If you watched to my last content about the (not yet officially announced) new CEO at MusclePharm, I unfortunately had to leave you on this sort of cliffhanger. While I was alerted about the MusclePharm intellectual property (IP) portfolio sale a few days before that content was published, it wasn’t my place to break that news publicly and I provided my reasoning for that to stay transparent with my audience. But this content will get the important stuff, such as why MusclePharm is selling a collection of its intellectual property, what IP was up for sale, and what are some paths for MusclePharm after this public auction. Additionally, I'll explain the accounting issues that are making those possible paths unpredictable. Despite the unknowns severely outweighing the limited public information available, I take a shot in the dark on where I think things could go…(1) bankruptcy (2) bolt-on acquisition or vertical integration M&A move provides strategic value (3) private equity or investment firm buys and simply lease back the IP to MusclePharm, collects payments, and let the new CEO Eric Hillman operate without interference. All I know is a "Part 3" is likely going to be needed soon!

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Back in December 2021, I successfully predicted that the biggest YouTuber in the world, Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast, would build on the successful momentum of the MrBeast Burger virtual restaurant concept and launch a CPG product. Two months later, MrBeast launched Feastables, a better-for-you snacking brand with its first product being the MrBeast Bar. The current Feastables product portfolio, which now also includes plant-based cookies, is just the beginning of a much bigger vision. What will be the next CPG product MrBeast will launch? Jimmy Donaldson already told us in a recent Forbes feature that the next CPG product launch will be in cereal, likely under the Feastables brand, but what about after that? Outside of trying my luck at correctly predicting another MrBeast CPG market move, I deep dive into the trend that’s fueling massive CPG industry success of MrBeast, but also The Rock, Logan Paul, and many others. Everyone thinks the C in CPG stands for consumer, but that’s dead wrong. The most popular celebrities and creators of today are becoming the biggest CPG brands of tomorrow. Celebrity packaged goods is a relatively new phenomenon. What's driving that shift from celebrities and creators using endorsement deals for wealth creation into entreprenuership? Fortune favors the bold and, increasingly, the many celebrities who’ve made the leap into the CPG industry. As seen with Feastables (and PRIME), celebrity packaged goods brands hold the potential of being developed into billion-dollar successful businesses capable of competing with even the most powerful CPG giants. Will MrBeast take on the beverage industry next? I think the signs are pointing to yes!

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Keurig Dr Pepper (NASDAQ: KDP) finally got off their butt and landed a key strategic partnership in the energy drinks market. On December 8, KDP and C4 Energy entered into a strategic partnership that includes a long-term sales and distribution arrangement, which is expected to meaningfully increase retail availability and household penetration for the C4 Energy brand. KDP is making a pre-tax cash investment in Nutrabolt of $863 million, in exchange for preferred equity ownership stake of approximately 30% that has additional earn-out benefits, rights to increase ownership in certain capital raising scenarios, and board representation.  This will make KDP the second-largest shareholder investor in Nutrabolt behind its Founder, Chairman and CEO, Doss Cunningham. Net of the anticipated cash tax benefits, the investment represents a multiple below 4x estimated 2023 net sales, which are expected to be above $650 million. This strategic investment was something that I predicted in October 2021 in a YouTube video titled “Keurig Dr Pepper Buys These Five Beverage Companies Next.” You can watch that YouTube video here - https://youtu.be/AHrmn87c26w. In that content, I not only explain my conviction pick for the energy drink category being Nutrabolt (aka C4 Energy), but also provide logic on its valuation being cheaper than Celsius Holdings and other key points that seem eerily familiar to yesterday's news. I’ll unpack all that original commentary and more throughout the content, that hits on some under-the-radar business reasons why KDP chose Nutrabolt, a little history on the sports nutrition brand portfolio Nutrabolt, and explanation around how this investment fills an important short-term need at KDP and potentially creates a long-term advantage. I'll also explain the implications to the energy drinks market, and explain some outside stakeholders that were winners and losers in this announcement.

