We Are Just Getting Started
Consumer is having its moment.
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” — Don Vito Corleone, The God Father (1972)
In the fall of 2024, Keurig Dr Pepper agreed to pay $1.65 billion for Ghost, an energy drink brand that didn’t exist a decade ago. A few months later, PepsiCo wrote a check for nearly $2 billion to acquire Poppi, a prebiotic soda company founded in a Texas kitchen. Then e.l.f. Beauty paid $1 billion for Rhode, Hailey Bieber’s skincare line launched just two years earlier. Unilever followed with Dr. Squatch at a reported $1.5 billion. Hershey bought LesserEvil. Mammoth Brands acquired Coterie for close to $1 billion.
Six deals. Eighteen months. Nearly $9 billion of announced value deployed into brands most boardrooms didn’t know existed five years ago. None of these buyers believe they’re early. That’s exactly why the cycle is accelerating.
This is not a blip. It’s the first inning of a cycle we haven’t seen since enterprise software in 1999.
The largest CPG companies in the world are sitting on unprecedented cash, facing core categories that haven’t grown in a decade, and watching younger consumers abandon their brands. Their innovation pipelines are structurally insufficient. Their cultures cannot manufacture authenticity. Their shareholders are out of patience.
They have one move left. Buy what they cannot build.
Consider the contrast with software. The mega-acquisitions that defined the last decade, Salesforce buying Slack, Microsoft buying LinkedIn, have given way to a more measured pace. Strategic buyers are digesting large acquisitions made at peak multiples. Enterprise software companies that once commanded 15x revenue now trade at 5x. The cycle isn’t over, but it’s in a different phase. Software M&A is waiting for AI to clarify. Consumer M&A is happening right now.
And the incumbents aren’t hiding their intentions. Unilever has committed €1.5 billion annually for acquisitions, with explicit focus on U.S. assets. That’s not optionality. That’s a mandate. The regulatory environment has shifted too. An administration friendly to M&A means deals that would have stalled in review are now getting done.
The forces driving this are the same ones I wrote about in Big Food’s Tobacco Moment. The chemistry that built these empires has become the liability. San Francisco’s lawsuit against Kraft, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola isn’t a nuisance. It’s an existential marker. The corn syrups, the stabilizers, the shelf-life agents, these aren’t bugs in the product. They are the product. Pull them out and the entire architecture collapses. These companies cannot reformulate their way to relevance fast enough. They can only acquire it.
The consumer shift underneath has reached escape velocity. Eighty percent of shoppers now associate “processed” with unhealthy. GLP-1 medications have rewired how tens of millions of Americans think about what they put in their bodies. As I argued in The Golden Age of Consumer Investing, health is no longer a niche. It’s the baseline expectation. When the Bay Area left and RFK’s populist right agree that Big Food is the enemy, the direction is locked. When consumption habits shift faster than reformulation cycles, acquisition becomes the only viable response.
The gap is widening. Emerging brands are using AI to compress timelines that used to take legacy companies years. The incumbents are still running RFPs. By the time they’ve selected a vendor, the founder they should have acquired has already scaled past them.
Here’s what most investors still miss. The acquisition math has fundamentally changed. Five years ago, strategics wanted $100 million in revenue before they’d engage. Today, they’re buying at $30 million because waiting means competing with three other bidders. Rhode sold for $1 billion three years after launch. Poppi exited at nearly $2 billion seven years after founding. Helen of Troy paid $240 million for Olive & June, a nail care brand that built a cult Gen Z following before legacy beauty companies knew what was happening.
And retail is accelerating the timeline. Target and Walmart aren’t bringing in better-for-you brands because they care about wellness. They’re doing it because their core customers are aging. The twenty-eight-year-old who buys a premium gummy vitamin is the same twenty-eight-year-old who will buy diapers, furniture, and electronics for the next forty years. Retailers are using emerging brands as customer acquisition for their entire ecosystem. That means shelf space. That means velocity. That means brands reaching acquisition scale faster than ever.
You don’t need a billion-dollar exit for the model to work. You need the right brand, the right timing, and buyers who can’t afford to wait.
No one knows exactly when this cycle will peak. But the conditions driving consolidation, stagnant portfolios, shareholder pressure, regulatory exposure, generational shifts in behavior, are structural, not cyclical. They will intensify. The forces reshaping this industry will play out over the next decade. That’s enough time to seed a company today and watch it become an acquisition target by 2030.
Software had its twenty-year run. The platforms got funded. The returns got made. Now the pipes are full, and the acquirers are looking for what flows through them.
The largest food, beverage, and personal care companies in the world have no choice. They will spend the next decade writing checks for what they cannot build. The founders who see this, who are building cleaner products, earning real trust, moving faster than the giants can comprehend, they are creating the defining exit opportunities of this era.
The old playbook is over. The new one is being written right now, by founders most boardrooms still haven’t heard of, backed by investors who saw this coming.
Twenty-five years from now, people will look back at this moment the way we look back at enterprise software in 1999. The opportunity was obvious in retrospect. The question was who had the conviction to act.
We are just getting started.