotech skincare”; “exocellular antioxidant serum with peptides”) and clinical studies.

eCommerce

• The cart that builds itself. Gopuff launched Go, a personal shopping assistant built with SpaceXAI that fuses frontier AI reasoning with Gopuff’s 13-year order history to generate a pre-loaded, personalized cart—before the shopper types a thing.

  • The bot learns the shopper’s habits and can build a personal cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. The pitch is a TikTok-style shoppable feed where a custom model uses Gopuff’s behavioral and inventory data plus live cultural signals from X to generate personalized product moments—if there’s a big game in your city, wings and drinks show up staged in a living room scene.

  • This is how Yakir Gola, Gopuff’s co-founder and co-CEO, explained Go: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering.” It’s genuinely wild that “thinking” is now the friction to engineer out. The entire premise is that deciding what you want is a problem to be solved rather than, you know, shopping.

  • The thing I’d watch is dynamic pricing, because the same infrastructure that personalizes your cart can personalize your price. Instacart spent late 2025 pulling the plug on item-level price tests after a Consumer Reports investigation found nearly three of every four grocery items were shown to shoppers at multiple prices, drawing FTC scrutiny and letters from lawmakers. Prices differed by as much as 23% per item between customers, via a technique Instacart internally called “smart rounding.” Instacart insisted it wasn’t dynamic or surveillance pricing—just randomized A/B tests—but the backlash was the point.

    • Gopuff is now building a system that knows your habits, your location, the time of day, and what’s happening in your city in real time, then pre-fills your cart before you’ve thought about price at all. That’s a far richer dataset for individualized pricing than anything Instacart had, and the pre-loaded-cart format is exactly the interface where a markup is hardest to notice.

Retail

• The Walmart win that breaks brands. Landing a Walmart PO is the biggest moment in a lot of brands’ trajectories, but the win comes with a bill that lands months before any revenue does. Between supplier deposits, a full production run, freight, and Walmart’s Net 60-90 terms, brands routinely wait 120 to 150 days from PO to payment—and because the gap scales with the order, a bigger win digs a bigger hole before it makes a dollar.

  • How brands cover that gap—equity vs. debt—quietly decides how much of the company they still own on the other side. We ran the actual math with our partners Bridge, the direct lender behind Walmart’s PO financing program, on what each option really costs.

Funding

• Big CPG goes all-in on meal replacement. Nestlé has acquired a controlling stake in YFood, a European meal replacement drink brand, for around half a billion dollars. This comes roughly two years after buying an initial 49% stake in the business. YFood launched in 2017 and currently operates across 30 European countries.

  • Nestlé isn’t the only big European CPG giant making big bets on meal replacement. Earlier this year, Danone announced it was acquiring Huel for $1.15B—the UK-born brand that’s spent a decade making ‘food is inefficient, nutrition is the point’ sound aspirational rather than dystopian (we still think it’s a smidge dystopian…)

  • So why is all of this happening right now? Why it’s GLP-1s, of course! The boom in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has quietly reshaped what the food industry is building toward. Consumers on GLP-1s have suppressed appetites but still need complete nutrition, and a nutritionally complete RTD or powder, maximum nutrition in minimum volume, is perfect for that use case. Meal replacement brands like Huel and YFood aren’t just convenient; they’re basically purpose-built for the GLP-1 consumer.

    • Danone has been deliberate and transparent about this: It launched Oikos Fusion—a drinkable yogurt specifically formulated for GLP-1 users—and even built a dedicated nutrition hub for GLP-1 users on their North American website. As we wrote in our deep dive on the Danone/Huel deal: the food-as-fuel proposition has gone fully mainstream. Soylent was a curiosity for people who openly didn’t care about food. Huel made the same bet much more palatable and built it into a $1Bn asset. Now the biggest names in CPG are racing to own this space.

• Jolly Rancher iced tea worth $20M. Ryl Tea raised a $20 million Series C led by Purchase Capital, following 157% year-over-year growth (while the rest of the canned and bottled tea category declined 1.8% over the same period) and a multi-year licensing deal with The Hershey Company to produce zero-sugar Jolly Rancher-inspired RTD teas.

