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Hi hello! It’s that time of year again when tens of thousands of foodie aliens descend on Anaheim for a week of Snacks, Drinks & Rock n’ Roll at Brandland.

The hottest trend at Expo West this year? Hundreds of indie brands are still in business with access to millions of collective customers. Let’s celebrate THAT.

Resilient founders always find a way to...

• Not wait for permission/$$$ to innovate.

• Fight for shelf space after a test-run.

• Fund the inventory run.

• Reduce costs of goods sold.

• Renegotiate vendor contracts.

• Get press because they have a story to tell.

• Design it themselves when the budget is zero.

• Cut underperforming SKUs that they loved.

• Launch new, customer inspired products.

• Split the cost of in-store demos & campaigns.

• Pivoted not once, but twice. Maybe 3x??

• Do right by the team when downsizing.

• Be kind to the competition in the aisle.

• STAY on the shelf for many years.

• Be vulnerable in the founder group chat.

These are the attributes of CPG founders worth betting on for your grocery stores, investment portfolio, and equity-for-agency services.

Another way resilient founders future-proof their brands is ensuring they have a solid insurance foundation for growth. I recently joined the board of SecureCPG and couldn’t be prouder to walk the show this week with Will.

SecureCPG is a founder-forward approach to insurance backed by decades of expertise across our founders, insurance partners, investors and industry advisors. Most brands either overpay for insurance or are underinsured for hyper-growth or worst-case scenarios. Think protecting your inventory, equipment, launching new products, packaging revisions, safety & recall/withdraws, workers comp, and everything in between. Learn more from SecureCPG’s head of business development Russ on Foodbevy’s podcast.

The data gymnastics that went into this guide

Just like your brands, we spent the past year preparing for this week, but in a very different way. Our hard launch is this annual guide to What to Eat & Drink at Expo West featuring new and notable exhibitors, leveraging insights from Amrit’s ongoing research and Supermercato database a.k.a the Brandelorean time machine. Hundreds of hours, photos, slide designs, chats with your teams, grocery tours, and tastings go into this guide to help retailers, investors & friends of Indie CPG see what’s new and next at the show.

This is a new guide format we’re trying. Hopefully it’s still fun to read, more shareable, and easier for you to save your fave slides to use on-the-go at the show! Feel free to share slides on Instagram or LinkedIn and tag the brands and us.

We’re friends with many brands featured throughout the guide and our inbox is open to the rest of you if you’d like to chat about your aisle, meet new founder friends for partnerships, or ask us for agency and tech recommendations. My email is [email protected] or send a message to @indiecpg on IG 👋

Omissions are never intentional. We focused on newer companies this year as well as established indie brands (and a few mainstream buyouts) launching new products, partnerships, and flavors in last year (or so) that we hope you’ll find interesting too. There’s something for everyone here - we cover all the aisles to help grocery buyers shop this week, as well as some antidotes for when the trade show tummy ache hits.

To the founders reading: We hope you know there are SO many community leaders, agencies, retailers, investors, journalists, friends, and customers (your most important stakeholder) collectively rooting for you like an underground Avengers squad. Check out the incredible brand building resources the kind folks at Nosh & BevNet, Foodboro, Startup CPG, Foodbevy, Naturally Network, CPGD, and SKU have in store for you too!

Lastly, an extra special thank you to our friends at kooz, Daniel at Front Page Retail (find him this week if you sell in Florida grocery stores!), Alex at Boredom Kills Creative from across the pond in the UK, and all the women at Wonderkind for collaborating with us going into this week, and to Delaney, Kendall, Sarah, Nate, and Kaitlin for the late night design feedback.

Can't hardly wait to see you this week and try your new products and flavors.

We got the vision, now let’s have some fun

Friends of Indie CPG are hosting happy hours at their booths too 🐠🍸🍭

And we still have some temp tattoos to giveaway from The Taste of Ink collaboration we did with Aura Bora at Expo West 2023. Kids love them 😉

Now back to the Goodies you came here for

After this week, we’re launching an anthology album of an archive here on Beehiiv featuring all of our past newsletters, collaborations, resources, and public research since 2019 on what’s new & next in CPG with an indie, global flavors, diverse founders, and better-for-you lens on the market.

Which means you have to subscribe to read our (totally free) guide to Expo West 2024 and future content. Satisfunction guaranteed.