CPG Power List: 17 Agencies and 37 People Who Can Supercharge Your CPG Brand and Boost Your Career

How founders, operators, inventors, and specialists can get a piece of the red hot $1.5 trillion U.S. CPG industry.

BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT, JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER, AND ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER

Photos: Courtesy Company

Right now, the next billion-dollar CPG brand is a concept on a whiteboard at a venture studio or a recipe a founder is testing in a shared commercial kitchen. Behind so many breakout consumer packaged goods are players who saw its potential early and helped it grow.

Liquid Death, Siete Foods, Feastables, Leisure Hydration, Béis Luggage, RxBar, Dollar Shave Club, and many, many more recent consumer hits got a significant boost or emanated from the CPG industry’s network of venture studios, incubators, and accelerators. These firms come in every size, from university programs that cost a few hundred dollars to celebrity-backed studios with eight-figure funding. Some dream up brands and recruit operators to run them. Others help founders sharpen their own ideas, find manufacturers, and land on retail shelves. Much like the 26 CPG insiders we profiled earlier this year, these firms and programs play an often unseen but vital role in a CPG idea’s success.

If you have a product idea, this is your essential guide to the people who can help you get it to market faster, cheaper, and with fewer expensive mistakes. You’ll learn:

How much equity to expect to give up, from none at all to 90 percent, depending on how much help you need

Which programs cost $500 or less, and which are free in exchange for a small stake

The revenue most accelerators want to see before they’ll take you, and which ones will work with you at the idea stage

Where to find funding of $10,000 to $250,000, plus kitchens and manufacturing for small production runs

Application deadlines for upcoming cohorts, including one that closes December 1

If you’re not a founder but want to be the person who runs that whiteboard idea, there’s a seat at the table for you too. You’ll discover:

Which studios hire CEOs for brands they’ve already validated, and what they pay in salary and equity

The experience they look for, from manufacturing expertise to time at a breakout consumer brand

How to get on their radar, whether that’s a careers email, a website form, or waiting for their recruiters to find you

“It’s really expensive to learn those lessons on your own nickel,” says Jeff Church, co-founder of Suja Juice and founder of the accelerator CPG Founders Group. Here are the people who will help you learn them on theirs.

Jump to Accelerators / Incubators / Venture Studios

Principals: Eric Schnell, executive director of BeyondCPG and founder and CEO of its parent company, BeyondBrands

Street cred: Schnell has spent 29 years in the natural products industry, co-founding 7 food and beverage brands and logging 5 exits, including Steaz, which he calls the first organic soft drink brand in America. 

Focus: Better-for-you natural products in five categories: food, beverage, supplements, spirits, and beauty. The accelerator grew out of “founders helping other founders,” Schnell says. BeyondBrands kept meeting young brands that weren’t yet big enough for its consulting and fractional management services, and wanted a way to work with them.

Brands: Halfday (iced tea), Cleo Coco (natural personal care and deodorant), Fabalish (dips and sauces made from fava beans and chickpeas)

How it works: Each year, six brands go through a 12-week “mini MBA,” as Schnell calls it. Brands meet a roster of 40 mentors and classes cover operations, finance, sales, fundraising, legal, marketing, and AI. Graduation is a five-minute pitch to about 300 investors, distributors, brokers, and retail buyers. BeyondCPG takes a 5 percent equity stake that its mentors share in, so they stay on to help with retail, distribution, and fundraising. 

Case study: Cleo Coco’s Suzanna Raff joined the fifth cohort in 2024, right as Whole Foods agreed to launch nine of her SKUs nationwide. Her mentors coached her through the launch and helped her hire a head of finance and operations. “I couldn’t have done this retail launch without them,” she says. The brand grew about 165 percent from 2024 to 2025 and planning to more than double its SKU count next year at the request of Whole Foods. It’s now raising its first institutional round, with one of the program’s mentors serving as a strategic advisor.

Who they want to work with: Young brands that are at least a year in market with $100,000 to $500,000 in revenue, typically funded by friends and family or a seed round. Halfday came in with just $50,000 in revenue four years ago; today it’s in more than 20,000 stores, is nearing $20 million in revenue, and heading toward a Series B. 

How to apply: Applications open each year on April 1 at beyondcpg.org. BeyondCPG typically receives about 100 applicants, extends offers to six in August, and closes the cohort September 1.

What’s in it for you: In exchange for 5 percent equity, founders get a network of 40 advisors they can call on long after graduation. Fabalish, for example, built its own manufacturing facility with help from a mentor after the program and is now a profitable $5 million brand.