  

  • People are calling this the “modern tea” moment—basically seeing what happened in other RTDs (soda, energy, hydration) and claiming the same thing is going on in tea. But this summary feels a bit oversimplified: tea is better-for-you already. There have been zero-sugar and low-sugar bottled and canned iced teas for a while now. Ryl isn’t making a BFY version of an otherwise high-sugar product; it’s taking an otherwise stale tea category and making it look more like the energy category. Bright colors, licensing deals with candy brands, nostalgic flavors like Rocket Pop, a tall can, and spelling out the benefits (namely antioxidants) that were always in tea—they just weren’t explicitly highlighted.

• A plant-based rollup takes shape. Trek One Capital acquired Good Karma Foods (flax milk) and No Cow (plant-based protein bar), adding to a Houston-based portfolio that already includes Alter Eco Foods.

  • As animal-based protein gets the spotlight, neither of these brands seems particularly appealing in the year of our lord 2026. The reality is, these plant-based assets are probably cheap right now—making them the perfect target for a roll-up. Trek One can consolidate operations of these brands, and hope that when the pendulum inevitably swings back to plant-based, they’ll be sitting on a sleeper brand.

• Hart’s hustle, now PE-backed. VitaHustle, Kevin Hart’s plant-based nutrition brand, secured a growth equity investment from Charlotte-based Axum Capital Partners. The brand has sold more than 5 million of its shakes since its 2022 launch; deal terms were not disclosed.

  • The brand’s core product is an all-in-one nutrition shake (sound familiar?) with 20g plant protein, vitamins, probiotics, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens.

  • Kevin might be one of the best operators in celebrity-owned CPG right now. Alongside VitaHustle, he runs a tequila brand, Gran Coramino. He co-founded it in 2022 with beverage vet James Morrissey and Jose Cuervo’s Juan Domingo Beckmann, and it pulled in $85 million in sales last year, up more than 80% year-over-year. They sold 3.6 million bottles in three years, even as the broader spirits industry has seen shrinking demand. The brand says it’s crossed $200 million in lifetime retail sales and is funding its own growth with no outside capital. Seems like Hart has a special touch.

• Affordable BFY, but in the beauty aisle. Personal care brand California Naturals raised a Series B led by Align Ventures, with participation from existing investor Elizabeth Street Ventures, to fuel retail expansion at Target, Ulta, and CVS. Founder Shelby Wild is handing the CEO role to former COO Hayden Hiatt, previously of Glossier.

  • California Naturals is winning in a way that looks a whole lot like Smash Kitchen—relatively neutral, straightforward branding and products with “clean” ingredients, at affordable prices. “Clean” plus accessible is the new “clean” plus premium. And we can’t forget, this is also a celebrity backed brand. Owen Wilson got involved with the brand back in 2024.

• The next Olaplex? Filament Sciences raised a $2M seed round led by Wittington Ventures, with Willow as a secondary investor—its first outside capital after being self-funded by L’Oréal and Kiehl’s vet Nathan Puksta. Funds go toward inventory, salon channel expansion, and educator hires.

  • Filament leans into the same science-first playbook that helped Experiment Beauty and Olaplex reach the masses. Filament launched last year into salons and dermatologists’ offices with its TS.02/Tt, a professional-strength mask for post-chemical services. The mask was clinically tested for improving tensile strength across a range of hair types and textures.

• Culturally relevant hydration. Austin-based sparkling agua fresca maker Bawi closed a $6M round, building on the $3.5M seed it raised in late 2024. The brand makes lightly carbonated, real-fruit aguas frescas under 100 calories, in flavors like limón, maracuyá, and guayaba, and is using the capital to push distribution.

  

  • Founder Victor Guardiola has said the brand straddles both the agua fresca and sparkling water categories, which is exactly the positioning that lets it compete for shelf space in the new “modern soda category” rather than getting boxed into the Hispanic foods aisle.

  • Agua fresca went from white space to crowded fast, with startups like Agua Bonita and Frescos Naturales plus Coca-Cola and the former BlueTriton circling the category.

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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We talk to a lot of CPG operators, and the pattern is consistent: the intent to AI-ify their workflows is there, the tools exist, but the transition... gets a little sticky.

