4AM just raised $4M from CAVU Consumer Partners and launched in 1,745 Target stores.

The founders: Jade Beguelin, a former Wall Street derivatives trader, and Sabrina Sade, a Georgetown-trained MD. The brand they built is premium skincare for a specific, honest use case: you were out until 4am, you need to cleanse, you have no time for a routine.

The name does everything. It doesn't say "responsible skincare for disciplined people." It says: I know who you actually are, and I built this for you. The TikTok beauty audience didn't want to be lectured about their seven-step routine. They wanted a brand that met them where they were.

The distribution story is the real one. Beguelin documents the brand journey on TikTok in real time, 150,000 followers watching a business get built. Sade shares dermatology education and product development on Instagram to 80,000 followers. The founders are the distribution channel. Then they launched on TikTok Shop: four sold-out production runs, #4 ranking in TikTok Shop's Cleansers category, 4x year-over-year revenue growth.

Then they walked into Target with proof.

The angel roster makes the moat explicit: Dr. Muneeb Shah, 18 million TikTok followers, and Dr. Joyce Park are both investors. In 2026, the sequence is inverted from what it was ten years ago. Consumer demand creates the proof. Retail clears the shelves in response. The TikTok consumer believes first. Target follows.

Chris Williamson hosts Modern Wisdom, a top 10 global podcast with over a billion downloads centered on cognitive performance, deep work, and lifestyle optimization. When he decided to launch a product, a productivity focus drink was almost inevitable.

He partnered with James Smith, 1.4M followers, an entrepreneur who built his entire audience tearing apart bad fitness marketing with blunt, evidence-based takes. That move only works if the baseline credibility is ironclad. And that's the entire thesis.

Neutonic just raised $6M at a $60M valuation. On track to exceed $25M in revenue this year. Over 7.5 million cans sold. Rolling into 500 Sainsbury's stores in the UK and landing US footprints in GNC and The Vitamin Shoppe.

The parallel is LMNT. Robb Wolf spent a decade building keto and paleo credibility before LMNT existed. When Huberman recommended it, the trust transferred seamlessly because the science matched the lifestyle. Neutonic is running the same playbook, Williamson and Smith's decade of audience trust is the hard part that was already done. The product just had to be good enough to deserve it.

Backed by US operators including Codie Sanchez and Dan Martell, the roadmap is explicit: replicate the Huel cross-Atlantic scaling story.

The honest question: the functional beverage shelf is brutal and the podcast circuit is crowded. Every creator with an audience is launching something. Do they blow past $250M in sales in five years and exit for $1B, or get stuck in a competitive pack where the credibility advantage eventually gets commoditized?

In 2013, George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman started making tequila for themselves. Not to sell. A house blend for their properties in Cabo San Lucas. Four years and 120,000 cases later, Diageo paid $1B for it.

Now the same three founders are back. Crazy Mountain just raised $15M in seed funding led by CAVU Consumer Partners, the firm that backed Poppi before prebiotic soda was mainstream and sold it to PepsiCo for $1.95B.

The product: non-alcoholic beer. Two SKUs. Original and Lime. Built for core beer drinkers who want the ritual without the alcohol.

The category timing is right. Traditional beer volumes are stalling. NA beer dollar sales grew 22% last year. The global market is tracking toward $50B+ by 2035, but still only 1.3% of total beer volume, meaning the penetration story hasn't started. Athletic Brewing has built a strong craft business. What doesn't exist yet is a dominant mainstream lifestyle brand for the everyday consumer. That's the gap Crazy Mountain is targeting, and they've brought on Steve Fechheimer, former CEO of New Belgium Brewing and the man behind Fat Tire, to run it.

These founders don't need to explain credibility to a distributor or a retailer. Casamigos already did that. The question is whether tequila-to-beer is a natural extension or a reach. The cultural positioning, ritual over alcohol, premium without pretension, maps cleanly. The consumer who drinks Casamigos at dinner is the same one now ordering NA beer at the bar without making it a whole thing. That's the bet.

Jason Burke pitched Target for ten years. Last month, New Primal went into 1,900 stores with six products.

He'll tell you himself: almost everything he did in the first ten years, he'd do differently. Chased too many SKUs. Expanded into retail markets he wasn't ready for. Spread too thin. Stayed on a fundraising carousel just to stay afloat.

He commercialized the first grass-fed beef jerky for retail in 2012. Was early. Was right about the category. And for almost a decade, nothing rocket-shipped.

Then something shifted. Mom entered the meat snack category. Pantry stocking replaced impulse buying at the gas station checkout. $20 bags of meat sticks started selling at Kroger, not just Whole Foods. A category that had been slowly turning for a decade suddenly became the fastest growing in all of grocery.

And New Primal, already lean, already trusted, already in the right lane, was exactly where the growth was heading. The hard part, the decade of shelf relationships, category education, and brand credibility, was already done. The tailwind just finally arrived.

He still walks into his local Sprouts, Whole Foods, Kroger, and Publix almost every day to straighten the shelf and high-five the store managers.

Three things from the conversation worth taking with you:

The four-to-five year CPG exit is a myth. The brands that survive are the ones built with a longer timeline in mind, not because the founders planned it that way, but because that's how long it actually takes for a category to mature around you.

Spreading across SKUs and markets before you're ready is how you almost die. Jason's ten years of near-misses came from chasing the next thing before the current thing was fully proven. Focus isn't a strategic choice in CPG. It's a survival requirement.

What he'd do completely differently if he started over. Worth listening to hear directly, the specific decisions he'd reverse are more instructive than any generic founder advice.

The category arrived at him. He just had to survive long enough to be there when it did.

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify.

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Cabbage is trending on TikTok. Pinterest named it "the new kitchen MVP" in 2026. The Guardian coined "Cabbagecore." Dietitians are going viral explaining its fiber, prebiotics, and vitamin C content. A vegetable that costs $0.50 per pound is having a cultural moment.

The same cultural forces driving the seed oil backlash, raw honey consumption, and organic produce growth have now reached cabbage. A generation that spends $40 on supplements just discovered that cabbage delivers prebiotics, probiotics when fermented, fiber, vitamin C, and anti-inflammatory compounds, at $0.50 a pound.

The commercial opportunity is in fermented vegetables. Kimchi. Sauerkraut. Fermented coleslaw. Global fermented food and ingredient sales: $61B. Kimchi specifically: $4.3B globally in 2025, growing at 5.2% annually.

The gut health education is already happening. Dietitians explaining the difference between prebiotics and probiotics. Fermentation content going viral. Kimchi recipes getting millions of views. The distribution work, consumer education at scale, is being done for free on TikTok right now.

The GLP-1 angle accelerates the timeline. Users eating 30–40% less food need maximum nutrient density per calorie. Fermented cabbage delivers prebiotics, probiotics, fiber, and micronutrients simultaneously at almost zero caloric cost. That's a compelling value proposition for one of the fastest-growing consumer segments in food.

The vegetable is trending. The ingredient is mainstream. The TikTok education is running. The hard part is already being done by the culture.

Who builds the dominant brand in the space?

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.

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