Chicken In A Biscuit, Messi No Más, And a Can Of Cod

0:05Monica Watrous:Welcome to the CPG Week podcast by BevNet and Nosh. I'm Monica Watrous, here with my co-host, Lukas Southard. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe on your listening platform of choice. Here's the latest in food and beverage industry news. Wild Brands has become known for its chips made with chicken breast, egg whites, and bone broth. Now the company is hatching a plan to create a much broader protein snacking platform. Its extension into the cracker aisle has unleashed a barnload of possibilities, all because it had to retool its manufacturing operation to meet the requirements of the new product.

0:42Monica Watrous:Wild Protein Crackers is a line of oven-baked crackers made with chicken breast, chicken bone broth, and cheese that delivers 12 grams of protein per serving, or roughly four times more protein than leading cheese cracker brands. In April, the Lexington, Kentucky-based manufacturer opened a new 130 ,000-square-foot USDA-regulated facility that will expand its production capacity sixfold. It includes specialized equipment to support a broad pipeline of protein-forward snack formats built around chicken breast as the primary ingredient. The company invested, quote, tens of millions of dollars into the project, according to founder and CEO Jason Wright.

1:25Monica Watrous:The Cracker launch marks a significant step in the company's evolution from a single product disruptor into a broader snack platform as it scales beyond$100 million in annual sales and more than 30 ,000 retail doors nationwide. Wild initially built its business around its chicken-based chips with a formulation that stood apart from traditional protein snacks that rely on powders or isolates. But translating that concept into a Cracker format proved significantly more complicated. Conventional cracker manufacturing systems couldn't handle Wild's chicken-based dough, forcing the company to source equipment from Europe originally designed for bread and pizza-style dough applications.

2:06Monica Watrous:Distribution for the crackers is beginning nationally across retailers including Costco, Sprouts, Target, Sam's Club, Buc-ee's, and 7-Eleven, with broader expansion planned throughout the summer. And crackers are only the beginning. Wright said the new facility is being built with the flexibility to eventually support pretzels, tortilla chips, pita chips, and shaped crackers similar to goldfish, positioning Wilde to continue expanding its real protein platform across the snacking aisle. Just in time for the World Cup this summer, soccer superstar Lionel Messi's sports drink brand, Moss Plus by Messi, is shutting down.

2:47Backed by Mark Anthony Brands, the short-lived positive hydration brand came out of the gates hot in 2024. Mark Anthony Brands CEO Phil Rossi confirmed the co-venture had concluded at the start of the year and told BevNet in email response that many great milestones were achieved. However, despite our best efforts, we did not achieve all of our objectives. Consequently, after careful review and discussion with Lionel Messi's team, we made the decision back in January 2026 to phase out Moss Plus by Messi. Details on the unachievable objectives remain murky, but suspicions that the brand had failed to gain as much of a foothold as it had hoped began to circulate when Moss Plus announced it had cut staff amid a pivot away from DSD late last year.

3:39At the time, a company spokesperson had said, quote, we are not ending the brand, but rather slowing down. The brand had begun to transition its 16.9 ounce PET plastic bottles into a 12 ounce aluminum slim can, but it appears the writing was already on the wall. Moss Plus dollar sales were up 105 % in the 52 weeks ending April 19th, according to Sakana data. Yet the brand's$16.7 million base pales in comparison to Gatorade's $7.6 billion share of the pie, or Coke's Body Armor and Powerade brands, which both tallied $1.4 and$1.3 billion respectively. While there has been a number of insurgent sports drink brands in recent years, attempting to carve out territory from these three strategic back brands is no easy task.

4:36Prime was another brand that rose quickly and has been steadily losing share in the category, although it hasn't appeared to shut down completely. Barcode is another brand that comes to mind. They were gaining a lot of momentum and partnering with various NBA teams, but has gone quiet in the last year. Yet there are a few brands still vying for relevancy in the sports drink category. Electrolit has grown to 6 % of the category in dollar sales with over three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue. And Roar Hydration has also been building and is now slotted as the eighth highest selling brand just over Moss Plus, according to recent Circona tracking.

5:18Monica Watrous:All of this is happening in the context of PepsiCo announcing an overhaul of its Gatorade portfolio with new hydration types of occasions like longer lasting and faster acting? There's a lot of kind of readjusting in sports drinks. I think for a long time, Gatorade was, you know, considered just sports drink and hydration brand. And now there has been somewhat of a blurring in the lines between what is a hydration brand and what is a sports drink brand. Some are more kind of athlete focused. Some are more for everyday hydration. And you see a brand like Unwell that has done pretty well in terms of launching as a hydration brand, but also expanding into other sets like clear protein and energy and kind of becoming a platform as Gatorade has done and seems to be emphasizing recently across the kind of need states of hydration and electrolyte infused beverages.

