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The $6.7 Billion Company Hiding in Your Cleaning Closet
Clorox began with five men, $500 and a bottle of industrial bleach. More than a century later, its real product is a portfolio of small, repeatable solutions to messy everyday life - now with Purell at the center of a sharper health-and-hygiene bet.
The Family That Taught American Grocers to Stock Queso Fresco
Cacique started in 1973 with a mother's cheese recipe and a father selling it door to door out of a car cooler. Fifty years on it is the country's top Hispanic cheese, crema and chorizo brand - stocked in roughly four of every five U.S. grocery stores.
The Curvy Bottle That Convinced America to Pour Almonds in Its Coffee
Founded by the man who once sold Odwalla to Coca-Cola, Califia Farms turned a citrus packinghouse and a strangely shaped bottle into a plant-milk empire pouring in about 30 countries.
Mondelēz International
The company that turned Oreo, Cadbury and Toblerone into a $38.5 billion snacking empire has one job: be the thing you reach for between meals - in 150 countries, at any hour.
GT's Living Foods
GT Dave started bottling fermented tea in his parents' kitchen as a teenager. Three decades later he owns 100% of the company that created America's kombucha aisle - and has turned down every buyer who came knocking.
The Campbell's Company
The company that taught America to recognize a soup can is betting its next chapter on a much bigger pantry - from Rao's sauce to Goldfish crackers. Its hardest task is not escaping its past, but making that past useful again.
General Mills
It began as one flour mill on the Mississippi in 1866. A century and a half later, General Mills fills roughly nine in ten American pantries - and is betting its next chapter on cereal, snacks and, increasingly, the dog bowl.
Vita Coco
How two guys and a bar-room question about homesickness became a public company that pours roughly half of America's coconut water - and files its social mission in the same drawer as its earnings.
Nature's Path Foods
Forty years ago a berry-farmer's son turned his father's one-line advice into a cereal company. Nature's Path is still family-run, still refuses to sell, and still puts organic breakfast on tables in more than 40 countries.
Bel Group
How a Jura cheesemaker became a 120-country snacking machine - and why a 160-year-old family business is now spending it on regenerative farms and lab-made dairy.
Kenvue
Spun out of Johnson & Johnson with Tylenol, Neutrogena and Band-Aid in tow, Kenvue became the biggest name in consumer health almost overnight - then spent 2025 fending off activists, a CEO exit, an autism-claim firestorm and a $48.7 billion buyout.
Unilever
The 96-year-old owner of Dove, Hellmann's and Knorr just cut its ice cream loose and bet everything on 30 brands. Inside the biggest reset in modern consumer goods.
Haleon
The company you have never heard of makes the toothpaste, painkillers and vitamins you buy without thinking. Here is how GSK's cast-off brands became a £30 billion bet on self-care.
Akash Raju
He made Forbes 30 Under 30 for a company he then threw away. The second version of Glimpse - AI that fights retail's most boring, most expensive fee - just raised $35 million.
Larry Nusbaum
Larry Nusbaum is a consumer-products and retail turnaround executive who serves as President and Chief Marketing Officer of Work 'N Gear, the Mid-Atlantic and New England workwear, footwear and healthcare-apparel chain, and as an operating partner at Dark Alpha Capital. Over two decades he has run companies as CEO, CMO and COO across housewares, electronics, personal care, apparel and fitness, most visibly at Ronco, the Ron Popeil gadget brand he bought out of bankruptcy with Marlin Equity Partners in 2007 and steered from a reported $7.5 million annual loss to roughly $4 million in profit on about $30 million of 2009 sales. He has also led Midwest Trading Group, where he acquired the phone-accessory brand TYLT in December 2023, and restructured the artisan-goods company GlobeIn into a subscription model. At Work 'N Gear he took a 25-year-old, roughly $40 million retailer through a 2025 Chapter 11 filing, a DIP financing, a shrink from 38 stores to 26, and a April 2026 asset sale to a family-office-backed operator that repaid the lender in full and set up a relaunch of the e-commerce platform and up to ten stores.
