the Joshua Schall Audio Experience

Is Simply Good Foods’ Turnaround Strategy Working? 📉 (Atkins, QUEST, & OWYN Deep Dive) The Simply Good Foods Company just dropped its Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings report, and the results reveal a massive divide between its portfolio brands. While one legacy brand is severely dragging down performance, others are battling product quality issues or holding onto explosive growth in unexpected categor...

The Secret Weapon Powering Peter Rahal’s New Food Empire 🤫🧪Peter Rahal is aggressively tearing up the traditional CPG playbook. While most modern food brands follow a predictable loop...launch a trendy product, scale online via performance marketing, and hope for an acquisition by a legacy CPG conglomerate, Peter Rahal is engineering a quiet structural revolution to dominate the future of nutrit...

Stop clinging to that "pristine" brand image, as the old CPG playbook of polished, sterile messaging is fundamentally broken because it ignores how trust actually works today. Modern consumers don’t want abstract brand voices…they want believable like seeing how your product fits into a messy, real, lived-in life! Arguably, this is why social commerce is exploding…as it’s more real life...

Why Barebells Just Bought Its Contract Manufacturer (The Protein Bar Wars) 🚀 The protein bar market is trapped in a "sea of sameness," as most brands use the exact same ingredients and contract manufacturing cloned recipes. Except for Barebells, which completely disrupted the global market by making protein bars that taste like actual candy. In this video, I break down the massive strat...

Is This the End of Vitamin Pills? Are you tired of swallowing giant supplement capsules every single day? You’re not alone. Nearly 40% of adults suffer from "pill fatigue," defined as the physical and psychological burnout of maintaining a complex, multi-bottle daily routine. In this video, I'll dive into the radical shift toward what I dubbed "Frictionless Wellness." Next-...

Here’s something I told a client, but they couldn’t come to grips with it. The "anything-goes" science foods era is dying…and society is firmly heading into an Age of “Sensory Grounding.” Texture has become a personality trait. I’m talking about "texture-maxxing" everything…you know freeze-dried, crispy, chewy, and velvety mashups. Also, in this economy, consumers want quality...

Is Your Supplement Brand Looking at TikTok Shop All Wrong? Most supplement and health brands treat TikTok Shop as an isolated sales channel. They look at direct dollars spent versus immediate revenue out, and if the margins aren’t instantly positive, they call it a failure. That legacy mindset is costing brands millions in lost growth. In this video, I'll break down why a performance-siloed vi...

Trump promised a manufacturing boom, but the truth thus far has been arguably much messier (at least across the CPG industry). On the one hand, CPG giants like Mars, Chobani, and Coca-Cola announced they’d spend billions on new manufacturing facilities. Although with interest rates staying relatively higher…and construction costs skyrocketing, we’ve seen a strategic rebalancing. And yes, Tyson Foo...

The beverage industry is hitting a catastrophic wall, but it isn’t just standard inflation. A high-stakes "metallurgical siege" is unfolding at the exact intersection of consumer packaged goods (CPG) and defense economics. In this video, I break down why aluminum costs have recently surged on the London Metal Exchange and what this means for the future of grocery shelves and beverage coo...

If you had “legacy juice brand pivots to GLP-1 side-effect management” on your bingo card, come collect your prize. Honestly, whatever simulation loop we’re in currently, does anything say “growing up” quite like your favorite childhood juice brand suddenly caring more about keeping your Ozempic-induced bloating in check than your sugar high? Backed by a $10 million manufacturing overhaul, Langers...

More than one-fifth of the 150K+ convenience stores have spoken, and they shared some interesting opinions about the growing energy drinks category. And even if you aren’t familiar with every insight regarding this beverage category, I’m sure you intuitively recognize that convenience is the most important sales channel (by sales dollars) for energy drinks in the U.S. market. But here are my top “...

When PepsiCo acquired Poppi for nearly $2 billion in early 2025, everyone assumed Olipop would be next. Rumors swirled, negotiations stalled with Coca-Cola, and then...Olipop walked away. Critics claimed they missed the peak of the prebiotic soda mania. But the truth could be much more rebellious. In this video, I break down why Olipop's independence isn't a failure, analyze Olipop's i...

