Honestly didn't expect the protein-ification of everything to reach jam. But here we are: a Brooklyn jam brand just raised $18M from L Catterton.

Smash Foods started with a founding question, why should jam be 55% sugar? Anna Peck and Steve Ford launched in 2019 with low-sugar chia fruit spreads, roughly 95% fruit, chia, dates, and lemon juice, grown out of Peck's food blog.

The product was genuinely good. The business was structurally stuck. A jar of jam is a slow-velocity pantry product; it sits in the fridge for weeks, repurchase cycles run monthly at best, and you're fighting Smucker's for a shelf that turns slowly. Plenty of brands die exactly here.

Smash didn't. In 2024 they launched Jammy Protein Bites, nut and seed butter snacks with the jam as a filled center. Completely different velocity profile. A monthly pantry item became a daily snack: 8–10g of plant protein, 4g of fiber, ~200 calories, sweetened with dates and fruit instead of cane sugar.

The business changed overnight. Revenue tripled. Distribution went from ~6,000 to 10,000+ doors, including Costco, Target, and Walmart. And L Catterton, who has appeared in this newsletter more than any other firm this year, wrote the check.

The lesson worth generalizing: product-market fit and format-market fit are different things, and founders conflate them constantly. Smash had the first from day one. The courage was admitting the second was missing, five years in, and rebuilding the form factor around how the customer actually eats.

By 2021, when Vita Coco was preparing its IPO, the consensus was that it had missed its moment. Coconut water was a 2010s trend, the majors were retreating, and the offering priced below its target range at an $833M valuation.

The market cap today is $4.25B, roughly 5.5x from IPO.

The arc is a masterclass in category endurance. Michael Kirban and Ira Liran founded the brand in 2004, with Liran selling his belongings and moving to Brazil to figure out sourcing. By 2010–2013, coconut water was the hottest trend in beverage; Madonna, Rihanna, and Matthew McConaughey invested in Vita Coco, Coca-Cola bought rival Zico, PepsiCo backed ONE. Then the trend cooled. By 2020, Coke discontinued Zico entirely and let the founder buy it back. Pepsi's ONE faded away. The market concluded the category was past its peak and priced Vita Coco's IPO accordingly.

Here's what the consensus missed: when the majors abandoned the category, they didn't take the consumer with them. They left the entire shelf to the one operator still committed. Vita Coco now reports ~$730M in revenue, 19% EBITDA margins, growing 27% year-on-year, and coconut water is once again the fastest-growing category in beverage.

Now they're spending from a position of strength: $175M plus a $100M earnout for Copra, a producer of super-premium Thai coconut water, chilled, cold-chain, not pasteurized, growing at a 48% CAGR with $100M+ in sales. It's a segment Vita Coco isn't currently in, and it's exactly the premium tier where the category's next decade of growth sits.

Twenty-two years in, both co-founders are still on the board. Sometimes the moat isn't a formula or a patent. It's simply refusing to leave while everyone else concludes the party is over.

Remember 2021, when every consumer reporter was buzzing about the $10B Oatly IPO? Oprah. Natalie Portman. Jay-Z's Roc Nation. Howard Schultz. Blackstone. And that creative packaging.

The stock fell 95%. Cumulative losses over five years: $1.4B.

The failure mode was classic over-expansion: factories built worldwide ahead of demand, gross margins collapsing into the teens, China underdelivering. The brand that defined a category nearly didn't survive owning it.

Last quarter, Oatly reported its first year of profit as a public company. And for anyone interested in turnarounds, which, given what I do all day, includes me, the composition of the recovery is the story. It was 93% cost, 7% growth. Over five years, EBITDA improved by $275M and free cash flow by $436M, on revenue growth of just 19% across the entire period.

Read that again: this was not a growth story. Nobody rode a trend back. Management ground out an operational rebuild, capacity rationalization, margin repair, discipline, while revenue barely moved. That's the least glamorous kind of turnaround and the most instructive one, because it's the kind most distressed brands actually face. You rarely get to grow your way out. You cut, fix, and repair your way out, and growth returns as a consequence.

Meanwhile the brand equity survived intact underneath the financial wreckage. Baristas still love it, the barista SKU grows double digits and remains the consumer adoption engine. The matcha line is pulling in younger consumers.

The natural next question, given everything else in this issue: is protein next for Oatly?

Sahand Dilmaghani recorded conversations with strangers in retail stores before Terra Kaffe existed. Then he moved to New York, lived on one meal a day, and carried espresso machines door to door across the city until someone let him serve coffee to their weekend crowd.

It turned out to be the foundation of an eight-figure hardware brand.

The category he was attacking made no sense to normal people. Bean-to-cup espresso machines priced anywhere from $1,200 to $6,000, engineered in Europe, explained by nobody. Meanwhile millions of Americans were pressing a button on a pod machine every morning, quietly wondering if there was something better. Sahand saw the missing link: nobody was making the jump from pods feel accessible.

So he built it. A super-automatic machine with 400-plus moving parts. Designed in Brooklyn, inspired by Bauhaus, manufactured in China through a relationship he'd built just weeks before COVID shut the world down. He didn't visit his own factory for three years. The machines kept shipping.

Today nearly half of Terra Kaffe's customers convert directly from a pod machine to a $2,000 device. The TK-02 became the first super-automatic to brew both true drip coffee and espresso from the same machine, with an app that lets customers dial in extraction like a barista. And the model underneath is the one hardware founders chase and rarely land: hardware plus consumables, recurring coffee revenue on top of a considered purchase, a customer base that takes months to convert and stays for years.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

The door-knocking research shaped every marketing message Terra Kaffe has ever run. The conversations with strangers weren't a scrappy phase to grow out of, they're the source material the brand still draws on. Most founders outsource customer understanding the moment they can afford to. Sahand treats it as the asset.

Three years of building hardware without visiting your own factory. The COVID-era manufacturing story is worth hearing in full, what it takes to hold a supplier relationship together across an ocean, sight unseen, while shipping a 400-part machine.

Why the unscalable things are the ones that scale. The months-long customer conversion cycle that looks like a weakness is exactly what produces the years-long retention. Slow to convert, slow to leave.

Everyone wants the playbook. Sahand went and wrote one door at a time.

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