In the space of about ten weeks this spring, three of the largest consumer companies on earth each wrote a check for a brand that did not exist a decade ago. Danone bought Huel. Unilever bought Grüns. Church & Dwight bought Miss Mouth's Messy Eater. L Catterton put Thorne on the block at a number that would have sounded delusional two years ago. After a long stretch where strategics sat on their hands and founders quietly wondered whether the exit market had closed for good, the buyers are back at the table.
I read these deals differently than most people who write about them, because I have sat on both sides. At WIN Brands Group I built and operated the kind of challenger brands that end up on an enterprise acquisition list. Then I crossed over and sourced and closed a several-hundred-million dollar DTC acquisition for an S&P 500 buyer, as the advisor on the corporate side of the table. So when a quarter like this one lands, I am not reading it for the headline. I am reading it for what the spread of outcomes tells the next founder and the next strategy team.
And the spread is the story. One of these deals cleared a billion dollars. Another cleared $325 million. The gap between them is where almost every real brand will actually exit, and it is the part the press releases bury.
The 2026 consumer
acquisition wave,
on one page.
Here is the run of deals that reopened the conversation. Two of them closed, one is undisclosed on price, and one is an exploration rather than a signed deal. Together they map the range a buyer will actually pay in this market.
| Target | Buyer | Price | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
Huel Meal replacement |
Danone | ~$1.2B ~22× EBITDA |
A strategic paying a premium to own a category leader in complete nutrition outright. |
Grüns Greens gummies |
Unilever | Undisclosed ~$500M Series B mark, 2025 |
A three-year-old brand absorbed into a wellness portfolio. Speed of category entry over building. |
Miss Mouth's Messy Eater Stain remover, Amazon-led |
Church & Dwight | ~$325M 4.1× sales · 11.6× EBITDA |
The realistic home run. A profitable category leader bought on disciplined math. |
Thorne Supplements / VMS |
L Catterton (exploring sale) | Up to $4B Taken private at ~$680M EV, 2023 |
A sponsor testing whether a strategic will pay up for scaled, profitable supplements. |
For context on how fast the mood shifted: the two reference points everyone still quotes are from 2025, when PepsiCo paid $1.95 billion for Poppi and Church & Dwight paid up to $880 million for Touchland ($700M plus a sales-based earnout). Those were the deals that convinced founders a billion-dollar outcome was the target. They are also the deals quietly distorting everyone's expectations.
Two deals, two completely
different valuation
frameworks.
Look at the two closed deals side by side and you can see the buyers using different lenses, on purpose. Danone paid roughly 22 times EBITDA for Huel, a premium multiple that only makes sense if you believe complete nutrition is a durable, expanding category and Huel is the brand that owns it globally. That is a strategic-conviction price, not a financial-discipline price.
Church & Dwight paid about 4.1 times sales and 11.6 times EBITDA for Miss Mouth's. On their own last four acquisitions, that is the cheapest they have been on an EBITDA basis. They bought a brand doing roughly $80 million in net sales at a 35 percent EBITDA margin, the number one stain treatment on Amazon with ninety thousand reviews, and they bought it on math a CFO can defend in a board meeting without flinching.
"A premium multiple is a statement about the category. A disciplined multiple is a statement about the brand. The 2026 wave has both, and founders need to know which one they are pitching."
There is one more wrinkle worth naming. Miss Mouth's came out of the Thrasio estate, and Thrasio is bankrupt. So part of that 11.6 times was not pure strategic logic, it was a good asset at a motivated price. That matters, because it means the cleanest comp in the quarter carries an asterisk: the buyer got a deal partly because the seller had to move. Do not build your own valuation model on someone else's distress.
The billion-dollar deals
are the exception.
The $325M deal is the rule.
This is the part I want every founder to sit with. The Poppi, Huel, and Grüns headlines set an anchor in people's heads that a great consumer brand exits for a billion dollars or more. For all but a tiny handful of brands, that number is fantasy. A $1B-plus outcome requires category-defining scale, a genuine bidding dynamic, and usually a few years of luck on top of execution. It is not a plan. It is a lottery ticket that occasionally pays.
A $300 to $500 million outcome, on the other hand, is a generational result that is actually within reach for a well-run brand. Miss Mouth's is the relatable case: a focused product, a dominant listing, real profitability, and a clean strategic fit. That is a path a disciplined operator can reverse-engineer. The billion-dollar path mostly cannot be reverse-engineered, which is exactly why chasing it leads founders to over-raise, over-spend, and price themselves out of the only buyers who were ever realistically going to call.
