For decades, American diet culture told consumers that carbs were the enemy. We spent a generation chasing low-carb fads, keto trends, and gluten-free alternatives that tasted like cardboard.

Aaron Gatti noticed a fundamental contradiction. Italians consume drastically more pasta than Americans every single year, yet they consistently rank among the healthiest populations on earth. The Mediterranean Paradox. That shift in perspective is why Brami just raised a $33M Series B led by VMG Partners. 400% projected year-over-year growth in 2026. Already profitable. Fastest-growing national pasta brand in America.

The product: two ingredients. Italian durum wheat semolina and lupini bean flour. 21 grams of protein. 9 grams of fiber. Tastes like traditional Italian pasta. The manufacturing partner is La Molisana, a fourth-generation Italian pastificio milling wheat since 1912 — both Brami's production partner and an equity investor. 4,000+ doors: Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger. A New York Yankees partnership for 2026.

But the founding story is what makes this interesting. Brami launched in 2016 as a pickled lupini bean snack. Most people have never heard of lupini beans. The snack didn't scale. The ingredient, blended with Italian durum wheat, became one of the best CPG product pivots of the last decade.

The consumer didn't change. The understanding of what the consumer actually wanted; familiar format, Mediterranean nutrition, no compromises on taste, did.

5-hour ENERGY does $1 billion in annual revenue. The formula hasn't changed since 2004. Artificial ingredients. Synthetic B vitamins. Neon yellow liquid. Sold next to beef jerky at gas station checkouts.

Proper Wild just raised $11M to disrupt it.

The founding insight from Vincent Bradley: "The energy shot category is the last CPG category that hasn't gone healthy. Literally everything else has." Poppi did it for soda. LMNT did it for electrolytes. Every major beverage category has been disrupted by a clean-label challenger in the last decade. The shot is the holdout.

The product: 100mg organic caffeine from green tea, 120mg L-theanine, no preservatives, no artificial sweeteners, plant-based, 4-6 hours of smooth energy, no crash.

Then the pivot. The shot proved the concept. The gummy is the growth lever. A shot is solitary. A gummy is shareable, at 25mg caffeine per piece you control your dose, and social-media native in a way a 2.5oz bottle never will be.

The question worth sitting with: 5-hour ENERGY has held a $1B+ position for twenty years without changing a single ingredient. How many other categories have that kind of incumbent inertia sitting there, waiting for the clean-label challenger that hasn't arrived yet?

Banana water is attempting to run the 2004 Vita Coco playbook.

When coconut water first landed in the US, most retailers dismissed it as a niche health-food curiosity. Today it's a multi-billion dollar global category. Banagua is betting the world's most popular fruit is about to spark the same evolution.

Banagua just raised $5.5M led by Hingham Growth Partners. The product: organic Thai bananas. That's the entire ingredient list. A proprietary extraction process separates the naturally occurring liquid from inside the fruit, no added water, no added sugar, no concentrates, no preservatives. The brand aligns with the anti-ultra-processed food movement and the push toward whole-food nutrition. Launched less than a year ago. Already in 3,500+ retail doors: Sprouts, Kroger, Albertsons, Erewhon.

The distribution insight is the most interesting part. Banagua didn't fight for eye-level space in the brutally crowded, high-slotting-fee beverage cooler. They bypassed the drink aisle entirely and placed cans directly in the produce section, next to actual bananas. The consumer who's already buying bananas sees a can of the same thing in liquid form. The occasion is obvious. The trust is borrowed from the fruit itself.

The plant-water category has an unforgiving graveyard. For every Vita Coco, there are dozens of failed cactus, birch, aloe, and maple waters that burned through venture capital because they couldn't move past grocery novelty. Coconut water won because it secured a permanent, repeatable functional occasion. Banagua's advantage is familiarity, bananas are already on almost every kitchen counter in America. The consumer already trusts the flavor, the fruit, and the nutritional association.

3,500 doors in under a year is a distribution story worth paying attention to, even before the category question is answered.

Stephen Vlahos built a tech company to $15M in revenue and handed the keys to a team from Uber. Then he went to Southern Europe and learned how to drink wine.

