Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The aisle audit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of our Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

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

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

June 12 (TX): Pre-Match Dinner

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

July 12-15 (Chicago): IFT First

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

• A quick poll 👇

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 878: Target doors for their nationwide launch

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

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

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

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

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

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

The routine is the product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most founders find out too late. Or never.

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

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

Get a free 5-minute demo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 20 (NY): DTC Dinner Club

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

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

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

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

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

June 12 (TX): Pre-Match Dinner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brands that make it vs. brands that don’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the secret to a pitch people remember?

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

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

My favorite event by far is the Holiday Bazaar.

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

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

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

Naturally New York started in the fall of 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blank page brief

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most CPG founders think about Instacart wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start converting on Instacart

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 19 (NY): Consumer Founders Rooftop Happy Hour

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

May 20 (NY): DTC Dinner Club

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

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

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

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

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

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

Most CPG founders think about Instacart wrong.

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

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

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

Here's how he thinks about Instacart.

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

Why Instacart is the great equalizer.

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

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

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

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

The one format that actually moves product.

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

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

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

The 4 moves that separate average from excellent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A note for early-stage brands.

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

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

The operational details most founders miss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

• The hot girlification of grocery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ~100 accounts: Retail footprint across New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The occasion fit test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing

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

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

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

Most founders find out too late. Or never.

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

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

Get a free 5-minute demo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 13 (Virtual): Practice Your Retail Buyer Pitch

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

May 20 (NY): DTC Dinner Club

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

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

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

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

• Running an influencer marketing campaign without the influencer price tag

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ~1.5 years: Spent on positioning and product development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you really selling?

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

Fill in the blanks:

• We make: ______.

• People buy us because: ______.

• So we’re actually a ______ brand.

Then reassess:

• Does this change who you compete with?

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

• Could someone be a fan without ever buying?

• Would your best customer say it this way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the full Expert Talks with Lydia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

June 7-9 (Orlando): IDDBA 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really like to invest in nano and micro creators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a natural plateau with every creator.

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

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

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

I have a very specific retail strategy.

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

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

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

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

We’re very much in your business.

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

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 10 units an hour: Average demo conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The local-first playbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it 🍵🍺

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

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

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

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interesting part is how they did it.

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

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

They sold out in a month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your first SKU scorecard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of the answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🥚🥚

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

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

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

Apply here

April 23 (NY): Naturally New York Spring Fling

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find your fractional

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

Find your fractional

Happy Tuesday. This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The format test

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grow Pro: A Fractional CPG Rolodex

Your first hires, before you hire.

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

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

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

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

Find your fractional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🥚🥚

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

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

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

Apply here

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

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

April 23 (NY): Naturally New York Spring Fling

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

May 20-21 (NY): The Lead Summit

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

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

This week, we’re sharing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can your product survive retail?

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

• Shelf price: $9.99

• Retailer (~50%): → $5.00

• Distributor (~15%): → $4.25

• Broker (~10%): → $3.82

• Promos/fees (10–15%): → $3.25-$3.40

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

Grow Pro: A Fractional CPG Rolodex

Your first hires, before you hire.

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

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

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

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

→ Browse the rolodex

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

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

Aldi goes digital with Instacart: Private label meets platform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 23 (NY): Naturally New York Spring Fling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The founder fundraising stack (pre-revenue edition)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Daniel Danés and Ben Aguilar, the partners behind Titin, an olive oil brand built from Spanish groves to U.S. kitchens.

They met at a CPG event in Boston. Daniel was pouring samples of an olive oil that didn’t taste like anything Ben had tried before. Bright, green, almost alive.

Daniel had left his career as in finance law in Madrid to build something of his own. Ben had been in risk management, with the same itch. Neither had built a CPG brand before.

Within 10 months, they went from an FDA consultation to landed inventory. Today, they have 5 East Coast distributors, 50+ restaurant accounts (including Michelin-starred restaurants), and 70+ retail accounts.

00:12 - The minds behind Titin
02:54 - It runs in the family
04:50 - Business in 10 months
07:34 - Purple reign
10:55 - Betting on back-of-house
14:19 - Old school in a new market
17:18 - Shooting fish in a barrel
20:19 - You have to be a little crazy

10 months: From FDA consultation to first container on U.S. soil

80/20: Food service vs. retail split

3× velocity lift in stores: When they do in-person demos

CPG is a contact sport. Daniel built the business by talking to everyone: store owners, distributors, chefs. Ben offered to help for free and later became a partner. “You have to ask for things and you can’t be ashamed to talk about what you’re doing,” he says. “Everyone’s in their own world.” When you’re new, no one is coming to you. You have to insert yourself into the room.

