On a crowded refrigerator shelf, a shopper grants a new drink perhaps one second. The can must explain itself before the hand moves on. It needs a promise, a personality and a reason to displace whatever is already in the cart. CAVU Consumer Partners has built an investment firm around that unforgiving second.
CAVU is a consumer-focused venture and growth-equity investor founded in 2015 by Brett Thomas and Rohan Oza. Its territory is the modern version of everyday consumption: food, beverages, wellness, beauty, personal care and pet products marketed as healthier or more functional than the incumbent choice. Its public roster includes Poppi, Once Upon a Farm, Vital Proteins, The Farmer's Dog, OSEA, Thrive Market, Whoop, Hims & Hers and more than two dozen others.
The names are recognizable. The more revealing detail is organizational. Beside the investors sit brand strategists, designers, e-commerce specialists, media operators and talent recruiters. UNCOMMON, CAVU's in-house brand and growth platform, can help rename a product, redraw a package, plan an Amazon strategy, find an executive or pair a company with an influencer. For a founder, the firm is designed to behave less like a quarterly board visitor and more like a compact consumer-goods operating team.
A can is a tiny billboard
Poppi is the cleanest expression of the playbook. Allison and Stephen Ellsworth arrived on Shark Tank with Mother Beverage, an apple-cider-vinegar drink born in their kitchen and sold at farmers' markets. Oza liked the liquid and the founders. He did not like the packaging. After investing, he and CAVU's creative group helped replace the earnest glass bottle with a bright can, a short name and a proposition that sounded familiar enough to understand: prebiotic soda.
The redesign was not cosmetic housekeeping. It changed where the product belonged. Mother looked like a worthy health tonic; Poppi looked at home beside soda, in a social feed or in a celebrity's hand. CAVU's case study describes a “digital first, modern day badge brand” that shoppers would want to join and retailers would want to carry. The package made the health cue accessible without forcing the customer to study it.
“I absolutely love your liquid, but I hate the packaging.”Rohan Oza to Poppi co-founder Allison Ellsworth, recalling their first meeting
That blunt diagnosis proved valuable. Oza told Inc. that Poppi grew from roughly $60,000 in monthly sales to more than $8 million within three years. CAVU later led a $25 million financing and kept working on Amazon, e-retail, digital media and campaigns. In March 2025, PepsiCo agreed to acquire Poppi for $1.95 billion, including anticipated tax benefits. The outcome was exceptional, but the method was mundane in the best way: make the benefit legible, make the package desirable, widen distribution, then repeat.
Capital with an operating manual
CAVU's direct customers are founders and management teams, not the people buying collagen powder or dog food. Those end consumers still shape every decision. The firm looks for a product with an authentic reason to exist, early evidence that buyers care and enough category space to grow. It then sells its limited partners a familiar proposition: invest through private funds, build portfolio value and realize gains through acquisitions, secondary sales or public listings.
What differs is the work between entry and exit. The firm's published menu runs through strategy, sales, creative, marketing, digital commerce, partnerships, talent, operations, media, public relations, influencers and exit planning. Those are not decorative extras in packaged goods. A brand can have strong repeat purchase and still stall because its wholesale price is wrong, its carton disappears on shelf, its Amazon page underperforms or it hires for a company twice its actual size.
The internal structure also shortens the chain of translation. A founder does not have to explain the investment thesis to an agency, the agency's design to a retailer and the retailer's constraints back to the board. CAVU's creative team can hear the commercial problem where it starts. Chief Marketing Officer Stevie Clements leads UNCOMMON and has worked on brand evolutions for Poppi, Vital Proteins, Once Upon a Farm, ONE Bar and Native Pet. The team's case-study archive also includes OSEA, Bulletproof, Health-Ade, Kettle & Fire and SkinnyDipped.
This does not eliminate the need for outside expertise, and CAVU itself works with agency and platform partners. It does make creative judgment part of investment judgment. That matters in categories where formulas can be imitated and distribution can be rented, but a memorable identity and loyal community take years to compound.
