Who's buying food &
beverage brands in
2026, and at what price.

Every food and beverage founder I talk to has one of two numbers stuck in their head, and they're wildly far apart. One group read that Danone paid over a billion dollars for Huel and Smithfield paid $450M for Nathan's Famous, and they've decided the category is printing money. The other group watched a friend sell a real, profitable snack brand for a low single-digit multiple of EBITDA and walk away underwhelmed. Both numbers are real. They just belong to different brands.

Here's the honest frame. Food and beverage trades at a discount to beauty and to most premium consumer categories, for one structural reason we'll get to: margin. As of Q1 2026, the sector benchmark sat around 3.1x enterprise value to sales and roughly 14.7x EV to EBITDA, per Investec's food and beverage valuation work, and EBITDA multiples compressed toward the 10 to 11x range through 2025 as cost pressure and softer volumes bit, per Baker Tilly's food and beverage M&A coverage. That's your anchor. The 2026 deals sit right on top of it.

I've sat on the side of the table that sets these numbers. At WIN Brands Group we built consumer brands and we bought brands to fold into the portfolio, which means I've run the quality-of-earnings work that takes a founder's reported numbers apart line by line. Food and beverage is the category where that work bites hardest, because the margin is thinner and the working capital is heavier, so a number that looks clean on a deck rarely survives the data room intact.

This is the reference version. Every named 2026 food and beverage acquisition worth knowing, the three buyer camps writing the checks, the revenue and EBITDA multiples that actually get applied, where the venture money is flowing, and what separates a brand that clears the sector average from one that gets repriced down. It reads as a living page. I update it as the deals land, and this pass is current to July 2026.

One caveat before the tables. Enterprise value and revenue timing are rarely disclosed cleanly, so several of the implied multiples here are approximations drawn from reported deal values and trailing sales. Where a figure is reported by trade press rather than officially confirmed, I say so. Treat these as the shape of the market, not a quote on your specific brand.

The multiple food and
beverage brands
actually sell for.

Food and beverage brands sold for a median of roughly 10 to 11x EBITDA through 2025, down from the low-to-mid teens a couple of years earlier, per Baker Tilly, on an EV to sales benchmark near 3.1x, per Investec's Q1 2026 update. That's the anchor, but it hides a wide spread. Branded, scaled assets still clear 12 to 16x EBITDA when a strategic wants them. Sub-scale and commodity-adjacent brands change hands at 6 to 10x, and distressed assets go for less than a single turn of revenue.

Look at the 2026 deals with disclosed math and the pattern holds. Smithfield paid $450M for Nathan's Famous at $102 a share, an implied 2.9x sales and about 12x EBITDA, per the company's filing. Marzetti paid $400M for Bachan's on roughly $87M of trailing net sales, an implied 4.6x sales, a rich number that reflects how fast Bachan's was growing. Danone paid about $1.15B for Huel on £214M of FY24 revenue, an implied 3.4x sales. B&G Foods bought the College Inn and Kitchen Basics broths for $110M at a reported 5.5x adjusted EBITDA. Four brands, four very different numbers, and each maps to how fast the brand was growing and how much profit it actually threw off.

Why a range instead of a single number? Because food and beverage isn't one category. A fast-growing functional-beverage brand and a steady pantry-staple brand live in different valuation universes at the same revenue. The RTD and better-for-you brands with real velocity get a growth conversation. The mature, low-growth grocery brands get a cash-flow conversation. Both are legitimate. They just produce very different checks, and anchoring on the wrong one is how founder expectations get set up to fail.

The category also sits structurally below beauty. Beauty brands cleared roughly 3.6x revenue on average from 2022 to 2025, and the breakout names went far higher, because a 65 to 75% gross margin funds the marketing engine a buyer is really paying for. Food and beverage runs a much thinner gross margin, often 25 to 45%, so every dollar of revenue converts to far less profit and commands far less per dollar at exit. I broke down why the beauty category clears a richer multiple separately. The short version: margin decides the multiple, and food margin is thin.