Start with the buyer who already speaks your language. Everyone said don’t bother with restaurants. “They buy canola. It’s a fight of pennies,” recalls Daniel. He ignored it, went after chefs who valued high-quality ingredients, and now 80% of their business is food service. Yes, margins are lower. But velocity is higher, there are no slotting fees, and you’re selling to the person who actually uses the product.

Your packaging decisions are sales decisions. The bottle shape, the color, the label. None of it is just aesthetic. Every choice impacts readability, shelf pickup, and velocity. Founders treat brand as identity. But in CPG, brand is a sales tool. If design doesn’t help the product move, it’s underutilized.

One try beats a thousand impressions. Olive oil looks the same online and on shelf. It only differentiates when you taste it. That makes paid digital a poor early investment for Titin. Instead, they run demos and see velocity increases 2-3x the category average. If your product closes on contact, your main job is to engineer that contact.

Most trade shows give you attention. Few give you orders. For an early-stage brand, big trade shows do one thing well: they make you feel part of the industry. What they don’t do is guarantee orders at a cost that makes sense. “Big trade shows are great for LinkedIn. Expensive for your P&L,” says Daniel. Focus on smaller, regional, distributor-led events. Same buyers, less noise, lower cost.

Market signal → Early brands aren’t starting in retail. They’re proving demand somewhere cheaper first: food service, demos, farmers markets. By the time they’re in stores, they already know it will sell.

Build your CPG brand… in this order

Get this wrong, and you end up with product and no one to sell it to.

1. Remove the blockers first. Regulatory, legal, technical. Find a specialist in your category and take care of it before you touch anything else.

2. Plan your supply chain before you need it. Lock in suppliers, logistics, and warehouse early. Costs and delays compound if you wait till the last minute.

3. Get real demand before you scale supply. Early buyers are proof and your best leverage. If no one wants it now, more product won’t fix it.

4. Set up distribution before you push growth. Make sure people can actually buy your product. Demand without access doesn’t convert.

5. Build a forecasting model on day one. Track velocity and demand from the start. Running out of stock isn’t traction. It’s a planning failure.

Meet Andrew Schundler, co-founder of CHUH Matcha. Two years ago, he was producing commercials and documentaries. Today he’s running a canned matcha brand sold across 135 independent retailers in Maine and New England.

The idea came when he broke up with coffee. “Even just one cup a day would give me jitters. And if I didn’t have that one cup, I’d be like in a coma by noon,” he says. On the search for a better option, he landed on matcha. Steady energy. No crash. He loved it.

What he didn’t love was the cold case options: hyper-caffeinated energy drinks on one side, sugary bottled coffees on the other. Not much in between.

So he and his wife Chloe made one. A flavor-forward matcha latte you can grab on the go. It’s been eight months since launch, and they’re already preparing for a national rollout. Here’s how they did it.

00:15 - The mind behind CHUH
02:17 - Matcha do about flavor
04:48 - 6,000 cans and a leap of faith
07:21 - Bootstrapping a beverage
09:34 - The Maine method
17:53 - Economics of a $4.99 can
15:26 - Making the cold case for matcha
18:24 - Where the decisions are made

$50,000: Total initial investment (formula, production, packaging, etc.)

6,000 cans: First production run (3,000 blueberry, 3,000 spice vanilla)

135 stores: Retail accounts reached within the first 7 months

Beverages sell in refrigerators, not browsers. Andrew assumed CHUH would sell four-packs on its website. It didn’t. Canned drinks are grab-and-go decisions made at a cold case, not considered online purchases. He pivoted quickly and sees most success in retail, office complexes, and food service.

Price for the shelf, not your spreadsheet. Start with a price your consumers will buy and your retailers can run promotions on. Too high and it never leaves the shelf. Too low and you can’t discount. CHUH landed on $4.99, even when early margins were closer to 20%. Pricing to hit 40% margins would have pushed the drink to $6.99. As volume grew, margins caught up.

