If you’ve been paying attention to the tape over the last 18 months, you’ve seen nearly $9 billion deployed into brands that legacy boardrooms couldn’t have named two years ago.
PepsiCo & Poppi: ~$2 billion
Unilever & Dr. Squatch: $1.5 billion
e.l.f. Beauty & Rhode: $1.3 billion
Hershey & LesserEvil: (Undisclosed but massive)
L Catterton & Thorne: Exploring a $4 billion exit
This isn’t a spike or a fluke. It is the start of the greatest CPG acquisition cycle in a generation.
Since I started in this space in 2014, I’ve seen the "DTC 1.0" era rise and burn. Those brands were Facebook ad machines wearing a "consumer insight" costume. But the "DTC 2.0" cohort, the ones built between 2019 and 2026 are different. They are the best-constructed businesses in history because they were forced to learn that CAC is not a growth lever.
Here is why the buyer is already in the room, and what you need to do to make sure they’re looking at you.
Cultural Credibility Void
Large CPG companies like Unilever and Pepsi have a structural problem: their internal R&D can produce line extensions, but it cannot manufacture cultural soul.
Authenticity doesn't scale from a corporate campus in Cincinnati. Big Food knows they can’t build the trust that brands like Rhode or Grüns have built on TikTok. They have the capital, but they have zero "cool."
Their only move left is to buy it. Unilever has already committed roughly $1.7 billion annually to acquisitions, specifically targeting U.S. assets. The mandate is already signed; they’re just waiting for the right P&L to show up.
Two-Sided Market Flywheel
We are entering a market dynamic that didn't exist at scale in 2021.
Private Equity (The Platform Builder): They are buying disciplined, science-backed brands, cleaning up the operations, and positioning them for the exit.
Strategics (The Exit): Big CPGs are divesting their "boring" legacy brands to focus on high-margin segments, creating a massive pool of capital to absorb these PE-backed winners.
It’s a flywheel: PE buys the platform, Strategics buy the growth.
Cash Flow Acquisitions > Storytelling Acquisitions
The window for hype-driven brands with no retention and zero margin is slammed shut. If your business needs 24/7 paid spend to survive, you aren't an acquisition target, you're a lead-generation tool for Meta.
Mammoth’s Coterie acquisition wasn’t about diapers. It was proof that the DTC acquisition blueprint is being codified in real time.
The brands getting unsolicited calls right now share a specific "Operating System":
Habitual Use: High-frequency, genuine repeat purchase behavior
Omnichannel Presence: Proof that the brand travels off-platform and into the "real world"
SaaS-level Discipline: Founders who track retention with the rigor of a CFO
Graham’s Takeaway
The next 3 to 5 years will be the strongest exit environment in a decade for those who built the right way. The buyers have the capital and nowhere else to find organic growth.
If you want to be worth buying, you have to do three things:
Prioritize Gross Margin over top-line velocity
Prioritize Retention over acquisition
Build a Category, not just a brand
Poppi didn’t win because they made "better soda." They won because they built a behavioral category around prebiotic hydration and owned the "default" spot before anyone else could.