The 2026 food and
beverage deal
board.

The 2026 deal calendar has been busy, with strategics doing most of the buying and a handful of large disclosed prices setting the reference points. Here are the named deals worth knowing, with the buyer, the price, and the implied multiple where it's calculable. Amounts come from company filings and releases where disclosed, and are labeled reported where the figure traces to trade press rather than an official disclosure.

A few of these deserve a sentence on their own. Danone's $1.15B move for Huel was the category's marquee DTC deal of the year, and the logic was explicit. Huel runs a 59% gross margin across roughly 25,000 retail doors, but its 8.5% EBITDA margin sits well below Danone's, per reporting on the deal. So Danone is buying a high-gross-margin brand with a DTC engine and a credible path to a mid-teens EBITDA margin over three to five years. That's a strategic paying ahead of current profit for growth and capability it can't build fast enough itself.

Danone kept going. In June it agreed to acquire Australia's Made Group, best known for Cocobella coconut water and Rokeby protein smoothies, adding a business with more than EUR 300M in annual sales to push high-protein and gut-health products across Asia-Pacific, per Danone's newsroom. Nestle, meanwhile, moved the other way on some assets, taking full ownership of German meal-replacement brand yfood while exploring a sale of its roughly $1.3B ice-cream business. When the majors trim in one place to buy in another, that reshuffling is exactly what reopens the window for sellers, the same dynamic running through the broader consumer M&A market in 2026.

The spirits and RTD shelf consolidated hard. E&J Gallo bought Four Roses bourbon back from Japan's Kirin for up to $775M including a $50M earn-out, returning an iconic distillery to US ownership after 83 years, per Gallo. Mark Anthony Group paid $325M for The Finnish Long Drink, Molson Coors picked up Monaco Cocktails through Atomic Brands, Bacardi bought out the rest of Teeling Whiskey, and Constellation took full control of non-alcoholic HOPWTR. The through-line is that the biggest beverage owners are buying growth and format optionality, from craft spirits to zero-proof, rather than building it.

The three camps
buying food and
beverage brands.

The 2026 buyer pool splits into three camps, and the camp that buys you shapes your multiple more than the brand does. Global food majors and beverage majors write the biggest checks for proven, scaled, on-trend assets. Private-equity platforms roll up the smaller end and underwrite to cash flow. Knowing which camp you're built for tells you which process to run and which number to expect.

The first camp is the global food majors: Danone, Nestle, Lactalis, Ferrero, Bel, and packaged-food strategics like Smithfield, Marzetti, and B&G Foods. They buy brands that fill a portfolio gap or ride a trend they're behind on, and in 2026 that trend was overwhelmingly protein and functional nutrition. Danone bought Huel and Made Group, Lactalis bought UK sports-nutrition brand Protein Works, Ferrero grabbed Brazilian protein-snack maker Bold Snacks, and Bel picked up functional fruit-snack brand Brainiac. A major that needs your position and can run your brand through its distribution will pay above what a spreadsheet alone justifies.

The second camp is the beverage and spirits majors, and they were the most acquisitive of all in 2026. E&J Gallo, Constellation Brands, Molson Coors, Bacardi, Sazerac, and Mark Anthony spent the year consolidating RTD cocktails, craft spirits, and non-alcoholic formats. This camp buys distribution reach and format coverage: a big beverage owner would rather buy a fast-moving RTD or zero-proof brand than lose a decade trying to build relevance in a format that's already selling. If you're building a beverage brand with real velocity, this is often your most motivated buyer.

The third camp is private equity and platform aggregators: L Catterton, Bansk Group, Trek One Capital, ACON Investments, Highlander Partners, and the roll-up platforms. They're active mostly at the smaller end, assembling portfolios of sub-scale brands and centralizing the unglamorous functions. L Catterton took a majority of cottage-cheese maker Good Culture, Bansk took wellness-shot brand So Good So You, Trek One bought Good Karma and No Cow on the same day, and ACON took control of organic-candy maker YumEarth. Critically, this camp underwrites to EBITDA and free cash flow, which usually means a lower revenue multiple than a strategic would pay for the identical brand.