On June 10, Drivepoint is hosting a live panel conversation with finance leaders from across the industry comparing notes on how they’re rolling out AI and bringing their teams along with them.

They’re sharing the practical stuff: how to pick the right first workflow, what guardrails need to be in place before you scale (critical for a growing team!!), how to build a 30-60-90 day rollout plan, and how to actually measure whether the transition is working.

Whether you’re a CFO planning a top-down initiative or a solopreneur trying to get one workflow off the ground, this one’s worth the hour!

June 10 at 1pm ET → Register here (FREE)

Now, onto the goods 👇

Nate’s Pickups:

Naked Bites

Dates are everywhere and you’ve probably noticed it. I mean it’s hard not to! Date sweetened treats have infiltrated almost every aisle. We have stuff dates, coated dates, date syrups, date sweetened candies…dates are freaking everywhere. The New York Times rightfully just called it the latest ‘it Girl’ of the snack aisle. It makes sense too, consumer are actively looking for healthier and more natural alternative sweeteners and whole food sweet treats. Plus they’re rich in fiber, and fiber is the next protein after all.

I absolutely adore dates so I’m always down to trying the latest and greatest that leverages this beautiful fruit. I’m always amazing how many different ways people have figured out to make a great date-based product. Naked Bites do not disappoint.

• Quick Facts: Soft, chewy, date-sweetened snacks made with just 4 to 5 real ingredients and absolutely no added sugar or junk. They were created by lifelong friends Alissa and Diane, who reinvented their favorite sweets to focus on clean, feel-good nutrition after both of their husbands were diagnosed with prostate cancer.

• Reasons to love:

  • Soft, chewy, and moist. They absolutely nailed the texture. I have no idea how they pull it off, but these little treats taste like someone made them seconds before I popped one in my mouth. They’re incredibly fresh, and they hold that moisture even after the bag’s been open a while. Among whole-food-style date products I think there’s a huge range, and a lot of them come out dry, or so dense you’re chewing forever to get your little mid-day pick-me-up.

  • Packed with flavor. These little spheres pack so much flavor. I genuinely enjoyed all the flavors, even the coconut one despite not being a huge coconut fan. But my favorite of the bunch has to be the PB&J one. It tastes like I’m eating a PB&J, they nailed the flavor ratio of peanut butter to jelly.

  • Wildly simple ingredients. This is something I come back to a lot is that I’m always impressed by how much brands can do with so little. A short ingredient list is no guarantee of a good flavor or texture profile, though. Plenty of minimal-ingredient products skimp on texture and come out dry or bland. Naked Bites is still a processed food, most packaged products are, it’s just minimally processed with a much shorter ingredient list. And they pull it off without sacrificing a thing in my humble opinion.

Where to buy: Online

Jenna’s Pickup:

Burlap & Barrel Royal Cinnamon

I am a cinnamon fiend. If my coffee doesn’t have cinnamon in it, I don’t want it. If my overnight oats weren’t sprinkled with a heavy-handed dash of the stuff, I’m setting myself up for a bad day. I adore cinnamon, and have had it nearly every day of my life for the past half-decade. Which is all to say, if cinnamon is going to impress me, it’s gotta be extra special. This one is.

If you don’t know Burlap & Barrel, 1) you clearly haven’t read our gift guide “For the overly ambitious home chef,” and 2) I am so excited to introduce you to the flavor wonderland that is this brand.

• Quick Facts: An heirloom variety of Royal Cinnamon (also known as Saigon cinnamon) harvested in the mountains of Vietnam’s ancient capital city, Huế—the first of its kind to be exported to the US.

• Reasons to love:

  • You can really taste the difference. I know what you’re thinking: can one cinnamon really taste all that different from other cinnamon? I, an equal skeptic, am here to report that the answer is an astounding yes. With tasting notes of “brown butter, orange peel, and buckwheat honey,” (oddly specific, but here for it), this is a naturally sweet cinnamon with no added sugar—or added anything, on that note. But don’t let its sweetness deceive you: this cinnamon is equally spicy. It can stand on its own in a hefty pastry, bold coffee, or even a savory dish (I love it on roasted butternut squash or in a curry). Even when I use it as a topper on my oats, it almost tastes like it was baked-in—a toasty nuttiness that beautifully blends into any vehicle.

