Consumer brand exits,
2020 to 2026,
in one ledger.

How to read
these counts.

Deal flow is the clearest read on where capital thinks a category is going, so I keep a running log of it. This page is the public version: a dated ledger of every notable consumer brand exit since 2020, brand by brand, with the price, the multiple where it was disclosed, the buyer, and a source for each. If you want the shape of the 2026 market in numbers rather than narrative, start here.

Through September 20, 2026, the underlying tracker logged 515 consumer brand transactions, of which 263 were acquisitions and control deals. This ledger covers those exits: full acquisitions, majority stakes, take-privates, and the handful of IPOs and exploratory sale processes worth flagging. It does not list pure funding rounds, which are entries, not exits. Food and beverage produced the most deals, beauty produced the richest multiples, and a third buyer type, the brand-licensing house, kept showing up on the biggest apparel names.

The twenty biggest
consumer exits of
2026 so far.

The largest disclosed consumer deal of 2026 so far is McCormick combining with most of Unilever's Foods business at $44.8B ($15.7B cash plus about $29.1B of stock), a Reverse Morris Trust rather than a cash brand purchase, announced March 31, 2026 and expected to close mid-2027 (McCormick IR). The largest completed cash beauty deal is L'Oreal's roughly 4 billion euro (about $4.6B) acquisition of Kering Beaute, which brought House of Creed and long-term licenses for Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga into its luxe division (L'Oreal, March 31, 2026). Behind it, Procter & Gamble agreed to buy Thorne for $3.8B, Intersnack took Utz Brands private for $2.9B, Clorox paid $2.25B for Purell maker GOJO, and Anta took a 29% stake in Puma for $1.8B. The table below ranks the twenty biggest disclosed exits by deal value.

Two patterns jump out of the top of the table. First, beauty and food and beverage own the biggest checks, which tracks the categories' overall deal volume. Second, the buyers are overwhelmingly strategics and CPG majors, not financial sponsors, at the very top end. L'Oreal, Danone, Clorox, Unilever, and Prestige are all buying to fill a portfolio gap, and a strategic buying a gap will pay above what a spreadsheet alone justifies. The financial buyers cluster a rung down, which is exactly where the multiples get more disciplined.

The 2026 deals that
came with a public
multiple.

Most consumer deals close without a published multiple, so the ones that disclose a ratio are the benchmark gold. Across 2026's disclosed deals, revenue multiples ran from about 0.34x for a distressed Hain snack unit to roughly 5.96x sales for Four Roses bourbon, while strategic EBITDA multiples clustered in the low-to-mid teens (Prestige, Clorox, Church & Dwight, and Smithfield all landed near 11x to 12x). The table collects every 2026 exit that carried a disclosed or credibly reported multiple. For how those ratios break down by product category, see the companion on consumer brand multiples by category.

The spread inside this table is the real lesson. Four Roses cleared nearly 6x sales because premium spirits with distillery scarcity price like trophies, while the Hain snack unit went for a third of one year's revenue because it was a divestiture with negligible profit. Both are consumer deals in the same year. The category, the margin, and the reason for the sale move the number far more than the word "consumer" ever does. If you are benchmarking your own brand, find the row that matches your category and your profitability, not the biggest headline you can remember.

The EBITDA cluster is worth internalizing too. The strategic majors, Prestige, Clorox, Church & Dwight, Smithfield, and Essity, all paid roughly 11x to 12x EBITDA for profitable, scaled, defensible assets. That is the going rate in 2026 for a clean cash-generative consumer brand bought by a major, and it is a useful anchor. If you are modeling a realistic outcome rather than a dream one, that band is a better starting point than the beauty outliers, which is a point I make at length in the realistic DTC exit breakdown.

September 2026,
then August and
July in full.