2. CPG Founders Group 

Street cred: Church, a serial entrepreneur, co-founded cold-pressed juice brand Suja Juice and scaled it to $100 million within six years. Of his seven other businesses, he says four had “great turnouts” and three were “really dismal failures.”

Focus: Founders helping founders. CPG has a steep learning curve, says Church, who created the accelerator program in order to give people the opportunity to “avoid the mistakes I’ve made along the way.”

Brands: Juni (Jay Shetty’s sparking tea brand), Huxley (energy drinks), Waav Organic (smoothie cubes)

How it works: If you’re just looking to learn from Church’s 35 years of experience, you can purchase his CPG bootcamp program online for $997 and join his free WhatsApp group for founders. If you’re looking to join his accelerator program, there are two options. Church charges either $2,000 per month for one call with him or $5,000 for two calls. He provides founders in each year-long program—which requires a three-month commitment, then charges month-to-month—with access to the CPG bootcamp, a custom LLM called Babu, and monthly speakers (the most recent one was Seth Goldman, co-founder and former CEO of Honest Tea). They also participate in two pitch slams, one with former retail buyers and one with investors. The latter serves as the founders’ capstone project, with the winner getting a $10,000 investment for equity based on their latest fundraising round.

Who they want to work with: Early-stage CPG founders in search of mentorship and advice

How to apply: Submit this form through Church’s website with information on your business including your revenue, your biggest challenge, and what a breakthrough would look like for you. The program currently only has room for just one to two more founders, so apply now if you’re interested.

What’s in it for you: You don’t need to give up any equity to work with Church. “I don’t want to create all this angst around me being an owner,” he says.

Founder: Nicolas Fina, a 15-year veteran of the beverage industry 

Street cred: Culturà Ventures grew out of Fina’s beverage consulting business Art of Beverage. 

Focus: Packaged drinks in any format, including cans, powders, and tablets. 

Current obsessions: Ready-to-mix powdered drinks, stick packs, mints, sublinguals, and chewable or dissolvable tablets have all been “pretty hot this year,” Fina says—they’re also a lot cheaper for a startup to package and ship than a beverage that’s mostly water. To launch premixed Hugo spritz brand Veeela, Culturà designed custom bar carts with kegs of the beverage, to be served poolside at luxury hotels. 

Brands: Art of Beverage worked with Bones Coffee (canned lattes) and Saltd (tequila seltzers with electrolytes). It created and owns the adaptogenic drink brand Ritual Euphorics.

How it works: Culturà incubates brands and helps with formulation, packaging, marketing, and finding a co-packer as the company grows. It works with founders building from the ground up and established companies doing brand extensions, such as Miami coffee shop Panther Coffee‘s move into canned drinks. 

Secret sauce: Last year, Culturà opened its own manufacturing facility in Delray Beach, Florida, which allows beverage brands to create small runs of products to prove out a new concept or test new recipes and formats—rather than having to pay for the large runs most co-manufacturers require.

Who they want to work with: Founders and existing brands that want to be nimble and play with unconventional formulations and product rollouts. “Where we shine,” Fina says, “is being able to come in and flip the script on the traditional playbook of this is how you launch a brand.”

How to apply: Founders can hire Culturà to help build a brand from the ground up or for specific services, like help finding a co-manufacturer. 

What’s in it for you: Fina says Culturà will expand his work with Art of Beverage into venture building, and he intends to deploy its first investment fund in the near future.

4. Georgia Tech Food & Beverage Accelerator 

Principals: Aubrey Lenyard and Brandy Nagel

Street cred: Lenyard, a serial entrepreneur who launched a small-batch line of gourmet barbecue sauces called AubSauce, developed the food and beverage accelerator after working for GT’s technology incubator. Nagel has spent more than a decade as an entrepreneurship educator working with campus incubator programs.

Big cool friends: Georgia Tech, one of the country’s top-ranked public universities, which was twice named to Inc. and Fast Company’s Ignition Schools list of the top 50 global universities for entrepreneurship. The Georgia state government, including, among other departments, Gourmet Foods International, a premier specialty food distributor that works with more than 2,000 brands, including José Andrés’s CPG line. 

Focus: “Customer discovery,” says Lenyard. “In technology, you actually need to prove your hypothesis, and in food and beverage you just go on in emotion.”

Brands: EZE Top Shelf Mixers, Lawton Chicken Sausage, sincerely, BY PARYANI (gluten-free baked goods)

How it works: The program has two tracks: an........

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