  • A company you can feel great about supporting. Burlap & Barrel sources all of its single-origin spices directly from small farms and cooperatives all across the world. They’re a Public Benefit Corporation that sources directly, which means they can keep the supply chain short and transparent, with purchase commitments that offer farmers financial stability.

  • Attention to detail. Burlap & Barrel take spices seriously. They search high and low for the best farms producing the highest-quality spices. In this case, they trekked to the mountains in central Vietnam—despite hearing that the heirloom cinnamon variety wasn’t being harvested there anymore. Turns out, the cinnamon was still being harvested, and harvested with a really special technique; instead of chopping down the tree to harvest the bark, they make a deep cut around the base of the tree and let the bark dry on the tree for a couple of weeks before harvesting it. This prevents essential oils from evaporating and concentrates them, keeping the intensity of the bark’s flavor. Apparently, you can smell it from half a mile away (brb, shipping myself off to Quang Nam).

Where to buy: Online!

Check out our most recent episode of The Curious Consumer. We were joined by Priyanka Ganjoo, founder of Kulfi Beauty—the first South Asian female-owned makeup line to be carried at Sephora. Priyanka shares her journey building an inclusive beauty brand, and the power of a strong emotional and cultural moat.

Plus, we’re chatting about the boom of Erewhon lookalikes (and how they’ll survive when mass-market becomes a discovery channel), the water brands capitalizing on fear of microplastics, one brand’s attempt to legitimize peptides, and more. →

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

Plus, we’re chatting about the boom of Erewhon lookalikes (and how they’ll survive when mass-market becomes a discovery channel), the water brands capitalizing on fear of microplastics, one brand’s attempt to legitimize peptides, and more. Let’s get into it!

The breakdown:

0:00 Kulfi Beauty + the wave of inclusive beauty

5:36 Kulfi’s Sephora growth and changing audience

9:49 The power of the emotional moat in beauty

14:49 Everything is Erewhon now (the new age of bougie grocers)

21:52 Water brands vs. microplastics

29:34 Kellogg’s cereal front-of-pack framework

34:31 Target’s private-label chef collabs

40:10 Peptides are the wild west of wellness

🎧 Love the show? Subscribe to The Curious Consumer wherever you get your podcasts! New episodes drop weekly.

📧 Get the inside scoop Subscribe to Express Checkout, our newsletter packed with consumer insights, trends, and exclusive content straight to your inbox at expresscheckout.co.

🗣️ Let’s connect! Follow us for behind-the-scenes content, quick tips, and more: @expresscheckout

💬 Join the conversation Have a product you’re curious about? DM us your questions or drop them in the comments—your topic could be featured in our next episode! If you have any thoughts/questions/suggestions, feel free to email us at hello@expresscheckout.co :)

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We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again (even in this very edition): Walmart is becoming the destination for fast-growing CPG brands.

That first confirmed Walmart PO is a BIG deal! But at the same time... it’s also not cash.

Behind that massive W is a pile of costs: production, supplier deposits, inventory—all due before Walmart pays on net terms. That gap between “we got the PO” and “Walmart actually pays us” is where a lot of otherwise-healthy suppliers get squeezed.

That’s why we’re excited to share Bridge—the direct lender behind Walmart’s official PO Financing Program. They fund up to 100% of COGS on approved Walmart and Sam’s Club transactions (loan sizes up to $10M), and handle everything from underwriting through repayment—no brokers needed.

If you just landed a Walmart order—or you’re close—you’re going to want Bridge in your corner.

Get instant cash on your Walmart PO

News of the Week

Everything is Erewhon now.

In the past few weeks, two more stores joined the cult. Laurel Supply opened May 8 in West Hollywood—blond wood, a sushi counter, $16 smoothies, and a location roughly a block from an Erewhon.

A week later, Nude Miami opened in Brickell confidently calling itself “the healthiest grocery store in America,” seed-oil-free, with a literal bouncer at the door. Add NYC’s latest bougie grocers, Meadow Lane and Happier Grocery, and there’s a clear trend happening here.