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MusclePharm (OTCMKTS: MSLP) has a new CEO and every supplement industry veteran will recognize his name. At the time of filming this content, the CEO change isn't exactly public information yet, but I can confirm that it's Eric Hillman. Who is "Big E", which he has been signing off on MusclePharm social media interactions? Eric Hillman is the co-founder of the supplement industry distributor Europa Sports Products (now known as Europa Sports Partners). After acquiring its second-largest competitor Lone Star Distribution in 2016, the combined revenue of the company reached around half a billion dollars. So, even though Europa Sports Partners is much smaller today, Eric Hillman is a strong businessman and has value here as the CEO. I give him all my respect for what he built at Europa Sports Products and the overall impact he had in building and growing the sports and active nutrition market. But the MusclePharm that Eric Hillman is being handed needs A LOT. The chance of getting back to the heyday of MusclePharm, both in influence/impact and revenue, is a statistical anomaly, but even clawing back to the level of the last few years will be extremely tough. So, I'll explore what went wrong during the Ryan Dexler era at MusclePharm and explain if I believe Eric Hillman really help turn the company around.  Disclaimer: I kept this "short and sweet" because there’s going to be a part 2. Don’t ding me for the cliffhanger, but for ethical reasons I’m not going to disclose until I see public mentions.

Europa Sports Products (May 2021 Content)

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1st Phorm isn’t like other supplement brands. That’s by design, but it seems to cause a level of ignorance by sports nutrition industry pundits that has always felt downright disrespectful to me. My belief is that outside of a rare few, the vast majority are one trick ponies that see the sports nutrition space through one lens only. Basically, they like to fit brands into boxes based on their understanding of the supplement market. The problem is that 1st Phorm doesn’t fit neatly into a box. Regardless, most of these supplement industry pundits recognize that 1st Phorm is successful by capitalistic market metrics. This does one of two things...they choose to simply ignore 1st Phorm all together or they take misguided jabs at them to try and generate attention or clicks. In my opinion, both are disrespectful. But, instead of hearing it just from me, I included a snippet of a conversation I had with Sal Frisella (President - 1st Phorm) on what he and his supplement brand thinks about it. Additionally, I breakdown a collection of strategies that are actually important and really damn impactful that 1st Phorm doesn’t get enough respect for, such as their job creation, free TransPhormation Challenges, Legionnaire Program, building the best community in the sports nutrition industry, leveraging of a vertically integrated business model, and being aggressively patient. Why is 1st Phorm different? 1st Phorm is an incremental success story…one that takes just as much patience to fully understand and appreciate.

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In a challenging business environment, where managing innovation risk has become critical, should you be expecting more than the typical brand-supplier relationship in the CPG industry? With tens of thousands of new CPG products launching every year, simply putting “new” on a bottle won’t get any meaningful market attention. There’s no doubt in my mind that innovation done right accelerates company growth in the CPG industry, but anticipating consumers’ needs, and measuring and managing innovation to address those needs, will continually get tougher. The supply side (e.g. ingredient suppliers and contract manufacturers) of the CPG industry have a vested interest in helping you beyond the lowest common denominator of just selling you ingredients or compiling the recipe or formula together to create that innovative new CPG product of your dreams. Seek out these partners, like Nutiani, as early as you can in the process to take advantage of value-added services and support. “What you don’t know can hurt you” or at least that ignorance can create disadvantages within the CPG industry. So, my baseline hope with this content was that you learned to elevate your expectations when seeking out supply side partners.

Full List of Nutiani Solutions

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Is the future of product development within the supplement industry heading towards more condition-specific or multifunctional formulation approaches? This juxtaposition in supplement industry product development approaches has been on mind for a while now...and there are so many considerations at play here coming from both the brand-level and supply side of the supplement industry, but also with how it all interacts to consumer behavior. We know that ingredient advances are enabling formulators to create products that can address a broader cluster of health conditions. At the same time, supplement brands are finding opportunities in smarter, more targeted products that appeal to specific subsets of consumers. While condition-specific is not a new approach in the supplement industry, it has gotten more prominent in the last few years though because of the overwhelming product proliferation within the supplement industry. Alternatively, we would be ignorant if we didn’t believe a subset of consumers appreciate convenient multifunctional products that can meet several wellness goals. But there’s also some other attributes at play in this condition-specific versus multifunctional debate. Though there's no central “best” approach to attack the supplement market, I'll explore this debate by looking at purchase criteria like price, personalization, marketing, and sales channel strategy. To further add depth to this content, I also included snippets of a recent conversation I had with Richard Wang, the CEO of ingredient company NuLiv Science, at the SupplySide West tradeshow.