September opened on its first day with a carve-out and a buyback. Yellow Wood Partners agreed to buy Nestle's mainstream vitamins, minerals and supplements platform for US$1.0B, seven brands led by Nature's Bounty plus the US private-label supplements business, at roughly 0.83x on US$1.2B of 2025 sales, the firm's sixth significant carve-out from a global consumer major. The same morning Keurig Dr Pepper sold its full equity stake in Chobani back to the company for $800M, with Chobani also taking KDP's Allentown plant for about $125M, so the combined proceeds to KDP come to roughly $925M. Three undisclosed deals rounded out the day: Randa took UNTUCKit, Dollar Shave Club made its first acquisition in Truly Beauty, and Skyline Beauty Group bought Lumin and Meridian out of Pangaea. The month's largest unsigned situation landed on Sep 7, when Bloomberg reported L Catterton close to a controlling stake in HYROX at about EUR600M (~US$697M), which would be a rare priced comparable for a consumer fitness-experience brand. Nothing is signed.

August opened with the largest consumer transaction of the quarter. Procter & Gamble agreed to buy Thorne for $3.8B, taking the science-backed supplement brand off L Catterton's hands at roughly 5.8x revenue, a multiple almost nobody else has cleared in a year when most consumer M&A has priced between 1x and 3x. The month has not slowed since. Bain Capital agreed to buy a majority of bubble-tea chain Gong cha from TA Associates for over $635M, and Canada Goose put Baffin into the Royer Group, its first brand divestiture since buying the footwear label in 2018. The second week brought the month's biggest carve-out: Saputo agreed to sell its entire UK dairy operation to Lactalis at a GBP 988M enterprise value, about 0.8x trailing revenue, exiting Britain seven years after buying in. Two days earlier Samsonite agreed to buy 85% of BÉIS at a $210M enterprise value, which at roughly 1.0x revenue is the cleanest disclosed DTC comparable of the year.

The Thorne multiple is the number to keep. It is the cleanest public mark yet on what a scaled supplement brand with a clinical claim is worth to a strategic, and the gap between it and the rest of the 2026 tape is the whole lesson: the premium sits with brands that own a science claim, not a flavour or a founder. Gong cha is the counterweight. A scaled international chain that carried a $2B ask in May cleared at under a third of it three months later, which is the widest ask-to-clearing gap in the 2026 set.

The July window opened with a big one. Danone reportedly paid about $1.4B for Australia's Made Group to push into high-protein foods across Asia-Pacific, its second nine-figure functional-nutrition deal of the year after Huel. Authentic Brands Group added the Care Bears IP, and Amazon aggregator Olsam picked up skincare brand Wrinkles Schminkles.

Reformation priced its IPO at $15.00 on Jul 29, the bottom of a $15 to $17 range, raising $210.9M gross on 14,062,500 shares for roughly $886M of equity value against a $1B target. The company sold 9,478,821 of those shares, about $142.2M gross, and roughly $125M of the net proceeds repays a loan. It went out on $507.1M of revenue, up 15.7%, and $45M of adjusted EBITDA, which works out to about 1.75x revenue. Birkenstock went public at more than 6x. Keep that gap handy the next time an apparel brand benchmarks itself against a European heritage name, because the market paid Reformation for a supply chain with a customer list rather than for a brand. Pricing inside the range instead of above it means the book cleared without reaching, which is a reasonable outcome for the first scaled DTC-native apparel listing of this cycle. Shares start trading Jul 30 and the offering closes Jul 31.

Of the two processes open in mid-July, one has closed. Body-care brand Saltair retained Raymond James in early July and sold on Jul 29. It is in the table above. Nutrabolt, the maker of C4 Energy, has picked underwriters for a US IPO targeting a valuation of up to $1B but has not priced, so it stays on the watch list. Twenty-seven days from reported process to signed deal is quick for beauty. Usually that means the buyer was already in the room before the bank was hired.

