the Joshua Schall Audio Experience

Sometimes if your patient enough, the world’s largest (and most diversified) food, beverage, and nutritional supplements company, will eventually “remix” one of your worst predictions into a real possibility again! If you’ve followed my content for long enough, you’ve seen me publicly take countless “victory laps” that essentially patted myself proudly on the back for making correct marketplace pr...

Nookie-flavored cookies that you stuck up your YEAH…to my knowledge never became a thing, but that doesn’t mean the late-90s/early-00s alternative metal band Limp Bizkit wasn’t still destined to be a CPG product inventor. Fred Durst and the guys were visionaries, but they needed a big-time partner to make it a reality…and those types of sales cycles take a long time. What am I talking about? 7-Ele...

If you needed to grab something fast at the convenience store, to help energize you through a busy day, what is your energy beverage selection? Since we live in the “Age of the Endless Aisle,” there are more options in every CPG category than during any other point in our history. Even within the smallest retail channel (in terms of average square footage), convenience stores will undoubtedly have...

What’s the biggest risk to the insane growth trajectory of GLP-1 pharmaceutical weight loss solutions? Explosive demand in the U.S. market has outstripped supply…causing prolonged shortages of these medications. GLP-1 market leaders, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, have warned supply constraints would likely extend into late-2024. That has unfortunately increased the circulation of counterfeit version...

Is the “often imitated, never duplicated” influential epicenter of all ingestible CPG categories ready to disrupt its next market? And while the “best and brightest sports nutrition brands are now (or will soon start) competing against large CPG incumbents in every functional food and beverage subcategory over time…this isn’t another content piece about the competitive landscape “changing of the g...

Can you influence behavior through taxation? In fact, legislators generally have three goals in mind as they prepare tax laws: raise revenue, create fairness, and ability to influence behavior. Sin taxes, which are used to discourage the purchase and use of products that pose a risk to health, are as old as the original New England colonies. Today, we typically see these sin taxes placed on tobacc...

Sometimes a relative stranger, during a small collection of conversations, can make an outsized impact by suddenly awakening a light within you. If you think that sounds like hyperbole…how about I share my recent experience with this phenomenon. In the last several years, I’ve had a handful of beverage industry friends tell me to check out this tea-plus brand named Equitea. Admittedly, in a rushed...

There’s something extremely admirable about those that “fight for the little guy.” Having worked in large CPG conglomerates like Mars, Daniel Scharff knew the advantages these mega companies have over small brands scratching and crawling for any opportunity. So, in late-2019…he began hosting Bay Area events that gave founders of the smallest emerging CPG brands a chance to demo products and networ...

Pizza and Beer. We take the pairing for granted…despite it being a must-have at any party and a marriage ingrained in our gastronomic culture. The simple and humble combination of pizza and beer represents more than the sum of its parts…which is especially true when we look at it through a recently announced bold co-branding lens. Nestlé-owned pizza brand Tombstone is teaming up with New Belgium t...

As the largest proposed supermarket merger in U.S. history remains expectedly tied up because of an ongoing FTC antitrust lawsuit, it’s totally understandable that speculation continues to build around if a combined Kroger-Albertsons will have a significant effect on how CPG brands do business with the new retailer. And while I have a multitude of my own theories of how this mega-merger plays out,...

Ready-to-mix (RTM) powder to ready-to-drink (RTD) liquid format expansion could very well become the dominant build model process amongst functional beverage entrepreneurs…though a recent hydration category example could be elemental in proving my strategic thesis correct. While I might be a bit biased considering my professional background, I believe the sports nutrition space has always been the...

Doesn’t it seem every beverage category is not what it used to be…as consumers are drinking up beverages that have benefits beyond just quenching their thirst. Even the largest (most sacred) packaged beverage categories are no longer safe…as carbonated soft drinks volume have been declining for much of the last decade. Consumers continue to move closer towards this four-way intersection of taste,...

Over the last dozen years as a CPG industry strategist, I’ve seen A LOT of “trade-in promotions” used across different product categories to meet different business objectives. Maybe a CPG brand wants to support its sustainability credentials through recycling incentives. Or maybe it’s focused around rewarding customer loyalty when exchanging an older product version. Though often it’s utilized wh...