For a founder, the takeaway is to build for the camp most likely to want you. A brand engineered for a food major needs a defensible position in a category the major is behind on. A beverage brand needs velocity and a format a big owner covets. A brand aimed at a PE platform needs clean, durable cash flow more than a growth story. Trying to appeal to all three usually means being compelling to none, a recurring pattern across how consolidation is playing out in the home category and beyond.

Why the strategics
are buying protein
and function.

Strategics are buying for one reason above all in 2026: they're behind on protein, functional nutrition, and better-for-you formats, and it's faster to buy proven demand than to build it. Danone's Huel and Made deals, Nestle's yfood buyout, Lactalis buying Protein Works, and Ferrero buying Bold Snacks are all the same move, a legacy owner acquiring a position in a high-growth, on-trend category it couldn't manufacture organically fast enough.

Look at what each major is actually solving. Danone is repositioning around functional and protein-forward nutrition, so it paid up for Huel's DTC-native, high-gross-margin meal-replacement business and Made Group's high-protein RTD and gut-health lineup. Its own framing on Huel said the quiet part out loud: the high gross margin gives a credible path to a mid-teens EBITDA margin, and the DTC experience was a capability Danone wanted in-house. The revenue was only part of the thesis. Danone was buying a growth engine and a channel it didn't already have.

The DTC-capability angle changes who buys food and beverage brands. Legacy food companies grew up in wholesale and retail, so a brand that has cracked direct-to-consumer subscription, retention, and first-party data brings something the major genuinely lacks. Huel's owned-channel engine was part of the thesis, not a footnote. A food or beverage brand with real DTC economics, the kind built on disciplined contribution margin, is more valuable to a wholesale-native acquirer precisely because it's the piece they can't easily replicate.

There's a timing lesson here too. Strategics don't buy on a steady cadence. They buy in waves, driven by where their portfolio is weak and what their last earnings call promised. When Nestle signals it's shedding a $1.3B ice-cream business to focus on coffee, pet care, and nutrition, that's not just an asset for sale, it's a buyer freeing up capital to chase the categories it actually wants. Reading those signals tells you when your category's window is open, and a process run into a hungry strategic clears a meaningfully higher number than the same brand sold into a quiet stretch.

Revenue multiple or
EBITDA multiple: which
you actually get.

Food and beverage brands get valued two ways, and which one a buyer reaches for tells you how they see you. High-velocity, fast-growing brands can command a revenue multiple, roughly 3 to 5x sales and occasionally higher. Everyone else gets an EBITDA conversation: 12 to 16x for a scaled, on-trend brand a strategic covets, and 6 to 10x for a steady, profitable, more commodity-like business. The weakest and distressed assets get repriced below a single turn of revenue.

The revenue-multiple conversation belongs to brands where the buyer is paying for future revenue, not current profit. Bachan's got there: Marzetti's $400M on about $87M of sales is 4.6x, a number you only justify with a steep growth curve and a category the buyer wants to own. Huel's 3.4x sat in the same zone, carried by a high gross margin and a DTC engine. This is the momentum conversation, and it produces the headline numbers, but it only applies if your growth and margin genuinely justify paying ahead of the cash flow.

The EBITDA conversation belongs to the steady, profitable middle, which is where most food and beverage brands actually live. Nathan's Famous sold at about 12x EBITDA because it's an iconic, durable brand with a licensing model Smithfield already knew intimately. College Inn's broths went at a reported 5.5x adjusted EBITDA, a mature-grocery number. The same brand can look very different depending on whether the buyer applies an on-trend strategic multiple or a generic packaged-food one, which is another reason the buyer's identity matters as much as the P&L.

