consumer-packaged-goods
(39)
poppi
Poppi turned a kitchen experiment into a brightly colored argument that soda could belong in the wellness aisle. PepsiCo's $1.95 billion acquisition shows how valuable that argument became - and how the brand now has to prove it can travel.
Peet's Coffee
The Berkeley roaster taught America to expect more from a cup. Sixty years later, its harder trick is carrying that craft from a hand-roasted batch to grocery aisles, subscriptions and airplane trays without turning it into mere nostalgia.
Mama's Creations
The only publicly traded company built entirely around the deli case turned a grandmother's Sunday sauce into a $171 million bet on the least glamorous corner of the grocery store.
Bimbo Bakeries USA
Bimbo Bakeries USA is the company hiding in plain sight across the bread aisle. Its advantage is not one famous loaf, but a portfolio of old brands tied to a daily system for baking, forecasting and delivering freshness at national scale.
ePac Flexible Packaging
Most packaging plants reward scale. ePac built its network for the awkward stage before scale - when a growing brand needs five flavors, sharp graphics and another shipment before the old industry can finish making plates.
Mammoth Brands
The company born to fix razor shopping now wants to build the next enduring house of consumer brands. Its wager is that direct customer insight, retail reach and patient operating infrastructure can scale five distinct labels without sanding off what made them matter.
Church & Dwight Co., Inc.
It started with baking soda in 1846. Nearly two centuries later, the quiet New Jersey company behind Arm & Hammer has turned buying other people's brands into a business worth more than $25 billion.
Smithfield Foods
Smithfield Foods is betting that the future of pork belongs to the company that can control the animal, the factory, the brand and the refrigerated truck - then make all four work as one.
McCormick & Company
The red-capped spice jar is only half the business. Behind it sits a global flavor laboratory that helps supermarkets, food factories and restaurant kitchens decide what the next bite should taste like.
Jennifer Bentz
Jennifer Bentz spent three decades learning how shoppers reveal what they want. Now Utz Brands’ chief marketing officer is turning that habit of attention into a playbook for a century-old snack company: sharpen the portfolio, test early, and let evidence earn the next bet.
Utz Brands, Inc.
A home-kitchen chip business became a $1.4 billion snack portfolio by preserving the peculiar loyalties of regional brands. Now Utz is betting that tighter factories, wider shelves and a new global partner can make local crunch travel.
Sean Goldsmith
Sean Goldsmith is the co-founder and CEO of The Zero Proof, an Atlanta-based platform for premium non-alcoholic wine, beer, and spirits. What started in 2019 as a review blog he ran with childhood friend Trevor Wolfe after both took a break from drinking has grown into one of the largest curators and retailers in the adult non-alcoholic category, with 400+ products, owned brands like Lapo's and Saint Viviana, and a Series A backed by Asahi.
William White
William White is the Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart, a role he has held since May 2020. He leads customer insights, brand strategy, and full-funnel marketing for the world's largest retailer, and is credited with steering Walmart's marketing through the pandemic, launching Walmart+, and building the retailer into a more culturally and emotionally connected brand. Before Walmart he spent seven years at Target and nearly nine years at Coca-Cola, where he scaled Coke Zero into a billion-dollar brand. He ranked #4 on Forbes' 2024 list of the World's Most Influential CMOs.
Oxipital AI
Oxipital AI is a Bedford, Massachusetts company building AI-enabled machine vision systems for food processing, agriculture and consumer-goods manufacturing. Emerging in 2024 from the rebrand of Soft Robotics after that company sold its gripper hardware line to Schmalz, Oxipital AI now centers on its V-CORTX vision platform and VX2 hardware, which use synthetic data and computer vision to handle quality inspection, foreign-object detection, yield optimization and vision-guided robotic picking in high-variability production lines.
Performance Kitchen | Food Is Medicine®
Performance Kitchen | Food Is Medicine® is an Austin, Texas company that produces chef-crafted, dietitian-approved Medically Tailored Meals designed to help manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and renal disease. Founded in 2011 as a healthy consumer food brand sold in more than 10,000 retail stores, the company pivoted to lead the Food Is Medicine movement, delivering ready-to-eat meals that are increasingly paid for by health insurers and delivered directly to members' homes. Led by Chairman and CEO Mark Walker, a CPA and founder of athlete-backed Dugout Ventures, Performance Kitchen operates nationwide production and distribution reaching roughly 98% of the U.S.