1. The anchor. A founder reads about a billion-dollar exit and quietly resets their floor. Now $400 million feels like a disappointment, even though it would change their life and their team's.
2. The over-raise. Chasing the anchor means raising capital at a valuation that only pencils if the billion-dollar exit happens. Every round after that has to clear a higher bar, and the realistic buyers get priced out one by one.
3. The stall. When the billion-dollar bid never materializes, the brand is too expensive for the strategics who would have paid a healthy $300 million, and too dependent on growth capital to stay independent. That is how a winnable exit turns into a down round.
In 2026, strategics are
buying proven demand.
Not potential.
The through-line across all four of these targets is that none of them are bets on a story. Huel has scaled revenue and a real subscription engine. Miss Mouth's is the top listing in its Amazon category with ninety thousand reviews and a 35 percent margin. Grüns built one of the largest brands in its supplement niche in under three years. Thorne more than doubled revenue from roughly $229 million to over $500 million under L Catterton, compounding north of 30 percent a year. These are not pre-product-market-fit acquisitions. They are buyers paying to own demand that has already been proven in the market.
That is a meaningful shift from the 2021 era, when strategics and growth funds would pay up for narrative and a steep top-line curve. The capital cost more now, boards are less forgiving, and every buyer in this list underwrote against profitability or durable category leadership, not just growth. If you want to be acquired in this market, the asset you are building is not a pitch deck. It is a profit-and-loss statement and a defensible position in a category a strategic wants to own.
If you're the strategic,
the window rewards
discipline and speed.
For the enterprise buyer, this quarter is a reminder that the best deals are available right now, and that the math still has to work. Church & Dwight did not stretch for Miss Mouth's. They found a profitable leader, paid the cheapest EBITDA multiple of their recent run, and moved while a distressed seller created the opening. That is the model: know your categories cold, have a target list ready, and be the buyer who can close fast when the window opens, rather than the one who spends nine months in committee while a competitor signs the deal.
The flip side is the one I watch enterprises get wrong constantly. They wait too long, let a challenger compound for two or three extra years, and then overpay defensively for a brand that has gotten more expensive and a founder relationship that has gotten more strained. The whole argument for that is laid out in the DTC acquisition playbook, and the part that decides the outcome is not the purchase price at all, it is the first ninety days after close. Buy a community-driven brand and run it through corporate marketing review and you will destroy the thing you paid for inside eighteen months.
If you're building to sell,
build the brand a buyer
can underwrite.
The clearest lesson in this whole wave is that the brands getting bought look like profitable, focused category leaders, not like growth-at-all-costs machines hoping a strategic shows up before the cash runs out. If your exit thesis depends on a billion-dollar bid, you are building for the wrong buyer. If it depends on being the most profitable, most defensible leader in a category a strategic wants to own, you are building for the buyer who is actually writing checks in 2026.
Concretely, that means margin is a feature, not an afterthought. It means owning a category position you can describe in one sentence. It means first-party data and a customer relationship that survives a change of ownership. And it means resisting the raise that only makes sense at a fantasy valuation. I go deeper on exactly which numbers a strategic underwrites in the companion piece on the $325 million exit that should reset your expectations.
The window is open. Strategics are paying premiums for category leaders and disciplined prices for profitable ones, and they are doing both in the same quarter. The founders who do well in this market will be the ones who built for the realistic exit instead of the lottery ticket, and the enterprises who do well will be the ones who moved early and integrated like they understood what they bought.
If you are building toward an exit, or evaluating a brand to acquire, the work page has the relevant case studies and the inquiry form is the fastest way to a conversation. I have been on both sides of this table, and that is the entire point of the conversation.
Building toward an exit, or evaluating a brand to buy?
I've built challenger brands that ended up on enterprise radar, and sourced and closed a several-hundred-million transaction on the corporate buy side. That dual view is what shapes every conversation about whether, how, and when a deal makes sense.
Start the conversation See the case studies →A note on sources: the consolidated read on this quarter was prompted by the consumer M&A tracking that Drew Fallon publishes in his Making Cents newsletter (he's also worth a follow on X). The deal figures here are drawn from public filings and reporting: Danone's acquisition of Huel, Unilever's acquisition of Grüns, Church & Dwight's Miss Mouth's and Touchland announcements, PepsiCo's Poppi close, and Axios reporting on L Catterton's Thorne process. The interpretation, and any errors in it, are mine.