The healthier aisle gets wider
CAVU's mission is to “democratize healthy living for all humans.” In practice, that has produced a broad definition of health. Vital Proteins sells collagen. Once Upon a Farm makes refrigerated children's nutrition. OSEA and Topicals sit in skincare. Native Pet and The Farmer's Dog address animal nutrition. Whoop measures human performance. Thrive Market connects members to groceries online. The formats differ; each asks consumers to replace an established habit with a more purposeful one.
One thesis, many aisles
CAVU's public portfolio is concentrated in products bought repeatedly. That creates frequent feedback, but also relentless competition for attention, placement and trust.
The market logic is straightforward. Large consumer companies have distribution, manufacturing relationships and balance sheets, but they often discover new tastes after smaller brands have made them culturally visible. Emerging companies can move faster, yet they struggle to finance inventory, win retail slots and maintain a coherent brand across channels. CAVU occupies the bridge: institutional capital with people who know how a case pack, paid-social campaign and grocery buyer fit together.
Its competitors include consumer specialists such as VMG Partners, L Catterton, Forerunner Ventures, Imaginary Ventures and Aria Growth Partners, as well as generalist funds and independent agencies. CAVU's distinction is not that nobody else helps. It is that the help is built into the firm's identity and staffing. The phrase “investment beyond the dollar sign” is less a slogan than a description of the product founders are being offered.
There is a tension inside that offer. A hands-on investor can bring pattern recognition, but a founder must be willing to let outsiders touch the name, package and voice that got the company started. Oza has described the Ellsworths' willingness to ask questions and compromise as a reason he invested in Poppi. The relationship worked because the original product insight survived the transformation. CAVU did not invent Allison Ellsworth's desire for a soda that fit her life; it helped millions of shoppers recognize that desire at a glance.
The same discipline applies to health claims. Better-for-you positioning creates attention and regulatory risk in equal measure. Poppi faced litigation over the way consumers interpreted its gut-health marketing and agreed to a settlement before the PepsiCo transaction. For investors and founders, the episode is a reminder that a memorable promise must remain supportable as the audience grows. Brand craft can sharpen an idea. It cannot substitute for evidence.
Proof, patience and the occasional giant check
Poppi is not the only proof point. CAVU invested $19 million in Vital Proteins in 2017 before Nestlé Health Science acquired a majority stake in 2020. It began backing Once Upon a Farm in 2018; the children's nutrition company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 2026. CAVU's SEC filings showed holdings across three funds converting into common shares at the offering. These are different exit paths, one strategic and one public, built over years rather than a campaign cycle.
The firm now has more capital to repeat the process. In February 2026, it closed CAVU Consumer Partners V with $325 million in commitments, above a $275 million target. More than 90 percent of existing limited partners returned, according to the announcement. The fund followed the Poppi transaction and arrived as governments, schools and shoppers paid closer attention to ingredients and functionality.
Recent investments show the mandate stretching without losing its center. CAVU led an $8.5 million Series A for Gymkhana Fine Foods as the London restaurant group's sauces entered U.S. grocery. It led a seed round of more than $4 million for skincare startup 4AM as its facial wipes landed in 1,745 Target stores. It also backed Crazy Mountain, a non-alcoholic beer company co-founded by George Clooney, Rande Gerber and Mike Meldman. In each case, the bet is that consumer behavior has already shifted while the defining brand remains unsettled.
The portable lesson is not “use brighter colors.” It is to remove the distance between product truth and customer understanding. Start with a problem someone can feel. Name the category in language the shopper already knows. Design for the phone and the shelf at once. Treat distribution as part of the brand, because being unavailable is its own message. Recruit for the next constraint, not the last victory. And build the company so that a strategic buyer is an option, not the only rescue.
CAVU's aviation-derived name expands to “ceiling and visibility unlimited.” Consumer markets rarely offer either. Visibility is expensive, ceilings arrive quickly, and a hit can still be one retailer reset away from trouble. The firm's contribution is more practical than the name suggests: put investors and operators at the same table, then make the can earn its second.