Is the golden age of protein over, or is the market hiding something much worse? While mainstream pundits point to falling average retail prices as a sign of consumer fatigue or market saturation, the reality is far more dangerous. CPG brands are trapped in a brutal macroeconomic vice: unprecedented, structural commodity inflation for whey protein vs. an already strained consumer. In this content,...

“Why complicate it?” Oftentimes, I’ll ask that question repeatedly when developing a product innovation strategy. While rethinking traditional product presentation (whether packaging or form factor) can help disrupt normal consumer behavior, effective strategy almost always lies in finding the simplest, most elegant solution that delivers the desired outcome. As an example, I recently came across...

Is the practitioner supplement market dead? Or is it just evolving into something completely unrecognizable? In this video, I break down why the traditional "insulated fortress" of practitioner dietary supplements (which accounts for around 9% of the total U.S. supplement industry) has officially been dismantled. With the death of information asymmetry, the rise of virtual dispensing sys...

McDonald’s is officially getting “dirty.” After watching a tiny soda shop called Swig explode in recent years, the “Golden Arches” is ditching burger innovation for TikTok-inspired beverage concoctions. So, why the sudden pivot? There’s no secret here…it’s about blending up profit margins! Beef is getting expensive to make and harder to sell. But flavored fizzy sugar water (sometimes with a splash...

Is this the deal that changes the future of the world’s largest dairy company? 🥛➡️💪 In this content, I break down Lactalis Group acquisition of the UK-based supplement brand, Protein Works. Discover how a $36B+ traditional dairy behemoth is breaking out of the dairy aisle to conquer the high-margin world of functional nutrition. 📌 What You'll Learn Protein Works Story: How a brand started i...

Your kid wants to drink exactly what you’re drinking. And honestly…CPG brands are finally letting them by taking grown-up wellness trends and making them playground ready. We’re talking about No Seed Oils, extra protein, and "Adult Functionality" in a lunchbox-sized serving. Although I wouldn’t consider this just a trend, as CPG brands are responding to the “MAHA Moms” wanting clean labe...

The cookie industry is experiencing a massive renaissance. But to understand where the future of cookies is going, we have to look back at the woman who wrote the original "Cookie Code" Debbi Fields. In this video, I break down how Mrs. Fields pioneered modern single-product retail, and how modern titans like Crumbl and new wellness startups like Fields Good are remixing her 1980s bluepr...

Is this UK supplement company smart or crazy? For decades, the U.S. sports nutrition market has been a graveyard for ambitious British brands. They cross the Atlantic with huge UK market share, only to get crushed by the brutal realities of the American marketplace. But Applied Nutrition is throwing out the traditional expansion playbook. Instead of spending millions to acquire their own brand nam...

Are you upset about that morning matcha ritual getting A LOT more expensive? Maybe blame all those performative males who are seemingly adopting emotionally sensitive progressive personas (such as drinking matcha and carrying tote bags) to attract women. Regardless, whether it's the matcha latte craze or the proliferation of packaged matcha products, supply can’t keep up with the unprecedented...

Is there a carbonation crisis bubbling up across the beverage industry? For decades, beverage executives stayed awake worrying about the war on sugar, anti-alcohol laws, and Gen Z trends. Today, the biggest liability might be the bubbles themselves. A massive shift in human biology and consumer habits is quietly threating the multibillion-dollar packaged beverage landscape: Surge in Gastrointestin...

Monster Energy and the Boston Red Sox just pulled off the most iconic marketing partnership in sports history. And yes, I’m about to go all “Captain Obvious” here, since presumably some of y’all aren’t baseball fans. But the 37-foot-high left field wall at Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox, is known as the Green Monster. And the classic OG color of Monster Energy drinks is green. Thus, plast...

Beyond the core revenue growth, the latest FitLife Brands (FTLF) Q1 2026 earnings report reveals critical operational pivots and emerging tailwinds that offer a more nuanced look at the company’s trajectory. While consolidated revenue skyrocketed 59% YoY to $25.3 million, the "real" story is found in the details of their recent acquisitions and shifting sales channels. Here's a snipp...

Even though the U.S. energy drinks market is hitting new all-time highs daily…some consumers would rather snack than sip their next “caffeinated buzz.” Just when I thought I’ve seen everything, the energy revolution officially went crunchable…which means your snack break just got a massive upgrade. So, are you ready to blend the crunch and conductivity together? If so, I dare you to try Bangers En...