Premium CPG · 01 · Answer

Should a premium food brand sell direct to consumer or through retailers?

Q: Should a premium food brand sell direct to consumer or through retailers?

On the only clean three-way split in the segment, direct neither saved the business nor sank it — Olaplex's DTC grew 3.1% while its professional channel grew 5.5% and retail fell 8.3%, on a total that was flat. And the brands that started direct mostly ended up in retail anyway.

On the only clean three-way split in the segment, direct neither saved the business nor sank it — Olaplex's DTC grew 3.1% while its professional channel grew 5.5% and retail fell 8.3%, on a total that was flat. And the brands that started direct mostly ended up in retail anyway.

The evidence

The one clean channel split that exists.

Olaplex FY2025: Professional $153.3m, up 5.5%. DTC $139.3m, up 3.1%. Specialty Retail $130.4m, down 8.3%. Total $423.0m, flat against $422.7m. Direct grew slower than the professional channel and faster than retail, on a total that did not move.

The direct-to-retail path is the common one.

Honest Company was founded direct and now takes about 91% of revenue through retailers and their websites, with Amazon alone at 39%. rhode reached $212m in net sales as a DTC brand and then moved to retail by being acquired rather than by building the motion.

Other disclosed channel mixes.

e.l.f. Beauty: retailers 76%, e-commerce 24% in FY2026. Simply Good Foods: e-commerce around 22% for Quest, 19% for Atkins, 26% for OWYN of US gross sales. Celsius, Vital Farms and Utz disclose no DTC share at all.

No customer acquisition cost figure appears here, and that is deliberate.

Every CAC benchmark we could locate was published by a party selling the remedy — attribution vendors, growth agencies, consultancies, a fractional-CFO firm. None published a methodology, a sample frame or a definition of “customer.” Commercial interest: 100% of the available field.

The defensible substitute, audited.

e.l.f. Beauty spent $399.8m on marketing and digital in FY2026, approximately 24% of net sales. That is acquisition-spend intensity from a company that grew through exactly these channels. It is not CAC and should not be called CAC.

What would have to be true for this to be wrong

If your product needs demonstration, refrigeration or a service relationship that a shelf cannot carry, the channel question is settled by the product and the comparison set above does not apply. These figures describe brands whose unit is a box.

Sources: SEC EDGAR full-text search and company filings, with each figure's period stated above. AI-answer measurements are CULT+MATH primary research, criteria registered before retrieval. Published 2026-10-21 by Ipalibo Da-Wariboko, CULT+MATH LLC. Figures carry the date they were pulled; where a number could not be sourced, this page says so and gives none.

This is one of six decisions covered in the premium CPG decision brief — each with the evidence behind it, who owns it, who it is contested with, and what would have to be true for the answer to flip.

See the brief →