Erewhon created a category, and now everyone wants in.

The playbook is, by this point, fully copy-pasteable:

• A ridiculously photogenic organic produce section

• A seed-oil-free hot bar/prepared food section

• Supplement-stacked, marbled smoothies

• “Clean” trendy snacks (featuring $15+ Masa Chips, without fail)

• A premium wellness section stocked with sea moss gels and “clean” face wash

We already know why this works, and a big piece of it is accessible luxury. A $20 smoothie is a lot for a smoothie, but there’s no waitlist and no $1,000 price tag. For the cost of a slop bowl lunch, you get to feel elevated, in-the-know, a little bougie… and then you get to post it, AKA turn it into social capital. Groceries became the rare status object that’s both attainable and instantly shareable. In High Snobiety’s recent survey on wellness, 74% of respondents said that wellness products signal they’re “dialed in.”

In other words, food/bev/wellness is identity now, and these stores sell identity by the basket (carts are for plebs). But that’s exactly the point: these aren’t really grocery stores.

Though this is largely anecdotal (Erewhon doesn’t reveal much data about its shoppers), the dominant Erewhon behavior isn’t the full weekly shop—it’s the occasion visit, the smoothie run, the “I can only get this here” discovery peruse and pickup. Full-basket grocery shopping at one of these places is almost anthropologically rare (and nearly physically impossible by design… have you seen the width of their aisles?!).

The product, then, is discovery—a shortcut for people who want to optimize cart curation without reading forty ingredient labels. You don’t go to Erewhon to stock a pantry; you go to find what’s next, and to be seen finding it.

For a while, that frontier was theirs alone. The thing is, now mass-market retailers like Target and Walmart are trying their hand at the discovery play:

• Target rolled out 2,000-plus new wellness items this year—600 exclusives, over half under $10—framed, explicitly, around helping shoppers “discover new categories.” Food and beverage is now Target’s No. 1 traffic driver, and it’s leaning into “merchandising authority” with nearly 50% more newness, more emerging brands, and an expanded wellness push: protein-forward items, organics, better-for-you swaps next to the owned brands shoppers already know.

  • And if you’re on the same side of IG as we are, you’ve probably seen one of the dozens of videos claiming Target is the “new Whole Foods.”

• Walmart built a modern-soda set around Poppi, Olipop and Culture Pop, launched a better-for-you private label (bettergoods), and is pulling synthetic dyes and 30-plus additives from every private brand it owns by 2027, one of the largest reformulations in retail history.

The discovery formula and ingredient bans that once made the Erewhons of the world feel exclusive could (slowly) become table stakes at the country’s biggest retailers. Isn’t that a threat to the new designer-smoothie-purveyors on the block?

Ironically, we think that the deeper mass-market retailers wade into clean labels and emerging brands, the more these boutiques can justify their existence. Because the moment the soda you “discovered” last year lands in a suburban Target, it isn’t first anymore.

First has to keep meaning something earlier, weirder, more exclusive. It has to mean stumbling upon a product at the only place confident enough to call itself “America’s healthiest grocery store”—a claim that, no matter how many better-for-you brands enter its assortment, Walmart could never make.

Everything is Erewhon now—so what does that leave Erewhon (and its copycats)? Further out, more curated, more exclusive, more aggressively first. There will always have to be a room that feels more exclusive than the one you’re standing in, and always a consumer with the capital (and the appetite) to get inside it.

CPG & Consumer Goods

• It runs in the family. Ashley Fields (daughter of Mrs. Fields Cookies founder Debbi Fields) and Kim Anderson launched Fields Good, a line of functional soft-baked cookies for focus (ft. creatine and Cognizin citicoline), sleep (ft. L-theanine), and protein (because, what else?). The brand raised a $1.8M pre-seed led by Female Founders Fund to scale DTC, expand to TikTok Shop/Amazon, and pursue retail distribution.