6:16Monica Watrous:Turning to a different segment of the functional beverage market, menstrual relief. Typically, consumers seeking relief for menstrual cycle pain and discomfort need to scour the drugstore aisles. The Cycle, a startup functional beverage brand now available nationwide in Sprouts, wants to put period relief right at the checkout. Founded in 2025 by CEO Anastasia Sarton, the cycle produces a line of functional, quote, period drinks made with sea buckthorn, sometimes called Himalayan holy fruit. The ingredient can provide relief and comfort during each stage of the menstrual cycle, according to Sarton.

6:56Monica Watrous:The tech entrepreneur began brewing the cycle for herself while seeking a solution for her own intense menstrual symptoms. After finding that shots of C. Buckthorn greatly improved her symptoms, friends began requesting she brew the drink for them, ultimately leading to her making her first leap into the consumer products industry with the brand's first production run taking place last September. Packaged in 8.4-ounce cans, the cycle comes in four varieties, pre-period comfort, period comfort, peri-comfort, and meno comfort, each designed for different hormonal stages with unique functional ingredients alongside the consistent use of C.

7:36Monica Watrous:buckthorn. The drinks can be consumed throughout a woman's menstrual cycle, with the pre-period comfort recommended for up to two weeks before one's period begins, while meno comfort is designed for older women experiencing menopause. Sartan said there is no minimum or maximum to how much consumers should drink, suggesting they can be consumed as long as symptoms persist or even just for refreshment. Rather than position the cycle as a supplement or a niche drink tucked away in the pharmacy section of a store, Sartan believes the cycle can and should be marketed as a mainstream product. That's been the strategy with its rollout into Sprouts, the brand's first national retail partner, where it's being sold in coolers alongside other functional drink brands.

8:21Monica Watrous:Besides Sprouts, the brand can also be found in Lazy Acres, Rainbow Farms, and Fraser Farm, in addition to other independent retailers. The company is also preparing to launch on Amazon. Although I'm sure it's okay for men to drink it, I don't know if there's going to be a whole lot of male consumers that are going to be picking up the cycle for a refreshing drink at various grocery stores. Yeah, that's a fair point. But the total addressable market is about half of the population. So I don't think that it's too niche. I think that most females experience menstrual cycles. And who knows, I don't know what other functional benefits C.

9:04Monica Watrous:Buckthorn may provide, but it may have broader applications beyond women during that time of the month. So from menstrual cycle support with sea buckthorn to seafood for protein support, David Protein is at it again. Positioned primarily in the nutritional bar category, David has launched a tinned cod product. It is the second time the brand has turned to the seafood set after launching a wild-caught frozen cod product last summer. While the move might be seen as a publicity stunt masked as a marketing campaign, David has continued to carry its frozen cod fillets on its D2C website. The canned cod product, or cod2 as the company is calling it, is intended to focus consumers on the portability of the brand's bars and tinned fish, I suppose.

10:02Both cod products were designed by the brand agency Dayjob. David communications lead, Marcos Bitsikakis told Nosh that oftentimes, quote, companies treat product as marketing as if they're almost pranking their audience. And that's definitely not been our approach. Our approach has always been to still offer something of material value. And that's why we plan to expand upon it even further. We'll see how the tinned cod goes, but it definitely is drawing attention as it was meant to. Monica, I'm interested to know you purchased the original David Cod last summer and was relatively unimpressed with the company's suggestion to boil the cod with no seasoning to maintain its protein density.

10:47Are you planning to crack a can of David Cod?

10:52Monica Watrous:Yeah, maybe I'll give it a spin. I just, I'd have to add my own seasoning, I guess. I think it's really on brand for David in terms of what they've done so far. and I think there is something to be said that a tinned cod product is probably more approachable than the cod fillets. I can't wait to see what cod three is. Cod sticks maybe? Here are some other notable bits of news from the week. The perfect puree of Napa Valley is expanding into the elevated bar ingredients category with its acquisition of Strongwater, a maker of craft bitters, mixers, and functional beverages. The parent company of Splenda, Heartland Food Products Group, announced its intention to acquire the America's business of whole earth brands, adding a slate of sweetener brands to its portfolio.

11:44Monica Watrous:And finally, five years after debuting online, Oppo Pop is in the midst of attempting to make its biggest retail push to date, opening last month in 3 ,000 Walmart locations across the country. For these stories and more, become an insider at BevNet and Nosh. That wraps up this edition of CPG Week by BevNet and Nosh. Thank you to our audio engineer, Joshua Pratt. Our director is Mike Schneider, and our designer is Erin Willett. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe on your listening platform of choice, and we will see you next time.

12:27Thank you.