Hailey Swartz

🚀 This Week in CPG: AI, Alt-Turkeys, and Cauliflower Crusts Thanksgiving on a budget: Shoppers swap brand-name birds for bargain feasts. With grocery prices still high, most consumers are scaling back Thanksgiving celebrations, buying private-label products, hosting smaller gatherings, and seeking retailer meal deals under $40 from stores like Walmart, Aldi, and Lidl. Walmart supercharges stores with AI, and shoppers are spending 25% more. Walmart is expanding its partnership with OpenAI beyond e-commerce, introducing AI-powered in-store tools that let shoppers find deals, locate items, and build curated lists through its app, and it’s already driving higher spending. TikTok Shop eats up E-Commerce. Food is fast becoming TikTok Shop’s hottest new category, with sales more than doubling year over year as major CPG brands and indie favorites alike turn viral moments into shopping conversions. Cymbiotika raises $25M after hitting $150M in revenue. San Diego–based wellness brand Cymbiotika has raised a $25 million seed round after scaling to $150 million in annual revenue without prior funding, backed by an all-star roster including The Weeknd, Post Malone, and Daymond John. Urban Farmer acquires CAULIPOWER to build a frozen food powerhouse.  Urban Farmer, backed by Paine Schwartz Partners, has acquired CAULIPOWER, the leading gluten-free, cauliflower-crust pizza brand, in a move that merges top-tier manufacturing with a category-defining better-for-you brand. 🔍 What to watch: As consumers lean into value, wellness, and convenience, expect CPG brands to double down on AI-driven personalization, social commerce experiments, and better-for-you innovation to stay top of mind (and in shoppers’ carts) this holiday season.

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The reality is: 80% of new CPG products fail before they reach a sustainable level of revenue. That number comes up constantly in my conversations with brand founders and PE operators. But in 30 years of branded and PL food manufacturing, I've come to believe the statistic is actually optimistic. Most products don't fail because the idea was wrong. They fail because the path from concept to retail shelf is brutal, expensive, and unforgiving of mistakes made before a product / brand has the revenue to absorb them. The first co-packer minimum order far exceeds demand consuming critical cash. The $800K piece of equipment that locks you into one format and the 12 month wait for delivery. The six-month production "start-up" delay while the market moves on. Those are execution problems. And they're mostly preventable. I'm curious — for those of you who've navigated early-stage commercialization, what was the most expensive mistake you didn't see coming?

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The mistake I see in CPG is launching into a category that’s already in structural decline, like ambient spoonables. The brands that still dominate that space didn’t emerge in the internet era, and they weren’t built to compete in it. They didn’t enter the category through modern channels — they were scaled through national magazine advertising and household cookbook culture, decades before digital mattered. Most of those brands were later acquired by large food companies for relatively small sums who invested into the marketing and distro . The original founders often never saw meaningful upside. The value was captured by the corporations that owned the distribution and the media reach. These are legacy incumbents resting on long-standing shelf placement and institutional familiarity — not modern brands trying to build from zero. And when the category itself is shrinking, incumbents don’t lose because challengers show up. Challengers lose because the category is contracting. Food Chemistry innovation is super interesting and has a lot of potential but re-purposing it, in a healthier format, and entering the shelf where the original innovation is still alive is not a good idea (in contracting categories). If you do want to enter that category, it’s not impossible you just need to approach it differently. Focus on pack size and flavor choices that carry cultural meaning for a very specific audience, not the mass market. Start locally, with a defined community where the product naturally fits. Think: a small showroom, café, or restaurant placement as a living test market. Let real people in a real environment shape the product before you scale. Build from the inside out, not the outside in. For example in 2017 I opened a small cafe selling latte’s with no caffeine or coffee. One of them was called a Unicorn Latte, Amethyst Latte…sold in a little cup. Those were just the products, the experience and context of our mission had nothing to do with the product. We wanted people to connect with their intuition and experience childlike wonder when visiting us bc our actual mission shaped in 2013 years prior was just to leave people and places better than we found them. We were NOT raising big money or saying we were going to compete with Starbucks or Folgers. BigCo took note and tried replicating our product so we were left with no choice but to lawyer up and defend our point of view, which ended amicably. It took off and after 5 -7 years we might have a chance at entering the market in a more commercialized format. Final note: Entrepreneurs are athletes not in a sport but in community. We aren’t sitting in an office pushing white paper and negotiating contracts. Although eventually you’ll do that a little more as time passes. The biggest opportunity in CPG is simple but complex innovation snack/drink that is healltier, that is prepped in 1-2 minutes or pre cooked restaurant staples like chicken and pork aligned with a culture prep 4-6 min.