NorCal Cannabis Company
NorCal Cannabis Company is a vertically integrated, seed-to-sale cannabis operator based in Northern California. Founded in 2014, it grew out of the region's long, pre-legalization cannabis culture into a licensed holding company spanning cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, a portfolio of consumer brands, and retail dispensaries. The company scaled revenue from roughly $2M to over $70M in a few years and raised more than $50M in capital, positioning itself as one of California's more compliant, operationally mature cannabis businesses.
Wholly Moly!
Wholly Moly! (好哩) is a health-food brand built on a simple, slightly stubborn premise: that oat bran - the fibrous outer casing of the oat that most milling throws away - deserves to be the center of a meal rather than a byproduct. Founded by Claire Cao Fang and operating between Silicon Valley and Shanghai, the company turns North American oats into instant porridge, hot cereal, and lightweight-packaged oat drinks aimed at younger Chinese consumers looking to swap refined white rice for whole grains. It raised roughly US$10 million in a Series A round led by Adrian Cheng's C Ventures in 2020.
Butterball
Butterball is the largest producer of turkey products in the United States, selling more than 1 billion pounds of turkey a year from its headquarters in Garner, North Carolina. Jointly owned by Seaboard Corporation and Maxwell Farms, the company makes whole turkeys, turkey cuts, ground turkey, turkey bacon, sausage and deli meats for grocery, foodservice and export - and runs the Turkey Talk-Line, the Thanksgiving cooking hotline that has answered questions from anxious cooks every holiday season since 1981.
G.O.A.T. Fuel, Inc.
G.O.A.T. Fuel is a Plano, Texas-based sports energy drink company co-founded by Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerry Rice and his daughter Jaqui Rice Gold and son-in-law Trevion Gold. Billed as the first Black-owned energy drink in national retail, the health-forward brand blends natural caffeine, electrolytes, BCAAs, antioxidants and cordyceps mushroom extract, with no added sugar or artificial sweeteners. Launched in January 2020, it has grown from a direct-to-consumer Shopify shop to more than 10,000 retail doors including Target, Walmart, Publix, H-E-B and 7-Eleven, and serves as the official energy drink of the Los Angeles Lakers and Chicago Sky.
Jaqui Rice Gold
Jaqui Rice Gold is the co-founder and CEO of G.O.A.T. Fuel, a health-forward sports energy drink she launched in January 2020 with her father, NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice, and her husband Trevion Gold. Built as the first Black-owned energy drink to lean on cordyceps mushrooms instead of sugar and synthetic stimulants, the brand grew from a pandemic-era direct-to-consumer scramble into a nationally distributed product in tens of thousands of retail doors, with sponsorship deals spanning the Los Angeles Lakers and the WNBA's Chicago Sky.
Jerome Tse
Jerome Tse is the founder and CEO of Berri Organics (also branded Berri Pro), a Southern California maker of certified-organic, plant-based hydration drinks. A Cornell-trained Hotelie and former competitive rower, he built the world's first plant-based organic fitness beverage, Berri Fit, from a dorm-kitchen prototype into a national brand. Its follow-up, Berri Lyte, an organic electrolyte solution, now anchors the company and sells in roughly 2,000 stores including Whole Foods, CVS, Target, Wegmans and Sprouts. Tse was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2019, and the company has raised more than $7 million.
Bedrock Analytics
Bedrock Analytics is an Oakland-based B2B SaaS company that turns the messy syndicated sales data CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands buy from sources like NielsenIQ and Circana into clear, automated selling stories. Built 'by CPG people for CPG people,' its cloud platform harmonizes retail data and uses a multi-model AI stack (ChatGPT, Claude, Llama) to generate visualizations, insights, and AI-driven sales decks - helping brand sales teams win shelf space and category reviews. The company tracks more than $100 billion in CPG sales across 80+ categories every month.
