CPG · Decision brief 02
Six decisions your executive team is making right now — and what the evidence says about each.
Written for the founder or CEO of a premium consumer brand that has not been acquired and is not acquiring. Each decision names the seat that owns it and the seat that contests it, carries sourced evidence, and states what would have to be true for the answer to flip.
8 pages · Evidence as of October 20, 2026 · PDF
Two acquirers in the entire 2024–2026 window disclosed a multiple. PepsiCo paid $1.95bn for poppi and $1.2bn for Siete and published no revenue for either.
The prices are knowable and the multiples are not. Every other number you will be quoted in a negotiation is derived, estimated or invented — and the brief names which two are real, on page one, before the first decision.
What is in it
- DTC, retail, or both — and when to crossDomain 4 · CEO, contested with Finance on burn. Olaplex is the only brand in the segment publishing a clean three-way split, and it says DTC neither saved the business nor sank it. No credible CAC benchmark exists anywhere in the field.
- Sell, raise, or stay independentDomain 11 · CEO, contested with the board on valuation. Two disclosed multiples in three years: 12× fully synergized EBITDA, and roughly 3× projected net revenue. Everything else is uncomputable from the filings.
- Hero SKU, or line extensionDomain 3 · Founder or CPO, contested with Sales on the shelf story. Vital Farms ran this experiment in public for four years: extensions moved the core down two points and then stopped. BellRing runs 85.9% of net sales through one brand at roughly $2bn of scale.
- Co-manufacture, or own the plantDomain 5 · CEO with Finance, contested with Ops on quality control. A single contract manufacturer produced products accounting for 54% of Olaplex's net sales. The one company that publicly reversed an owned-plant strategy never published what it saved.
- Where buyers now discover the brandDomain 12 · CEO. Premium brands are named abundantly by AI assistants and not through any source you could have placed. Asked about premium snacks, ChatGPT cited two bicycle retailers and a stock-photo CDN.
- Retailer and SKU concentrationDomain 9 · CEO, contested with Finance on economics. Top-customer concentration in this segment runs from 23% to 74% — there is no normal. Celsius published two consecutive years showing its dependence falling, which is worth more in a diligence room than any single-year number.
It closes with the executive decision matrix — CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, Legal and Risk — each with something specific to do in this category, not a generic lens.
What it is not
- Not a vendor ranking. It measures decisions and evidence, not which company is better.
- Not a forecast. Where something is an observation of one window, it says so.
- Not a market-size report. It will not tell you what any of this is worth to you in revenue.
- Not padded. 8 pages because that is what the evidence filled.
How the evidence is handled
Every figure is sourced. Where a number could not be sourced, the brief says so and gives none. Where two sources disagree on direction, it says that rather than picking the flattering one. Where a widely quoted statistic comes from a party with a commercial position, it is flagged — including where that flag weakens a point the brief is making.
The decision-maker and every decision were fixed before any source was read, and were not revised to fit what came back.
None of these your decision?
The catalogue briefs answer the decisions a category shares. A custom brief answers yours: one decision, one decision-maker, your market, with the question and what would prove it wrong registered before any data is pulled. See the custom brief →
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Licensing. A brief is sold for use inside the buying organization — read it, quote it internally, build on it in your own planning. It may not be resold, published in full, or redistributed outside your organization. Quoting a figure externally is fine with attribution to CULT+MATH and the as-of date, which is the part that makes the figure meaningful.