Dana Kim
Dana Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a New York-based product intelligence platform that modernizes in-home product testing for consumer brands. A former qualitative market researcher who spent years collecting insights the slow way - standing in stores with paper surveys for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike - she went to Wharton for an MBA, met co-founder Ethan Kellough, and built a technology-driven alternative that pairs a proprietary consumer community with logistics automation and AI analytics. Founded in 2020, Highlight has raised more than $30 million and works with brands including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. Kim has been named to GreenBook's 2022 Future List and Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
EthonAI
EthonAI (now branded Ethon) is a Zurich-based industrial AI company, spun out of ETH Zurich in 2021, that builds a Manufacturing Analytics System for factories. Its no-code platform layers on top of existing factory data sources to detect visual defects, monitor processes and run autonomous root cause analysis, using causal AI to explain what drives production variation. Customers including Siemens, Lindt & Sprüngli, Bosch and Roche use it to cut quality losses by up to 50% and raise productivity while keeping engineers in the decision loop.
Glimpse
Glimpse is an AI-native platform that automates deduction management for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. Its AI agents log into retailer portals, gather scattered documents, classify and validate deductions against internal data like promotion calendars and supply-chain records, then file disputes and recover cash that brands would otherwise write off. Founded in 2024 by three Purdue classmates after pivoting from an Airbnb product-placement startup, Glimpse works with 200+ brands and retail partners including Suave, Chapstick and Lemon Perfect, and raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in March 2026.
Gotham Greens
Gotham Greens is a Brooklyn-born indoor farming and fresh food company that grows pesticide-free leafy greens and herbs year-round in a national network of high-tech hydroponic greenhouses. Founded in 2009, it opened the first commercial rooftop greenhouse in the United States and has since scaled to more than a dozen facilities across nine states, producing roughly 100 million heads of lettuce a year using up to 90% less water and 97% less land than conventional field farming. Beyond greens, the company sells branded salad kits, dressings, dips and cooking sauces to more than 6,500 retail, restaurant and foodservice locations nationwide.
Mike's Hot Honey
Mike's Hot Honey is a Brooklyn-based food brand that makes honey infused with chili peppers - a sweet-and-spicy condiment for pizza, fried chicken, cheese and more. Founded by Mike Kurtz in 2010 after he discovered chili-infused honey at a Brazilian pizzeria, the company pioneered the hot honey category in the United States and now sells through more than 30,000 retail locations and 3,000-plus restaurants. Led by CEO Matt Beaton since 2015, it has grown from a one-man operation at Paulie Gee's pizzeria into a nationally distributed brand with an estimated $40 million in annual revenue.
NotCo
NotCo is a Chilean food-tech company that uses a proprietary artificial intelligence platform called Giuseppe to reverse-engineer animal-based foods and recreate them from plants. Founded in 2015 in Santiago, it makes consumer brands such as NotMilk, NotBurger, NotMayo and NotIceCream, sold across the Americas, and licenses its AI to other food companies. NotCo became Chile's first unicorn in 2021 and runs a plant-based joint venture with Kraft Heinz in North America.
Stay AI
Stay AI is a Shopify-native subscription and retention platform that helps direct-to-consumer brands turn subscriptions into a growth channel rather than a simple billing tool. Founded in 2021 by ecommerce operators Gina Perrelli, Pierson Krass, and Taylor Cawiezell, the platform pairs a no-code, marketer-friendly customer portal with AI-driven churn prediction, smart dunning, cancellation surveys, and A/B testing. More than 500 brands - including OLIPOP, Magic Spoon, Momofuku, Lemme, and ARMRA - use Stay AI to reduce churn, lift recurring revenue, and increase customer lifetime value.