Warm the room before you pitch it. Retail buyers say yes faster to people they already know. Before they had a single can to sell, Andrew and Chloe visited local retailers just to talk: What do they look for? How does it work? A disarmingly simple move most founders skip because they’re too eager to pitch. When they returned with product, it was an easy yes.

One SKU doesn’t make a brand block. One product on a shelf disappears. Two or three creates a brand block buyers can actually see. CHUH launched with blueberry and spice vanilla to help stand out in the cold case… and they’re quickly rolling out more SKUs. Shelf space is visual real estate. One can doesn’t buy much of it.

Follow up more often than feels reasonable. Andrew emailed one buyer in September. Then October. November. December. January. The reply came in February. “He’s like, yeah, sounds good. As if I hadn’t emailed him six times,” Andrew says. Track every contact, follow up on a schedule, and don’t stop. Buyers are managing hundreds of vendors. Silence usually means busy, not no.

Market signal → Cafés built the matcha habit. RTD brands are scaling it. Just as cold brew did for coffee and kombucha did for fermentation, canned drinks are now doing for matcha.

The retail shelf-life rule

Before every production run, work backwards from what retailers require.

1. Start with the retailer: Most retailers want 70–80% of shelf life remaining when product arrives. If your drink has a 12-month shelf life, you effectively have ~9 months to sell it.
2. Subtract logistics: Co-packer lead time, distributor pickup, and warehouse time usually take 2–3 months. Now your real selling window is 6–7 months.
3. Multiply by velocity: Stores × units per store per week × weeks in your window = units you can move.

If that number is bigger than your run size, you can scale up. If it’s smaller, run less.

Everyone thinks they understand food.

Founders have opinions on ingredients. Investors ask about “clean labels.” But once you try to make a product, you realize how little of the conversation reflects how food actually works.

Hydroxide is a food scientist and content creator with over 450,000 followers and seven years in the industry, from plant-based meat and chocolate to food safety and quality. She translates the science, the myths, and the mechanics behind products people eat every day.

Feature Video:
00:14 - Beyond Immerse
02:16 - David Protein Bar
04:54 - Olipop

Video Q&A (below):
1 - When food scientists say X, they mean Y
2 - Dos and don’ts of working with a food scientist
3 - How the sauce gets made
4 - Final advice for founders getting into food

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

What’s really in Beyond Immerse, David Bar, and Olipop

Beyond Immerse

The base starts with carbonated water, followed by hydrolyzed pea protein. Hydrolyzing the protein breaks it into smaller pieces, which helps it dissolve in liquid and prevents the drink from separating. Protein also acts as an emulsifier, helping keep everything suspended rather than ending up with powder floating in water.

Then comes soluble tapioca fiber, which adds fiber but also improves texture. Fiber holds water almost like a sponge, which helps create a smoother, more stable drink.

Other ingredients manage flavor and stability:

• Citric acid helps with acidity, flavor, and preservation

• Malic acid adds the sour note people associate with sour candy

• Stevia and monk fruit provide sweetness

• Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) helps maintain color

• Beta carotene adds color

Most of the formula is doing structural work, helping the drink stay smooth, stable, and drinkable.

David Bar

David organizes its formula into systems, something many modern food tech companies do.

The protein system includes milk protein isolate, collagen, whey protein concentrate, and egg white. Isolates have a higher protein percentage, while concentrates contain less protein but can improve texture.

High-protein bars tend to become dry and chalky, so the next layer is the binding system:

• Maltitol, allulose, and glycerin retain moisture

• Soluble corn fiber adds structure

• Tapioca starch contributes elasticity and chew

• Soy lecithin helps emulsify and stabilize the mixture

The fat system includes EPG (esterified propoxylated glycerol) and coconut oil. EPG behaves like fat but contributes far fewer calories, which helps David maintain very low calorie counts while still creating a rich mouthfeel. Most of the ingredient list is there to engineer the texture and structure of the bar.

Olipop

Olipop’s key innovation is its proprietary OliSmart fiber blend, which includes ingredients like cassava root fiber, chicory root inulin, Jerusalem artichoke inulin, nopal cactus, marshmallow root, calendula flower, and kudzu root. Some of these ingredients function primarily as fiber sources, while others may be included for additional functionality or differentiation.