He came back convinced the American wine industry was getting almost everything wrong. Too many additives. Too much sugar. Too complicated. Too focused on the bottle as a status symbol rather than the drink as a daily pleasure. He couldn't find the brand he was looking for on any shelf. So he built it.

He launched Gratsi in Austin bars and restaurants in early 2020. Within weeks, COVID shut down 90% of his accounts. Three weeks from placing a major purchase order he couldn't justify, he didn't fight it. He started over, online, in a bag-in-box format the industry associates with cheap wine. His friends told him it was a mistake.

The bag-in-box turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the business. No light exposure. Stays fresh for six weeks after opening. Ships efficiently. Sits beautifully on a kitchen counter. And for a customer who drinks wine regularly, not ceremonially, it made complete sense. The format the industry dismissed as low-end was actually better for the product and better for the customer. The stigma was wrong.

Gratsi is now well into eight figures in revenue. Over 30,000 subscribers. Three SKUs, and no plans to add more. A wholesale footprint that only enters markets where DTC data has already proven demand exists.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

Use ecommerce to de-risk every retail launch before a single case ships. Gratsi doesn't enter a new wholesale market until DTC data has already proven that demand exists there. The retailer becomes the lagging indicator, not the gating mechanism. Sound familiar?

Three SKUs while the rest of the industry chases product proliferation. The discipline to not expand until the current thing is completely mastered is rarer than it sounds, and more valuable than most founders realize until they've made the mistake of spreading too thin.

What the Bellhops co-founder experience taught him about what quietly kills companies. Worth hearing directly. The specific patterns he learned to watch for are more instructive than any generic founder advice.

The pivot wasn't the setback. It was the whole strategy. The COVID shutdown forced him to find a format that was actually better, and the industry's stigma around it turned out to be the competitive moat.

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Design-led DTC platform with a category-defining hero franchise, distinctive brand IP, and a loyal repeat customer base.

Key highlights:

The business is not yet consistently profitable. The opportunity for the right owner is one of two clear paths: re-accelerate paid and creative spend on a brand with real cultural equity, or rebuild the wholesale book with discipline. Both are achievable; neither requires building from zero.

Email: [email protected]

Beyond Meat peaked at over $230 a share in 2019. Today it trades under $1. A peak valuation of $13B+ has been effectively wiped out, staving off liquidation only by executing a massive debt restructuring that severely diluted its remaining shareholders.

It happened while the wellness movement was supposed to be its ultimate tailwind. That's the paradox worth understanding.

Plant-based meat brands built their initial empire on a simple thesis: animal protein is bad for you, engineered plants are better. From 2017 to 2021, that message landed perfectly with flexitarians and climate-conscious millennials. A Beyond Burger in a Whole Foods basket felt like the future.

Then the anti-ultra-processed food revolution happened. The same MAHA cultural forces driving the seed oil backlash, the tallow revival, and the raw honey trend turned on fake meat with a devastating accusation: it's an industrialized chemistry set. The health-conscious consumer who went plant-based for longevity in 2019 is the exact same consumer reading ingredient labels in 2026 and rejecting what they used to buy.

Meanwhile, mainstream wellness culture has made butter cool again. Grass-fed beef, tallow snacks, and regenerative agriculture are aspirational. The definition of "better" moved, and Beyond Meat's product didn't.

The plant-based brands winning in 2026 never tried to replicate animal protein in a lab. This week we wrote about Brami milling lupini bean pasta with two whole ingredients. Last month we covered fermented vegetables riding the gut-health wave. The vegetarian, vegan, and plant-curious consumer didn't disappear. They just changed their definition of better.

The white space: a clean-label, whole-food, plant-based brand that doesn't pretend to be meat. One that the MAHA consumer, the anti-UPF consumer, and the plant-curious consumer can all reach for without contradiction.

Who builds the next $1B plant-based brand on that brief?

That’s it for this week.
If you liked this issue, forward to a friend who obsesses over brand strategy, capital flows, or exit timing.

In the Money – following the flow of capital in consumer

P.S. We love talking to brands interested in exiting in the next 3-18 months. If you know of any brands interested in exiting, or any firms trying to help port cos manage turnarounds, we'd love to share a POV.

Email: [email protected]
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