  • The Mrs. Fields heritage is doing real work here, even if implicitly. It gives the brand instant permission to be in the cookie space in a way that most functional snack startups don’t have, and validates the most important decision-maker in food—taste—before trial. At the same time, it’s setting up the brand with big shoes to fill: consumers typically have lower expectations for the taste of a functional treat than its function-free counterpart. But here, if the cookies don’t match the indulgent memory of an OG Mrs. Fields, the brand will have a lot more apologizing to do.

  • Separately: the irony that Mrs. Fields—whose entire empire was built on the most unapologetically indulgent cookies imaginable—now has a legacy brand in the “functional soft-baked cookie” space is…. funny.

• She sure loves an exclamation point. Supergoop! founder Holly Thaggard and her son Will launched WaterOuai! They’ll be sourcing water from Texas’s Edwards Aquifer and packaging it in the SUPERCAN, an innovative aluminum can designed to avoid BPA/PFAs/phthalates and reduce material transfer.

  • This feels part of a larger movement towards the new era of water bottles. WaterOuai isn’t alone in betting on microplastics fear seeping into our water bottle usage: Loonen, the new status-symbol water founded by venture investor Clara Sieg, launched late last year with exhaustively tested, PFAS-free spring water in glass bottles, arguing that “the organic movement never came for water, because it’s not grown.”

  • WaterOuai is launching DTC and on Amazon at $2/can or $48/case, with an initial distribution focus on schools, universities, corporate offices, and boutique hotels—the same institution-first strategy Thaggard used to scale Supergoop!

• Say it with me folks….”Another! Celeb! Protein! Product!!” Kristin Cavallari—reality TV alum (Laguna Beach / The Hills) and founder of Uncommon James—is launching Fizzen, a sparkling juice with protein, collagen peptides, and B vitamins.

• Sell the uppers and the downers. Magic Mind, makers of a line of mental performance shots, launched a new drug-free 2 oz sleep shot. The shots include ingredients like lavender, L-theanine, Magnesium Glycinate, and plant-based melatonin. The shot is available online and is launching this month in Sprouts, HEB, New Seasons, and Central Market.

  

  • Magic Mind owned your mornings—now it wants your nights. The brand made its name selling 2 oz “mental performance shots,” a mixture of caffeine and nootropics to get you through the day, that it’s sold since 2020. Now with a sleep shot, Magic Mind can bookend your whole day. A shot to wake you up and a shot to put you down. Is it mind control or just clever positioning? Either way, owning both ends of your routine is a smart way to double the number of times a day you reach for the same brand. I’m just glad it’s not another gummy.

  • And let’s not forget, sleep is big business. The global sleep economy was valued at roughly $616 billion in 2025 and is still climbing—smart mattresses, trackers, magnesium gummies, mouth tape, and now microdosed sleep shots. Magic Mind is wedging into a category where consumers have already proven they’ll spend whatever it takes to chase a better night.

• Surprise, surprise, another functional drink. YouTuber and makeup artist Tati Westbrook launched Unfair Advantage, a functional powdered energy drink with 75mg natural caffeine from guarana, prebiotics, and, of course, skin-support claims.

  • It looks like you told AI to make you a functional powdered drink brand…

• Cereal wants its health halo back. WK Kellogg rolled out SPOONS, an on-pack nutrition framework (simple ingredients, protein, outstanding fiber, other nutritious foods, nutrients you need, single-digit sugars) across Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran, and Rice Krispies. This is the first notable move under its new owner Ferrero.

  • SPOONS is a proprietary label that Kellogg’s designed itself, so it can highlight whatever it wants—it’s not a third-party standard. The FDA has been pushing for front-of-pack labeling for exactly this reason, but brands keep beating regulators to the punch with their own friendlier-looking versions.

• Target’s keeps recruiting chefs. Target’s in-house brand Good & Gather launched a limited-edition snack line with James Beard Award-winning chef Roy Choi. They’re dropping new sweet and savory snack items such as Spicy Ramen Yuca Chips, Wassapi Ranch Popcorn, Chili Lime Cake Pops (confused about this one tbh), and more across nearly 1,800 stores starting May 31, all under $6.