The main challenge with high-fiber drinks is texture. Fiber can easily make beverages thick or sludgy. Olipop’s formula manages to keep the drink light and soda-like while still delivering significant fiber.

The sweetening system includes:

• Cassava root syrup

• Apple juice concentrate

• Lemon juice concentrate

• Stevia

Interestingly, Olipop uses slightly different fiber systems depending on whether the product is refrigerated or shelf-stable, since different fibers help control stability and water activity in different environments. The real achievement is that they created a high-fiber soda that still tastes like soda, which is much harder than it sounds.

When food scientists say X, they mean Y

Hydroxide decodes the terms founders encounter most, and what they actually mean for your product.

Water activity: The number one thing you need to know is water activity is not the same thing as moisture content. They sound similar, but water activity is used to change both the safety and texture of your product.

Lower water activity allows products to sit on a shelf without molding, growing bacteria, or develop pathogens. A quick hack is to increase acidity, increase salt, or increase sugar.

A classic example is the McDonald’s hamburger that’s been sitting out for seven or eight years without molding. People ask what chemicals must be in it. In reality, it’s the water activity. If there isn’t freely available water, mold and bacteria simply can’t grow.

Maillard reaction: Probably the most common chemical reaction in cooking. It’s basically what creates browning and flavor in cooking. When carbohydrates and amino acids react under heat, they form hundreds of flavor compounds. It’s the reason bread crust turns brown and why cooked meat develops that rich flavor.

Natural flavors: Founders, write this down: 21 CFR. That’s the Code of Federal Regulations, and it defines food labeling terms and ingredient rules. (Canada has the CFIA, Europe has the EFSA.) This is where you’ll find definitions for things like natural flavors. and it’s as broad as you’d expect.

Natural flavors can include spices, oils, oleoresins, distillates, extracts, edible yeast, bark, roots… almost anything derived from a natural source. It’s basically a catch-all term, which is why companies often use it to group complex flavor blends.

Kill step: It’s pretty much what it sounds like. Heating your product until the bad stuff dies. Not every product needs a kill step. Hot sauce is a good example. Many hot sauces aren’t boiled or sterilized; the acidity and salt make them shelf stable on their own. In other words, a product doesn’t have to go through a kill step to be safe.

Dos and don’ts of working with a food scientist

What every founder should know before stepping into the lab.

1. Give your food scientist time to play. Let them go into their little free range pen to experiment to their heart’s desire, to do stretch projects.

If you’re pre-Series A and the product isn’t done yet, don’t put a tight timeline on it. Your product is going to change from the idea in your head, and that’s okay. Give it four months minimum if you’re starting from scratch.

Ideally, it would be more like six months. However much time you think you need, double it. Food does not scale like tech. It’s not an app you’re building in your garage.

2. Focus on making your product taste good. This sounds sarcastic, but I really mean it. So many founders in food CPG want to change the world with their product. They want to add the fiber, the protein, the health, the function. But no one will eat it if it tastes bad. That doesn’t mean you have to make a deep fried Oreo, but you do have to make sacrifices.

And another secret is to focus on texture before flavor. A good texture can carry weak flavor. But even good flavor cannot save bad texture.

3. Definitely don’t buy fancy equipment. What’s so great about food is you can be really scrappy with just a few things. A basic blender, a basic oven, a SodaStream for beverages, that’s enough.

Food has to be elastic to scale. If your product falls apart on the bench with cheap equipment, it will not survive a co-packer. If it holds together with $50 equipment, it’ll hold together with $500,000 equipment. That’s when you know you’re ready.

4. Don’t get married to your product idea. As a founder, you have this dream and you want your dream to be seen by the world. And that is great. You should not doubt your dream. A strong concept is super essential to this business. But food is such an ever-changing entity and always going to be more than the sum of its parts.

When I was working in plant-based meat, we’d set out to mimic animal protein and end up with a secret third thing. Something that wasn’t the vegan version or the animal version, just its own product.

Your formula will change. Ingredients get yanked. Supply chains break. Take the ring off. Be dating your idea, not married to it. Sometimes what it becomes is better than what you planned.

If a founder came to you and said, “I want to make a sauce,” what would you say?

Before the flavor, there’s the formula.