Sundia Corporation
Sundia Corporation is an Orinda, California-based plant-based snacking company best known for its True Fruit ready-to-eat refrigerated fruit cups and True Chia coconut-milk chia pots. Founded in 2004 around the unsexy genius of better watermelons, Sundia has spent two decades turning produce-aisle staples into branded, shelf-stable convenience without the syrupy compromises of the canned-fruit era.
Daniel Medvene
Daniel Medvene is the CEO and co-founder of Quantum Energy Squares, a Santa Monica plant-based energy bar company he started in 2019 with partner Leah Marquez. After years of relying on pre-workout powders and gallons of coffee that left him 'wired but tired,' Medvene set out to engineer a cleaner source of all-day energy. He and Marquez ran more than 200 recipe iterations with a sports dietitian, food scientist, and pastry chef before landing on a bar powered by organic green coffee and balanced plant-based macros. The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2021 from a roster of pro athletes, became the official energy bar of the IRONMAN and Rock 'n' Roll Marathon series, and now sells nationally through Whole Foods and Sprouts.
Rosa Li
Rosa Li is the founder and CEO of wildwonder, the sparkling beverage brand she built around the herbal tonics her grandmother brewed in Beijing. A Stanford MBA and former private equity investor, she traded Wall Street spreadsheets for a homemade carbonation rig made from a beer keg, launched in 2020, and landed a deal with DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on Shark Tank in 2023. wildwonder now reaches 3,000-plus retailers across 40 states and has sold millions of cans.
Copper Cow Coffee
Copper Cow Coffee is a California-based specialty coffee company reimagining traditional Vietnamese coffee for the American market. Founded by Vietnamese-American entrepreneur Debbie Wei Mullin, it sells single-serve pour-over pouches, flavored ground coffees, and latte kits paired with sweetened condensed milk creamers, all made with real ingredients and beans sourced from organic, sustainable Vietnamese farms where growers are paid roughly double the market rate. The women- and AAPI-owned brand has grown from a garage operation into a product sold in thousands of retail stores nationwide.
Abbot's
Abbot's (formerly Abbot's Butcher) is a Costa Mesa, California maker of premium plant-rich proteins built from 100% real food ingredients - pea protein, vegetables, herbs, spices, extra virgin olive oil and vinegars. Founded in 2017 by Kerry Song, the brand makes plant-based 'Chorizo,' Ground 'Beef,' Chopped and Fajita Chick'n, Italian 'Sausage' and high-protein veggie burgers that are free from the top nine allergens, seed oils, gums, preservatives and artificial flavors. With distribution in thousands of retail and foodservice locations including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Publix and Target, Abbot's positions clean, craveable plant food under a 'food as medicine' philosophy.
Bonafide Provisions
Bonafide Provisions is a Carlsbad, California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth founded in 2011 by clinical nutritionist Sharon Brown and her chef husband Reb. Born after bone broth helped heal their young son's chronic infections, the company became the first USDA Organic frozen broth on the market and has since expanded into shelf-stable cooking broths, paleo soups and heat-and-go keto broth cups. Its products are sold nationwide through Whole Foods, Sprouts, Kroger, Target, Publix and Walmart.
Cheers
Cheers (formerly Thrive+) is a Houston-based alcohol-related health and wellness company built around dihydromyricetin (DHM), a botanical extract studied for supporting the liver and reducing the after-effects of drinking. Founded by Brooks Powell after he encountered DHM research as a Princeton undergraduate, Cheers sells a line of science-backed supplements - Restore, Relief, Hydrate, Protect and Multi - direct-to-consumer, on Amazon, and in tens of thousands of retail locations. The company holds a U.S. patent on its formulation, has served more than a million customers, and frames its mission as helping people enjoy alcohol responsibly while protecting long-term health.
Amanda Luke
Amanda Luke is the CEO of Bonafide Provisions, the family-founded California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth. A UC Berkeley and Columbia-trained marketer, she spent years building health-and-wellness brands at Safeway and Luvo before joining the small Carlsbad broth company in 2018, rising from VP of Marketing to CEO within roughly a year. Under her leadership the women-led brand pushed beyond frozen broth into keto cups, cooking broths, and shelf-stable pantry products, positioning Bonafide as one of the most recognizable clean-label bone broth names in the United States.