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The U.S. wine category is shrinking. Bonanza Cabernet keeps growing anyway. That's worth looking at if you're in any business where the category is moving against you. U.S. wine sales fell roughly 6% in 2024 (SipSource). Wine Intelligence (acquired by IWSR) forecasts volume dropping at -2% CAGR through 2027, faster than the -1% pace from 2017 to 2022. Regular wine drinkers aged 21-34 fell from 29% of the base to 23% between 2019 and 2023. The board decks all have the same sad category chart right now. And then a $20 Cabernet from the Caymus Vineyards family just keeps taking share. According to Impact Databank, Bonanza launched at 131,000 cases in the U.S. in 2020 and has added 60,000 to 80,000 cases every year since. Double-digit volume growth. The category was falling the whole time. We dug into how. Four things stood out. 1. They priced against the occasion, not the shelf position. Bonanza lives where a weeknight steak dinner lives. Around $20. The slot was crowded but no one held it with real winemaking credibility behind them. Silicon Valley Bank's 2025 State of the Wine Industry report found the top quartile of premium wineries grew revenue 22% in 2024. The value-with-credibility window is open. Has been for a while. 2. They borrowed trust rather than building it cold. Chuck Wagner's name is on it. Decades of Caymus equity, spent carefully on a value tier without pulling the flagship down with it. That's genuinely hard to do. Heritage brands tend to hoard the halo or blow it. Bonanza did neither. 3. They dropped the rules the buyer never cared about. No vintage on the label. No single appellation. They blend across California lots to hit a consistent taste profile every time. Wine people were unhappy about this. Buyers at Costco Wholesale and Total Wine & More were not. The person grabbing a bottle on a Tuesday just wanted it to taste the same as last time. Bonanza built for that person. The consistency thing is probably the most transferable idea here for anyone building a consumer brand outside wine. 4. Supply structure did the real work. Multi-region sourcing means they buy fruit where the value sits each year. Cost structure moves with the market. A Napa-only brand at that price can't follow. The wine world sells vintage variation as romance. The grocery shopper reads it as inconsistency. Bonanza picked a side and moved on. A declining category and a growing brand at the same time. It's not rare, actually. For any team staring at a flat or shrinking market: the category number is an average. Find the occasion that wasn't priced for. Use trust you already have. Ignore the rules your customer never knew existed. What brand in your category is pulling this off? Drop it below. If this is useful, follow me on LinkedIn. We do this regularly across growth, transformation, and value creation. #WineIndustry #BrandGrowth #MarketStrategy #ConsumerInsights

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Whole Foods Market's strategy is now operating on two distinct, powerful frequencies: Experience and Automation. The simultaneous expansion of "Sip & Spin" and the rollout of the Automated Micro-Fulfillment Center (MFC) reveal the comprehensive nature of the Amazon/Whole Foods latest master plan. Here is how both fit into the long-term strategy: - The Experiential Win: By adding features like "Sip & Spin", WFM converts a transactional grocery trip into an experiential destination. This increases dwell time, boosts customer loyalty, and drives higher basket sizes—a crucial way for physical retail to compete with pure-play e-commerce. - The Fulfillment Win: The new "store-within-a-store" and MFC are a logistical game-changer. They merge Whole Foods' organic inventory with Amazon's national brand inventory under one roof. The physical store is instantly leveraged as a highly efficient, automated e-commerce fulfillment hub, enabling faster, cheaper online delivery and pickup by combining two previously separate product universes. The net result? The physical Whole Foods store is no longer just a store. It is both a Neighborhood Hub that builds brand affinity and a High-Speed E-commerce Warehouse that enables Amazon to dominate online grocery fulfillment. #WholeFoods #Amazon #RetailStrategy #GroceryTech #ECommerce #SupplyChain #FoodIndustry #CPG #GroceryRetail #Supermarket #Fulfillment

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