The first question is whether the sauce will be refrigerated or shelf stable. That decision influences almost everything about the formula. Refrigerated sauces usually cost more because cold storage is expensive, but they often require fewer preservatives and less salt or sugar. Shelf-stable sauces are more complicated. You have to control water activity and pH so bacteria can’t grow.

You also need to think about packaging. Is it going into a bottle, pouch, or jug? For certain products, especially creamy sauces, you also have to follow low-acid canned food regulations, since acidity alone might not be enough to keep the product safe.

Another big question is whether the sauce is fully mixed or designed to separate, like a vinaigrette you shake before using. If it’s fully mixed, you’ll almost always need an emulsifier to keep the sauce stable. Garlic can act as a natural emulsifier, but in large-scale production it usually isn’t strong enough on its own. Companies often use ingredients like soy lecithin, sunflower lecithin, proteins, or mono- and diglycerides to keep everything consistent.

Once the structure works and the sauce stays stable without separating, that’s when the fun part starts: playing with flavor.

Any final advice for founders getting into food?

The product will fail. Make it anyway.

Don’t underestimate how much food science you already understand. If you cook or even just pay attention to how food behaves, you probably know more than you think. Also be ready for things to fail. Recipes won’t work. Products will taste bad. That’s just part of building in food.

But when you finally make something people genuinely love, it’s incredibly rewarding. Invest in understanding the science early, and combine it with strong marketing without letting either one stifle the other. Easy enough, right?

Meet Victor Guardiola, founder of Bawi Agua Fresca, a fruit-forward take on the Mexican drink he grew up with, minus the 40 grams of sugar.

Walk into Whole Foods and you’ll find every kind of better-for-you soda. What you won’t find is one built around bold Hispanic flavors. Victor came up with the idea for Bawi during a UT Austin entrepreneurship practicum and raised capital the old-fashioned way: cold emails. Today the brand has sold over 1.5M cans and is stocked in 600+ stores across 40+ states.

But the real story isn’t the beverage. It’s the fundraising playbook he built to get there. Coming off a 12-month strategic repositioning, Victor breaks down how he raised his first checks through cold outreach, navigated a production run that had investors texting him photos of exploded cans, and why he never starts with a deck.

00:12 - The mind behind Bawi
03:12 - Stage by stage, problem by problem
06:51 - Never lead with the deck
10:34 - The cans exploded
13:44 - Pick your battles… then win them
17:51 - Velocity or bust
22:07 - Dilution is tuition

$150K: Raised through cold emails to fund Bawi’s first production run

1.5M cans: Sold since launch

600+ stores: Current retail footprint across 40+ states

Never lead with the deck. Victor raised his first $150K entirely through cold emails, and never asked for money in the first message. No pitch, no attachment. Just a short note and a request for 15 minutes of advice. “When you go that route, as opposed to ‘we’re currently raising our series seed and have $300K committed,’ is that it’s going to be received very differently.”

Don’t Write Your Subject Line Like This ⚠️. Victor treats every email like a copywriting exercise, with subject lines being the most important. His goal: sound human, not automated. “The know I’m Gen Z, so sometimes I’ll even go full lowercase,” he says. “Whatever makes it clear this isn’t another AI cold email.”

Warm up the cold email. Before reaching out, Victor looks for one point of overlap. “I’m Hispanic, first-gen immigrant, based in Austin, went to UT. I can find all the successful UT grads in the past decade, all the successful Latinos within the CPG industry.” Those small details turn a cold email into a warmer introduction.

Land one operator first. Victor focused on operators who already built in the same category or channel. Once one operator is on board, their involvement makes all others much easier. “All of what we’re doing in business is figuring out what carrot we have to offer these people.” Equity, access, a story worth being part of.

Dilution is tuition. Most founders treat dilution like a loss. Victor treats it as the cost of learning. “Your dilution is the tax you pay for learning how to run your business.” Great mentors lower the price. Learning everything yourself raises it.

Market signal → Investors are still pouring money into better-for-you beverages. The opportunity now isn’t just formulation. It’s cultural translation that opens entirely new markets.

Who to email? Operators or VCs

One funds the idea. The other funds the scale.

