Open tabs: Pickle juice as a personality, Curry's homegrown Jordan Brand, and Instacart's middleman aisle
The trends, reads, and one founder story worth your lunch break.
While we weren’t at Cannes this year (we hear the Croisette doesn’t take Venmo — so we hosted an NYC CPG Cool Down after the Fancy Food show instead!), we’re pretty sure no one in attendance was sipping the electrolyte drink of the summer. That honor belongs to us, courtesy of pickles. For real though, is there anything pickles can’t do? Ditto rocket pops, more on that below…
Every time we declare “peak pickle,” we end up eating our crunchy, briny words. HOPWTR x Good Girl Snacks launched a limited-edition pickle lemonade. The very notion fills us with electrolytes (and joy). 🍋
If you thought all supplement gummies were for kids, you clearly haven’t met Grüns…which just rolled out a line of gummies for kids. And before you ask: yes, they come in rocket pop flavor. (As do America’s birthday beans.) 🫘
Steph Curry signed a $400M deal with Li-Ning, a brand that’s been banned from selling in the US since 2022. The real MVP? 1.4 billion basketball-obsessed Chinese consumers. Did Li-Ning just buy itself a homegrown Jordan Brand? Discuss. ⛹
Instacart is now its own ad agency — you can find it in the middleman aisle! Brands used to hire an agency, then buy ads, then beg for their own data back. Instacart just rolled all three into one convenient checkout. (Also, AI.) 🥕
We read on Reddit that Reddit’s data on Redditers indicates fully half of US shoppers validate their AI-recommended CPG purchases on Reddit. So, humans…good? 🤖
Three ultra-deals this year — Kimberly-Clark buying Kenvue, McCormick scooping up Unilever's foods division, Keurig Dr Pepper nabbing JDE Peet's — added up to $120B. Yup, Ozempic and ingredient panels accomplished what decades of "eat healthier" campaigns couldn't. 📈
Summer Fancy Food was poppin’ this week! So many samples to eat, so little stomach space… which seems to be the case with almost all the best tradeshows these days.
Ted Repic is the CEO of Rhino USA: the family-owned adventure gear company his sons Cameron and Dylan started in 2015 with a pickup truck and a gap in the market. Cameron was 19. Dylan jumped in with his savings while he was still in high school. Ted came in as CEO to help guide the growth.
A decade later: nine figures in revenue, 300+ products, Walmart, Sam's Club, AutoZone, and one of the most unexpected TikTok Shop success stories out there — the top seller in automotive and motorcycle, with eight figures in platform revenue.
Now they're breaking ground on RhinoWorld, a 182-acre adventure campus outside Austin where the gear gets built, beaten up, and eventually opened to customers, retail partners, and first responders in training.
Ready to shoot videos live in the mud? Cause Ted and the boys are!
