How is the American economy doing? According to the Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book, economic expansion has been moderate and optimism is waning, but what about the CPG industry specifically?

 The Beige Book is a Federal Reserve System publication that collects mostly qualitative information, gathered directly from District sources. This consumer data creates an opportunity to characterize dynamics and identify emerging trends in the economy that may not be readily apparent in the available quantitative economic data. Additionally, most CPG businesses today are offered nationally through e-commerce or large brick and mortar retail chains, so it’s important to understand that America is not a one-size-fits-all economy, especially during the coronavirus.  

Because of that, the Beige Book can potentially help you with regional insights that can be applied to create advantages in your business. To save you time from reading the whole document that comes out every 45 days, I started a content series that takes five CPG industry related highlights that I found most insightful from the latest Beige Book, such as indications of out of stocks in grocery stores again and e-commerce continues to see pressure on the logistics side around holiday shopping, with the goal of sharing it along with some additional commentary on how it could potentially impact you.  

On Vol.4 of the CPG industry Beige Book, I also wanted provided some additional bonus quantitative private industry data on the 2020 Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Digital Sales performance from Adobe Analytics and Salesforce.

When you have a proven content and commerce mechanism that does $1B+ in revenues, you build an iterative second version, right? What does that have to do with the breaking news that the sports nutrition brand that Lebron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger founded named Ladder was just acquired by Openfit? Openfit is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Beachbody, the multi-level marketing company known for fitness programs like P90x and Insanity. Openfit is Beachbody repositioned within a different segment of the market. Beachbody is the creator and owner of the line of supplements called Shakeology. With the acquisition of Ladder, Openfit seems poised to replicate the workout and supplement combination of Beachbody and Shakeology, which I believe will be highly successful in helping Ladder become the sports nutrition brand it had aspirations to become found it launched in 2018.

In this latest podcast episode, I'll breakdown the most important key quarter-end financial data from the recent MusclePharm Corporation (MSLP) 2020Q1 through 2020Q3 earnings reports that were released on 11/24/2020. I'll explain why the sports nutrition brand filed a clustering of quarterly financial reports again (Note: they are not caught up to SEC disclosure requirements). Additionally, I'll update you on MusclePharm important events through a collection of publicly-disclosed news and cover a variety of risk footnotes that were in the latest set of 10-Q filings. Finally, I'll answer the cliffhanger question from the previous piece of content surrounding if MusclePharm would finally reach its goal of being profitable in 2020.

On this episode of my Pivotal "interview series", I chat with Robert Oliver, Founder & CEO of The Genius Brand, about how he saw early the power of using an Amazon strategy to build up his extremely successful supplement brand. Robert shares about how he got started working on the Amazon platform and why he launched The Genius Brand. Additionally, we talk about how unique The Genius Brand is on the Amazon platform when it launched and how that's now providing some massive value against the onslaught of Amazon private label supplement sellers. Finally, Robert Oliver also breaks down why he's been successful in 2020 with his ability to apply learnings from Nassim Taleb.

Premier Protein is once again ringing the sales bell after it rebounds from its first slip up as a publicly-traded company last quarter. Premier Protein is the key holding of the BellRing Brands (BRBR) portfolio that owns a collection of Active Nutrition businesses that also includes Dymatize Nutrition, Powerbar, Joint Juice, and Supreme Nutrition. 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. I'll utilize the recent quarterly earnings report and conference call for BellRing Brands to update you on the growth of the portfolio's largest consumer brand Premier Protein. Additionally, I'll breakdown how the RTD protein beverage category, active nutrition powders, and protein bar formats are performing in the challenging retail environment stemming from COVID-19. I'll also share some news surrounding Dymatize Nutrition being consolidated and the closure of the Dallas facility. Finally, I breakdown the BellRing Brands 2021 outlook and explain why I believe M&A activity will be in their near-term future.

I’m excited to hit you with the fifth episode of this new content series, and since the Thanksgiving holiday is fast approaching, I wanted to thank each of those in my community that have consumed any of the previous episodes. This week, I had a number of content pieces make me stop the infinite scroll, including some with a Thanksgiving theme.

On this episode you'll hear about; ◼️ The "Most 2020" Thanksgiving Main Dish  ◼️ How you can get Thanksgiving Insurance ◼️ A Metaverse will Become Publicly-Traded Soon ◼️ Bang Energy Fires PepsiCo ◼️ Oreo Takes Inspiration from Nike

How is the largest nutrition company in the world performing against a global pandemic that severely interrupts the value of their distribution strategy? The Herbalife Nutrition multi-level marketing (MLM) structure relies a great deal on a distribution model that brings value through; (1) Frequent Interaction (2) Results Shared To Customers (3) Personal connection with customers (4) Hyper-localization (5) Brick & Mortar community done mostly through what they call nutrition clubs. Theoretically, that should be severely interrupted by the “COVID-19 Effect” where face-to-face interactions, physical shopping and communities are being replaced by digital interactions, ecommerce, and isolation. This is where business theory and actual business results diverge in the anomaly that is Herbalife Nutrition. That’s because they just achieved another record net sales quarter and this growth was broad-based globally, as three of our six regions (including North America), along with 24 countries, set new quarterly net sales records. This is all pretty astounding, which begs the question of how they are doing it?

Today’s social media platforms and digital marketplaces don’t have walls or borders, but how does that affect your functional CPG brand? With a few clicks of your mouse, you can fire up your functional CPG brand’s multinational marketing and retail distribution. It's really crazy how fast and easy things can be done in 2020. Despite uncertain global markets, entrepreneurship is still in the middle of the golden era because of the growing importance of ecommerce and social media.

That all being said, one thing that has been reinforced during the "COVID-19 Effect" is that functional CPG business owners were reminded there isn't and shouldn't be a "one size fits all" approach to business domestically or multi-nationally! Being a multinational functional CPG shouldn’t mean you seek global parity. Instead, functional CPG brands should have a global template, but with local adaptations. The fancy business school jargon for this is Glocalization and it's exactly what successful functional CPG brands must do as the world becomes one, but also more fragmented. It’s a complex strategy to pull off, but if executed properly the rewards are immensely valuable.

I'll use the Celsius Holdings (CELH) 2020Q3 earnings report and conference call (released on 11/12/20), as the backdrop to talk about bigger functional energy drink categorical and strategic insights. Key points within the content includes; retail and DSD distribution increases, digital sales details with Amazon highlights, and other positive insights that show you why Celsius Holdings broke just about every internal record in the company's history this quarter. Celsius energy drinks are heating up in the market, even with resistance within some of its historically strong sales channels. That being said, the company is transforming itself from a niche energy drink brand into a real viable mainstream player that should pick up incremental trialing in the fickle beverage category as it gains ACV across major channels. I still think Celsius is in prime position to be sold in the coming 12-18 months, but current aggressive stock prices have pushed the market cap above $2B making the deal expensive.

Did you miss not having my most interesting list to listen too last week? I decided to not compete with the craziness that is called the American Election Day or I guess week or maybe month, who the heck knows really this year.

Regardless, I’m excited to hit you with another episode because I had a number of content pieces make me stop the infinite scroll this week that I believe you’ll enjoy hearing about. On this episode you'll hear about; ◼️ Mountain Dew is Getting Spicy  ◼️ Is Veblen a Species of Allbirds? ◼️ When the McDonald’s “Mc” Prefix Comes Out You Know They Mean Business ◼️ Amazon wants to replace your Office Manager with its new Dash Smart Shelf ◼️ Lululemon is Making Mirror More Competitive