Is there a hidden meaning behind FitLife Brands calling MusclePharm “our most significant organic growth opportunity”? For those unaware, the supplement brands that are within the FitLife Brands portfolio are now categorized in four segments…NDS Products (which are a collection of brands mostly sold in the GNC franchise system), iSatori Products (which are a collection of brands sold through a div...

Most successful CPG products do not arrive out of nowhere; they’re remixes of existing ones. While most remixed CPG product innovations have “easy to understand lineages,” Pop-Tarts (and its lesser-known competitor) wouldn’t fit that description. See…the food technology advancement that packaged those fruit-filled pastries in Mylar wrappers and made them shelf-stable was remixed from a 1961 produc...

If you get too close to the sun, you will burn. This is the recent story of Premier Protein. BellRing Brands (NYSE: BRBR) is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein and Dymatize Nutrition, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resul...

What does a famous scene in Goodfellas and a renegotiation of the PepsiCo and Celsius distribution deal have in common? Celsius Holdings (NASDAQ: CELH) had quarterly revenue of $356 million, which was up 37% YoY. During the trailing twelve months, Celsius Holdings smashed through the billion-dollar mark…with the energy drink brand generating $1.41 billion in revenues over that period. According to...

Maybe it wasn’t the most impressive first official reporting period for Glanbia’s new CEO…though it’s not always about how you start that’s important, but how you finish, right? Glanbia Performance Nutrition is one of two wholly-owned segments of Glanbia plc (LON:GLB), a multibillion-dollar global nutrition company. The brands in the Glanbia Performance Nutrition portfolio include; Optimum Nutriti...

41 months after I posed the original question, The Simply Good Foods Company has finally given me the answer I’ve been waiting for! So, I’ve been alluding to this “eat or be eaten” phase of The Simply Good Foods Company for the last 3.5 years. But only a few days after posting that January 2021 Simply Good Foods prediction, the company released its first quarter earnings report and then-CEO Joe Sc...

Who wins in a fight…Travis Scott or Kylie Jenner? No, this isn’t one of those weird man vs. woman fetish wrestling matches…I’m referring to an alcoholic beverage brand fight. It was recently announced that beauty CPG category mogul and “Kardashians” personality Kylie Jenner is launching Sprinter…a canned vodka soda cocktail. But if you remember…Kylie Jenner’s baby daddy (aka the talented rapper an...

Does it matter that Liquid Death “swung on and missed” its first attempt at extending its platform beyond the ready-to-drink beverage category? If you checked out my “beverage identity crisis” content from last week, I had originally intended to include these Liquid Death format expansion insights in that piece. But there was a bit too much strategic nuance that I believed would create confusion w...

40,000 convenience store owners have spoken, and they had A LOT to say about the growing energy drinks category. And even if you aren’t super familiar with this beverage category’s sales insights, I’m sure you intuitively recognize that convenience stores are the most important in terms of channels for energy drinks in the U.S. market. But here are the top 3 biggest “categorical” takeaways from th...

I already predicted the massive MyProtein rebrand would face a “no pain, no gain” reality, so what is THG CEO Matthew Moulding all fired up about? THG (aka the company formerly known as The Hut Group) recently updated the public markets by releasing its 2024 Q1 trading statement. I’ll be utilizing that financial information, along with notes I took listening to the earnings conference call, and an...

In today’s functional CPG market, how would you categorize what is (or isn’t) a beverage? There’s a growing format expansion trend within key functional beverage categories that's causing most consumers to provide a widening variance in definitions. But the mainstreaming version of the “beverage identity crisis” was something I started talking more about publicly during the “Great Shutdown” pe...

Will insurgent CPG brands capture an even greater share of category growth as innovation by large companies remains limited and consumers seek meaningful value propositions? While accounting for less than 2% of market share in their respective categories, insurgent CPG brands captured nearly 20% of incremental category growth last year. And you might be asking yourself, what is an insurgent CPG br...