Operators

• Best for: First check, credibility, category validation

• What they care about: A story worth being part of, real product insight

• When to approach: Stage 0: Pre-traction

• How to win them: Lead with the story and category insight

• Your carrot: Early equity, cultural relevance, access

VCs

• Best for: Scale capital, follow-on rounds

• What they care about: Traction, TAM, exit potential

• When to approach: Stage 1: Post-traction

• How to win them: Lead with traction and data

• Your carrot: Growth, category size, returns
  
  

Meet Isabella Hoag, co-founder of Osia, a modern mood beverage company built on fruit juice, herbs, and the idea that drinking should be intentional.

She didn’t start with a co-packer or a pitch deck. She started with $50, a friend’s art show, and drinks priced at $13-15 a glass. Within a year, Isabella had done 500+ events and put her product in thousands of hands. Then, she decided to build a brand.

No MBA. No beverage experience. Just the conviction that sober doesn’t have to be sidelined, and that daily ritual will outsell occasional indulgence. Osia is now in 100+ doors and just landed its first national retailer.

00:12 - The mind behind Osia
02:38 - Tinctures to traction
04:48 - Drink of choice
07:48 - Read the room
10:17 - The sweet spot
12:51 - Hands dirty, head down

$50: Initial investment for the first event

500+ events: In one year before launching cans

100 doors → 1,500 projected: Retail growth in under two years

No contacts? Ask anyway. Isabella had no industry contacts and no idea how to manufacture a beverage. When she didn’t know, she Googled. When she couldn’t Google it, she asked strangers. “The worst someone’s gonna say is no, so you might as well just put yourself out there.”

Get proof before production. Isabella did 500+ events before a single can was produced, from intimate gatherings to 10,000-person crowds. Events are the cheapest R&D you’ll ever do. They gave her live validation and cash flow to fund her first production run.

Mistakes are fine. Surprises aren’t. Osia’s first production run over-extracted its sage. The batch shipped. They had to explain, reformulate, and then re-explain again. “We had to win over those customers again, whether it was our B2B or D2C customers.” Early customers forgive mistakes. They don’t forgive being kept in the dark.

Your pitch changes depending on the room. Same product, different language, every account. Liquor stores care about occasion. Wellness shops care about ingredients. Bars care about margin. Isabella pitched to all and adjusted in real time.

Don’t hire to grow a team. Hire to close gaps. Years of doing everything themselves taught the founders exactly where they needed help. So when it was time to hire, they knew what roles to fill. “If we didn’t bootstrap, maybe I would have hired a different person,” says Isabella.

Market signal → What began as a nighttime substitute is becoming an anytime drink. NA isn’t just cutting into alcohol; it’s creating entirely new drinking occasions.

Read the room

Same product, different doors. Before you walk in, answer three questions: What problem does this buyer actually have? What language do they respond to? What’s the one thing they need to remember?

Liquor store / Specialty retail

• Problem: Their NA shelf is lacking or underperforming.

• Language: Occasion, customers cutting back.

• The 1 thing: This is what todays customers are reaching for and you don’t have it yet.

Wellness / Natural grocery

• Problem: Functional fatigue. Too many brands. Too many additives.

• Language: Clean label, sourcing, clear benefit.

• The 1 thing: Real inputs. No fillers. It does what it says.

Restaurant / Bar

• Problem: NA options are forgettable and hard to sell.

• Language: Margin, menu story, ease of explanation.

• The 1 thing: It’s easy to describe, margins cleanly, and gives the table something worth ordering.

National retail

• Problem: Shelf space is scarce, velocity decides survival.

• Language: Reorder rate, customer profile, proof of demand.

• The 1 thing: It moves. It reorders. It earns its space.
  
  

The CPG industry has no shortage of advice. Everyone has a take on your packaging, your retail strategy, your raise.

The problem isn’t access to opinions. It’s that most of it comes from observers, not operators.

Jordan Buckner is the latter. He founded a brand, scaled it, shut it down, then built Foodbevy as the resource he wished existed when he was starting out. Today, he hosts the Startup to Scale podcast and curates a quarterly Foodbevy Insider Box.

Few people see the full system. We ask him what it looks like from every seat at the table.

As a CPG expert

My name is Jordan Buckner, I’m the founder of Foodbevy, a community of food and beverage founders helping go from start to scale. I’m a previous CPG founder myself and just on a mission to help everyone with a CPG brand build a successful business.

Where are founders wasting their time and energy?

