consumer-packaged-goods
(23)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soupergirl
Soupergirl is a Washington, DC-area food company making fresh, plant-based, certified-kosher soups, gazpachos, and salsas. Founded in 2008 by former stand-up comedian Sara Polon and her mother Marilyn, the mother-daughter business grew from a local home-delivery operation into a brand sold in 800+ retail locations including Costco, Whole Foods, Kroger, and Amazon Fresh. Soupergirl pairs radically simple, responsibly sourced recipes with an outspoken commitment to sustainability and farmworker rights - it was the first consumer packaged goods brand certified under the Fair Food Program.