Here's the trap I watch founders fall into. A brand doing $30M at a 10% EBITDA margin dreams of 4x revenue, which pencils to $120M. But if growth has cooled and a PE platform is the realistic buyer, the conversation is 7 to 9x EBITDA on $3M of profit, which is $21M to $27M. The gap between those two numbers is enormous, and it's entirely about which multiple gets applied. In food and beverage, where margins are thin, the EBITDA conversation is the base case for most brands, and that means real profit, not just sales, is what you're building. The EBITDA line that makes a brand sellable is the number that decides the outcome.

What actually moves a
food and beverage
multiple.

A food and beverage multiple isn't arbitrary. It's a proxy for four things a buyer can underwrite: growth rate, gross margin, retail velocity, and how much of the business survives diligence. Deliver strongly on all four and you're in the revenue-multiple conversation. Miss two and you're a below-average EBITDA case no matter how good the product tastes.

The first is growth rate, and in food and beverage it moves the number more than anything. A brand growing 40% gets a fundamentally different conversation than one growing 5%, because a buyer is paying for a curve, not last year. Bachan's earned its 4.6x by being one of the fastest-growing sauce brands in the country. The catch is that the growth has to be real and repeatable, not bought with deep trade spend and promotion, because a buyer rebuilds your growth net of the discounting and prices the fragile version down.

The second is gross margin, which sets the ceiling on everything. Food and beverage runs thin, often 25 to 45%, so every point of durable gross margin matters more here than almost anywhere. Huel's near-60% gross margin is exactly why Danone could pay a revenue multiple and still see a path to a healthy EBITDA margin. A brand carrying a fragile margin, propped up by a single co-packer, a favorable freight arrangement, or optimistic slotting assumptions, gets that margin normalized down in diligence. The same discipline that governs category-specific unit economics is what a buyer stress-tests first.

The third is retail velocity and distribution quality. In food and beverage, the number a buyer trusts most is velocity: units per store per week. A brand that turns fast on shelf and holds its retail placements is proving durable demand, which is worth more than raw revenue that leans on a handful of accounts. Concentration is the flip side. A brand where one retailer or one club channel holds the whole P&L hostage carries a discount, because the buyer is pricing the risk that the account walks. Diversified, high-velocity distribution gets the high end of the range.

The fourth is what survives the data room. This is where food and beverage brands lose the most value, because the category has heavy working capital, trade-spend accounting that's easy to get wrong, and co-manufacturing arrangements that can hide risk. Clean, accrual-based books, honest trade-spend accruals, and funded working capital protect your multiple. A surprise in diligence doesn't just cost you the specific problem, it makes the buyer question everything else and reprices the whole deal. Running your own quality-of-earnings review before a buyer runs theirs is the single highest-leverage pre-sale move.

Where the venture
money is flowing in
2026.

The funding side is the leading indicator for the next wave of acquisitions, and in 2026 the money concentrated in exactly the categories the strategics were buying: protein, functional beverages, and better-for-you snacks. Follow the venture checks and you can watch the acquisition pipeline forming a couple of years early.

Functional and better-for-you beverages drew the biggest rounds. OLIPOP, the prebiotic-soda leader that reached a $1.85B valuation in its early-2025 Series C and surpassed $400M in annual sales, per CNBC, reportedly raised fresh capital in 2026 after passing on acquisition interest from Coca-Cola and Red Bull. The Ryl Company raised a $20M Series C for RTD tea, and a wave of smaller functional-drink brands, from Neutonic to Throne Sport Coffee to Just Ice Tea, took growth capital. When a category is both consolidating at the top and raising aggressively underneath, that's a category with real momentum.

Protein and better-for-you food was the other magnet. Brami raised a $33M Series B for high-protein lupini pasta, Mosh raised $13M for brain-health protein bars, and Khloe Kardashian's Khloud raised $15M for protein popcorn. Evergreen Waffles, Maxine's Heavenly, and Jesse & Ben's all took rounds for better-for-you takes on familiar formats. And Nutrabolt, maker of C4 Energy, tapped JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America for a US IPO that could raise up to $1B on a roughly $1B revenue run rate, per Reuters, a reminder that the biggest functional-nutrition brands now have a public exit path too.