  

  • This isn’t the first time Target worked with chefs on its in-house brands. Good & Gather Collabs launched in 2025 with James Beard chef Ann Kim on frozen pizza, then pitmaster Rodney Scott on barbecue, and now Roy Choi on snacks. They’re borrowing these chefs culinary credibility to elevate their own brand and keep Target a place of discovery and taste as a way to differentiate the grocery arm beyond just the branded products on the shelf.

• Looking good means smelling good. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s fast-growing men’s grooming line, Papatui, has expanded into cologne with three scents at about $40 each, built with perfumers Frank Voelkl (DSM-Firmenich) and Jérôme Epinette (Byredo, Sol de Janeiro), and sold at Target..

  

  • Back in October 2025 we said “Men want to smell good now” —and it couldn’t ring more true today. Men’s skincare, and fragrance especially, is one of the few corners of beauty putting up consistent wins, and it’s not slowing down. Papatui is already the #1 brand in the Men’s Skin Care category at Target (sales per IRI/Circana), so moving into cologne is a logical next step for them.

eCommerce

• From retailer to AI infrastructure vendor. Amazon announced Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS, licensing its AI shopping tech to outside retailers for deployment within 60 days—Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade) went live first, with more retailers in testing.

  • In other words, Amazon is selling the AI layer that could help brands reduce their dependence on Amazon’s own marketplace—while also keeping them firmly in the AWS/Bedrock ecosystem. Freeing them from one Amazon dependency, landing them in another….

  • AWS specifically called out CPG brands as a use case—the argument being that no one knows their products better than the brands that make them. The pitch is that proprietary product knowledge plus proven AI infrastructure beats a generic assistant every time. Whether CPG brands have the dev resources to actually deploy this is a different question.

Retail

• Calling all retail nerds! 📣 We are heading to Retail Brew’s Clicks, Bricks & Everything In-Between on June 3 at Studio Gather (45 Rock, NYC). Half-day, 8 AM–12:30 PM, all about how omnichannel is actually playing out.

  • We’re moderating a session called “Getting Discovered with Express Checkout” at 9:30am, where we’ll get into how consumer brands are creating demand in a fragmented landscape with Little Spoon’s Caryn Wasser.

  • Use code EC50 at checkout for 50% off!!!!

Funding

• Betting peptides go legit. Feel Peptides closed a $3 million seed round led by Sugar Capital—investors in brands like Caraway, Starface, and Grüns (acq. Unilever 2026)—to bring trust and better branding to the growing peptide market.

  • Peptides are the latest thing that American consumers are experimenting with to become the most productive, hot, athletic version of themselves (and also defy all laws of aging). If you’re as confused as we are about this growing market, our friend Dan Toomey made a great (hilarious) vid breaking it down.

  • Despite every Joe Rogan listener and their biohacking bestie promoting these products, it’s still wildly under-researched. Most peptide consumers are sourcing their vials from online sellers (often internationally) with minimal-to-no transparency on sourcing, purity, or quality. So if somebody is going to inject themselves with these products, might as well come from a brand that promotes testing, quality standards, and control—which is what Feel Peptides seems to be promising.

  • Stay tuned: we’ll have a longer piece on this topic soon.

• OxiClean’s parent just bought a stain-remover cult. Church & Dwight acquired Miss Mouth’s Messy Eater for ~$325 million. The brand did ~$80M in net sales and ~$28M EBITDA in 2025, built almost entirely on eCommerce. It’s currently the #1 stain remover on Amazon.

  • Church & Dwight already owns the heavy hitters of stain removal (OxiClean, Arm & Hammer), so sure they’re buying market share but what they’re really buying is a consumer. Miss Mouth’s positions itself as natural and non-toxic while still claiming to work as well as the harsh stuff, which is exactly what shoppers now want from the products they use around their kids and kitchens. The whole household-care aisle is moving away from “chemical” and toward “clean but still effective,” and C&D just bought the brand that’s already won that argument with consumers.

• Splenda just gobbled up the sweetener aisle. Heartland Food Products Group announced an agreement to acquire Whole Earth Brands’ Americas business, adding Equal, Whole Earth, Swerve, and Chuker to its Splenda, SlimFast, and Java House portfolio. Financial terms were not disclosed.