Trade shows can be helpful, but be clear on what you want to get out of them. Distributor and regional shows might actually be better for getting real sales orders. Larger shows can be helpful if you want to just get in front of as many people as possible. Know that you have control over your destiny and you need to take that control instead of just letting things happen to you.

What “best practice” in CPG is overrated?

Doing everything yourself. As a founder in the industry, work with your competitors. I’ve heard of products that might seem like competitors, but the founders actually talk and share best practices because if they’re building in a new category, they need to build it category together. They can both be successful from doing that.

As a CPG founder

I started my energy bar company, TeaSquares, at the end of 2015. CPG is especially challenging because you have physical products that expire and because it’s food, everyone has an opinion because everyone eats.

What’s the biggest mistake you made building your own brand?

Trying to make something that was so different and so unique in the market. We were trying to create a moat around our competitors, but ended up creating a moat around our customers too. They couldn’t understand what our product did. We were caffeinated energy bars, but we changed so much about form, function, texture, and taste that new people couldn’t envision it in their lives.

The lesson is to find an existing problem, iterate on it, find one key differentiator, and sell that point hard. With TeaSquares, I should have positioned it as a protein bar plus tea; not some weird energy tea bar nobody was looking for

f you had to launch a brand tomorrow, what category would you go into?

There’s a ton of opportunity in what I call “permissible indulgence.” Better-for-you sodas, chocolates, desserts… categories that have been villainized by sugar, where founders are adding low-sugar alternatives or functionality. Think the Poppis and Olipops of the world. Any category where you can bring permissible indulgence is really, really big right now.

As a CPG community builder

One of my biggest challenges running a brand was not knowing what was coming next. We'd land Whole Foods and think, “How do we even service this retailer?” I felt constantly behind. Foodbevy evolved to be the resource that fixes that. We started with founder-to-founder connection, but now it's become how-to information.

What questions do you hear over and over?

Definitely the two biggest ones are how do I find money to grow my business? Everyone’s constantly seeking investment. And the second is working with distributors, particularly KeHE and UNFI, on how to navigate the challenges and build a successful business. Because they really are the gatekeepers to a lot of the natural channel retailers.

What’s the biggest debate in CPG right now?

It’s really around how to approach going to market. That balance between e-commerce and retail business. Small regional stores or large national? Building the brand and building the business.

A lot of people say don’t go too fast because you’re going to make a lot of mistakes early on. But then, I’ve heard others say that you want to get into national retail early so that you can tell if your product is actually solving a problem.

As a podcast host

The Startup to Scale podcast started as a way to share inspiring founder stories. We're over 250 episodes now and have talked about every topic in CPG. But we still keep finding new stories to tell.

Who’s a guest episode all founders should listen to?

Luke Abbott of Vdriven. He ran a distribution business that was sold to KeHE, now does consulting heavily focused on Sprouts and their innovation set. He knows exactly what he’s talking about and shares everything openly.

What’s something you’ve learned that significantly changed how you see CPG?

There’s no set path. Manufacturing, distribution, retail, e-commerce… There’s a lot of decisions to be made and it’s not straightforward. it’s really important to forge your own path as a founder. Are you great at one-on-one relationships? Go talk to investors. Great at building community? Try crowdfunding. Lean into the avenue that your personality, especially as a founder, fits best in because that’s what’s going to come naturally to you.

As an Insider Box curator

The Insider Box is a quarterly discovery box with the latest new food and beverage products delivered to your door. I built it because I was talking to founders all day and never actually trying their products. Now I do. Some I love, some aren’t for me, but that’s the point.

We search for brands winning local awards and pitch competitions, taste everything with the team, and ship our picks to insiders across the country.

Any surprising feedback from the boxes so far?

Some people call it a trade show in a box. Teams buy it for remote employees and do quarterly tastings together, talking about which ones they like or think are going to be the next big thing.

One of the things I always say about with our Insider Boxes is it allows you to get your products into the rooms where decisions are made. A lot of our recipients are the ones judging pitch competitions or on the board for selection committees. You want them to be your fans.

What patterns are you seeing in new products?

Protein is obviously one of the big areas. But I’m also seeing what I call “the diversification of cultural American foods,” where it’s beyond the ethnic aisle. Second and third generation Americans bringing Asian, Latin, African flavors into familiar form factors. For example, Keya’s does Indian flavors on a potato chip. These aren’t ethnic foods anymore. They’re just American foods.