Tastewise
Tastewise is an agentic AI platform built exclusively for the food and beverage industry. It combines proprietary consumer panels, market trackers, and trillions of real-time food signals with AI agents trained on food behavior to help brands spot trends earlier, validate new products, win retail and menu placement, and automate marketing and sales. Its tools are used by a large share of the world's leading F&B companies, including Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Kroger.
Gina Perrelli
Gina Perrelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands that treats subscriptions as a performance channel rather than a payment mechanism. A self-described 'retention girlie' with over a decade in lifecycle marketing, she previously co-founded the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and now leads a company that helps hundreds of DTC brands - including Olipop, Vita Coco, and Momofuku - reduce churn and grow subscriber revenue. Stay AI raised $15.1M in Series A funding and has expanded through acquisitions of RetentionEngine and Bellwethr.
Eclipse Foods
Eclipse Foods is an Alameda, California food-technology company making plant-based dairy products - ice cream and, since 2025, a non-dairy whole milk - engineered to be molecule-for-molecule indistinguishable from conventional dairy. Founded in 2019 by chef Thomas Bowman and food-systems entrepreneur Aylon Steinhart, Eclipse uses a proprietary blend of non-GMO plants like cassava, corn, potato and fava rather than nuts, soy, coconut or oats to recreate dairy's taste, texture and functionality. It sells through retail (Amazon, Whole Foods and regional grocers) and to foodservice partners including scoop shops, diners and burger chains.
Ocean's Halo
Ocean's Halo is a California-based natural foods company that grows, harvests and packages organic, ocean-to-table Asian-inspired products - from its signature trayless seaweed snacks to frozen kimbap, broths, noodle bowls and sauces. Founded in 2011 as New Frontier Foods by a group of former finance and tech executives, the brand farms its own organic seaweed in a protected bay off South Korea and sells through roughly 10,000 retail doors including Costco, Whole Foods, Walmart and Target, pairing plant-based nutrition with plastic-free, trayless packaging and a 1% for the Planet conservation pledge.
Renewal Mill
Renewal Mill is an Oakland-based next-generation ingredients company that upcycles the fiber- and protein-rich byproducts of food manufacturing - like okara (soymilk pulp), oat milk pulp, corn fines and off-spec green bananas - into premium gluten-free flours and baking mixes. Founded in 2016 by Claire Schlemme and Caroline Cotto, the women-owned benefit corporation sells both direct-to-consumer and as a B2B ingredient supplier, aiming to keep 100% of what we grow feeding people.
Rivalz Snacks
Rivalz is a Sonoma, California snack company making oven-baked, dual-textured stuffed snacks built on yellow pea protein. Each one-ounce serving packs 8g of plant protein, 4g of fiber, no added sugar and seven essential vitamins and minerals, wrapped in nostalgic flavors like Late Night Pizza, Extra Chedda' Mac and Spicy Street Taco. Founded in 2022 by a team of CPG veterans, food scientists and UC Davis researchers and led by former Marine aviator Peter Barrick, Rivalz aims to make genuinely nutritious snacking taste like the junk food people already crave - and to sell it at mainstream prices.
Taika
Taika is a San Francisco-based functional beverage company making ready-to-drink canned coffees and matcha lattes infused with adaptogens and functional mushrooms - ingredients like L-theanine, ashwagandha, and lion's mane - meant to deliver focused energy without the jitters or crash. Founded in 2019 by former Facebook engineer Michael Sharon and world-class barista Kalle Freese, the brand is plant-based and sweetened with monk fruit for zero added sugar. Its tagline, 'Feel Inspired, Not Wired,' captures the pitch: caffeine with calm, sold direct-to-consumer online and through retail.
Marlow Nickell
Marlow Nickell is co-founder and CEO of Grocery TV, the largest in-store retail media network for U.S. grocery. From a University of Texas physics degree and a stint at McKinsey, he took the unusual path of writing the original software himself before running the company that now puts screens in over 6,500 grocery stores reaching roughly 95 million shoppers.