The lesson for an operator is to read the funding map as a heat map of buyer intent. The categories raising the most today are the ones the strategics will be shopping in 18 to 36 months, because venture-funded growth is what creates the scaled, on-trend targets a major eventually wants. If you're building in protein or functional beverage, you're in a hot lane. If you're in a category the venture money has left, plan for a patient, EBITDA-led process rather than a competitive auction.

The low end, distress,
and what a weak
brand fetches.

Not every food and beverage exit is a premium. The low end of the 2026 market shows what a weak or sub-scale brand actually fetches, and it's sobering. Hain Celestial sold its North American snacks business, including Terra chips and Garden of Eatin', to Snackruptors for $115M on roughly $343M of sales, an implied 0.34x revenue, because the unit carried negligible EBITDA and Hain was simplifying a struggling portfolio, per the company's filing.

That sub-1x-revenue outcome is what happens when a brand is scaled but unprofitable, or when a corporate seller needs to shed a non-core unit to fix its balance sheet. It's a divestiture, not a celebration, and it's a real part of the market. Several 2026 deals were out-of-bankruptcy or distressed sales at the smaller end, from Kombucha Town's bankruptcy sale to a string of quiet asset deals that never generated a press release. The floor under food and beverage is much lower than the floor under beauty, because thin margins mean a brand can be doing real revenue and still be worth very little if it doesn't convert to profit.

The category also carries genuine cyclical risk, and 2026 showed it. Kirin sold Four Roses as the US whiskey market cooled, and the broader spirits shelf softened after years of premiumization. A brand riding a trend that turns can go from a competitive auction to a distressed sale faster than founders expect. The buyers know this, which is why durability, real repeat purchase, and diversified distribution get paid for and momentum alone does not. A trend is not a moat, and the difference shows up hardest at the low end of the market.

For a founder, the distressed end is a warning about sequence. The worst position is scaling revenue without scaling profit, because it leaves you dependent on the next raise and vulnerable to a down round or a fire sale if capital tightens or the trend cools. Building durable gross margin and real profitability isn't just how you earn a premium multiple, it's how you avoid becoming the 0.34x line in someone's deal board. The diligence red flags that make a buyer walk are almost always the same ones that push a brand toward the low end in the first place.

The runway to a
food brand worth a
premium.

If you intend to sell, the worst time to start engineering your multiple is the quarter before you go to market, because every shortcut shows up in the data room. The right runway is roughly 12 to 18 months, long enough to build margin, velocity, and a clean financial story that look like the natural state of the business. Here's how that work sequences in food and beverage, in the order that actually compounds.

A caveat worth stating plainly: not every brand should be engineered for a sale, and a multiple built only to flip a business tends to be brittle. This runway works because it builds a better business either way. Higher durable margin, faster velocity, diversified distribution, and clean books are good for the company whether or not you ever sell. Do the 12 to 18 months and decide to keep operating, and you've still got a healthier, more cash-generative brand.

The food and beverage multiple is never magic and never random. It's a proxy for growth, margin, velocity, and durability, and the 2026 deals map cleanly onto those levers. The premium exits, Danone's Huel and Marzetti's Bachan's, went to brands that delivered on all of them. The sector-average and below is where the thin-margin, slow-growth, single-account brands end up, and the 0.34x floor is where the unprofitable ones land. Knowing which part of that distribution you're building toward, and building deliberately for the buyer most likely to want you, is the entire game. For the cross-category view, the multiples across every consumer category, the running tracker of 2026 consumer exits, and the map of who owns which consumer brand put food and beverage in context.

If you're building a food or beverage brand toward a sale and you want to know what an acquirer will actually pay, and what's quietly capping your multiple, that's exactly the buy-side work I've run, applied to your brand before a buyer applies it to you. The consumer commerce practice exists for this pre-deal work, and the DTC Growth Scorecard is a fast first read on where your brand sits.

Questions founders
ask about a food and
beverage exit.