• In case you didn’t know, R&B singer and actress Patti Labelle has a food brand called Patti’s Good Life which started in 2008. They reportedly do around $80M+ a year and just raised a strategic investment from Factory’s Supply Factory, Lafayette Square, and Innovate Capital to scale distribution and expand its frozen and family meals portfolio.

  • The frozen aisle keeps pulling in serious money. Brands have been launching and raising left and right. Frozen waffle brand Evergreen pulled in $15M, Laoban raised $7M for its frozen Asian lineup, Jesse & Ben’s closed a $10M Series A for its clean label fries, and stuffed pasta brand Ripi landed $2.4M ahead of its Target rollout. It’s no wonder this is all happening right now, U.S. frozen food sales hit $87 billion in the 52 weeks ending September 2025, up more than 45% from 2019, with frozen snacks alone up nearly 70%! It’s where shoppers are going to save money without sacrificing on quality.

• Is makeup coming back? Violette_FR, a beauty brand founded my French makeup artist Violette Serrat, raised $5M from existing backers Silas Capital, Monogram Capital Partners, and Highlander Partners, extending its 2024 Series B as prestige makeup brands faces sluggish category growth and limited exit opportunities.

  • Prestige makeup grew just 2% in Q1, compared to 10% for prestige haircare and 7% for both skincare and fragrance—which explains why “extending an existing Series B” rather than closing a fresh round is the financing structure of the moment. Westman Atelier did the same thing earlier this year. Investors in these brands aren’t panicking; they’re holding, waiting for the category to turn. The French-girl-beauty positioning and tight SKU edit (Violette_FR has no complexion products) at least gives it a defensible identity that isn’t just trend-dependent.

• The anti-Amazon is gaining steam. Stord raised $250M at a $3B valuation led by Strike Capital alongside Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund. Stord runs warehouses and fulfillment software that let brands offer Amazon-level shipping speed without handing Amazon the customer relationship; the Atlanta company, started by two Georgia Tech students in 2015, has now raised roughly $775M in total.

• Ôrebella closed a Series A led by Silas Capital and named its first CEO, Anish Agarwal (ex-T3 Micro and Colgate-Palmolive). The clean-fragrance line launched in 2024, is sold in Ulta’s worldwide and industry estimates peg 2026 revenue at $20–30M.

• Call it the Wagyu of pork. Campo Grande raised $4M to bring its heritage pork brand into more retail doors across the country. Backers include Valor Equity Partners, Spacestation Investments, Supernatural Ventures, and Chomps co-founder Pete Maldonado.

  • ButcherBox’s retail move is a useful parallel: the DTC subscription brand made its first major retail leap in January, landing fresh grass-fed beef in over 1,400 Targets—and the bet is paying off from a position of strength, with subscription revenue already exceeding $570M in 2025. If a brand built entirely on the premise of “better meat, delivered” can successfully cross into mass retail without diluting its identity, it’s a good sign for Campo Grande’s ambitions to do the same at the shelf level with heritage pork.

  • The broader context: 80% of Americans report prioritizing protein intake during at least one meal a day, and shoppers increasingly favor “clean meat” attributes like grass-fed, organic, and no additives—with protein callouts on red meat packaging having doubled since 2019. Campo Grande is pitching into exactly that: the consumer who’s already reading labels closely and is willing to pay up for provenance. Heritage breed pork is a natural next frontier as beef prices stay elevated—ground beef averaged $6.69/lb in December 2025 versus $4.30/lb for pork chops—which makes a premium pork brand easier to justify on relative terms even at a higher price point than conventional pork.

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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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You know what’s wild? You very well might have a celebrity buying from your store right now… but you would have no idea (!!!).

That’s not a hypothetical: Magic Mind had Kim Kardashian as a customer for TWO YEARS before they figured it out. Once they did, they sent a care package and got an Instagram shoutout worth millions. The data was always there, but without the right tools, they just couldn’t see it.

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Jolie ran an OuterSignal lookalike against their Meta audiences, and saw 4x more sales, 32% lower CPA. Gratsi drove a 47% lift in email revenue in an A/B test.

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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!

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from YOU 🫵: if you have feedback on our recent content, it would mean SO much to us if you could take two minutes to respond to this short survey with your thoughts!

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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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