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Purchasing volume has fallen for both Premier Protein and Dymatize, yet total revenues for the brands keep climbing…what’s going on here? As I normally do with my performance update content of publicly-traded functional CPG brands, I will use the recently filled earnings report, earnings conference call, and any relevant publicly disclosed news, in this case it’s Bellring Brands (NYSE: BRBR) 2022 Q4 earnings release, to obviously update you on the performance of brands in that portfolio, but also use it as the backdrop to discuss market insights within the active nutrition formats of the liquids, powders, and bars. BellRing Brands is a portfolio that owns a collection of convenient nutrition brands like Premier Protein, Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, and Joint Juice, which was previously wholly-owned by Post Holdings. A fast-paced and busy lifestyle is pushing consumers to switch to quick and healthy meal options. This has resulted in the increased household penetration of RTD protein shakes that promote active lifestyles. Bellring Brands had a strong 2022 Q4 with net sales reaching $379.2 million, which was up 11.5% YoY. Premier Protein (81% of BellRing Brands total revenue) grew 10.1% YoY because it was able to exercise pricing power because of its strong brand equity in the inflationary market. Dymatize Nutrition was up 31.6% YoY stemming from price increases. I also give some more detail later in the content about why both Premier Protein and Dymatize struggled with comparative volumes. Finally, I explain why the voluntary product recall, that was initiated by one of the company’s contract manufacturers, might not be much of a problem to available supply and brand equity at all based on information that I found throughout the financial documents.

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Did y’all really think the party was over for Celsius Holdings after the PepsiCo deal? Come on man! Celsius Holdings (NASDAQ: CELH) hit another record quarterly revenue ($188 million - up 98% YoY) and represented its 17th consecutive quarter of sequential growth for the energy drinks brand. While Celsius energy drinks saw massive growth in convenience stores, mass retailers like Walmart, the club channel, and the Amazon marketplace...the big news this quarter was that the brand announced they passed Bang Energy to become the third most popular energy drink in the U.S. market. Now…hold your horses on getting super excited about that. Firstly, this is based on one week data from IRI. Secondly, Celsius is beating a Bang Energy brand that is battered, bruised, and confused where they are at right now. Just like when retailers were delisting Coke Energy, Celsius is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Bang Energy delisting process. So, Celsius is gaining incremental shelf space on that change, but you can’t assume Bang Energy or other fast charging energy drink brands like GHOST, C4, Alani Nu, or Ryse Fuel are going to make it easy for them to retain it long-term.

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Will revamping SlimFast and BSN be the answer to solving the struggles of both Glanbia Performance Nutrition brands? Glanbia Performance Nutrition had 2022 Q3 revenue growth of 13.7% YoY on a constant currency basis from strong pricing increases. They also benefitted from the mid-2021 acquisition of LevlUp, a gamer (esports) nutrition brand. Glanbia Performance Nutrition is one of two wholly-owned segments of Glanbia plc (LON:GLB), a multi-billion dollar global nutrition company. The brands in the Glanbia Performance Nutrition portfolio include; Optimum Nutrition, BSN, think!, Isopure, Amazing Grass, and SlimFast. I'll use the recent earnings report, earnings call, and associated news to update you on how Glanbia Nutritionals and Glanbia Performance Nutrition is performing against the complex operating environment. Additionally, I'll dive deeper into Glanbia Performance Nutrition categorial performance (performance nutrition, healthy lifestyle, weight management, and international). Finally, I share a collection of hot takes or things I’m left pondering about Glanbia at this current time, which includes the Slim Fast brand overhaul, BSN getting back into bodybuilding, and why your sports nutrition brand shouldn't follow the leader during this current recessionary period.

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