Saltair is the July close worth studying. TSG Consumer Partners bought a majority stake in the four-year-old body and hair care brand, and both early institutional backers, The Center and Prelude Growth Partners, sold out entirely. Terms were not disclosed. Reported operating figures put the brand near $100M of trailing sales in early 2026 against roughly $150M projected for the full year, on 30% EBITDA margins. That is where the outside estimate of a $450M to $458M enterprise value comes from, and it is a comp model, not a disclosure, so hold it loosely. The ownership story is the more useful one. The Center, Prelude's beauty incubator, has now produced three exits: Naturium to e.l.f. Beauty for $355M in 2023, Phlur to TSG in July 2025, and now Saltair. TSG has bought two of the three. An incubator that hands the same sponsor a second asset inside twelve months has a process, and the sponsor on the other side of it is paying for pattern recognition as much as for the brand. Founder Iskra Lawrence moves to Chief Community Advocate. CEO Rachel Shelowitz and the leadership team stay.

The month's loudest deal is one that did not happen. Sazerac renewed its rejected approach for Brown-Forman and was turned down a second time, in public. It did not raise the April terms, it went around the board with them, writing directly to shareholders and directors to ask them to reconsider the same all-cash $32.00 per share, about $15B, a 23% premium to the prior close. Brown-Forman confirmed the approach for the first time on Jul 26 and called it not actionable, and Wolf Pen Branch, the Brown family group holding the majority of Class A voting stock, said the proposal does not align with its vision for the company. They are refusing from a weak position. Full-year organic sales were flat, Tequila and Canada were both down, and there is no permanent CEO while the search for Lawson Whiting's successor runs. Saying no twice to a 23% premium in that spot tells you the Brown family is defending control of the company, whatever the shares are worth. Sazerac meanwhile keeps buying what it can, taking a minority stake in Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila in April with exclusive nationwide distribution attached, an equity stake in RTD margarita brand SIPMARGS in May, and Dirty Shirley in March. An acquirer that cannot buy the big asset is buying small ones continuously instead. Those minority positions are not in the tables below, which track control deals only.

June 2026.

June closed the year's biggest wellness deal when Prestige Consumer Healthcare completed its $1.045B purchase of Breathe Right on the 15th, a nasal-strip brand doing about $200M in revenue at a roughly 47% EBITDA margin. L'Oreal kept building in India with a majority stake in house-of-brands Innovist, and SanMar bought blank-tee giant BELLA+CANVAS in a deal analysts read as Alo Yoga IPO prep.

Two beauty processes stayed live through June without resolving. Jay-Z's MarcyPen Capital was reported a leading contender to buy LVMH's 50% Fenty Beauty stake, and The Founders inc, the K-beauty incubator behind Anua, was reportedly exploring a purchase of Dr.Jart+ from Estee Lauder. The second one has since died: in mid-July ELC told staff it will keep Too Faced, Smashbox and Dr. Jart+ after all, reversing a divestiture that had reached final bids in May. Sometimes the exit that teaches you the most is the one the seller walks back.

May 2026.

May was the month brand-licensing houses and fast fashion made headlines. Authentic Brands Group bought the Lee denim IP for $750M plus a $250M earnout, and Shein acquired sustainability-forward DTC brand Everlane for a reported $100M. Church & Dwight paid roughly $325M for stain-remover Miss Mouth's, sold out of the bankrupt Thrasio estate at about 11.6x EBITDA.

The month also carried two of the year's most-watched exploratory processes. Purely Elizabeth was reported to be exploring a sale at a valuation of up to $600M, and Blackstone and CD&R were both circling Unilever's carved-out Magnum ice cream business. Separately, Estee Lauder and Puig ended merger talks, killing a would-be roughly $40B luxury beauty group before it existed.

April 2026.

April's marquee deal was Unilever acquiring gummy-multivitamin brand Gruns, a business under three years old running at roughly $300M in revenue. Press reports put it near $1.2B and Unilever disclosed nothing at the time, but its H1 2026 results filing has since shown the real shape: $873M for 80% of the shares, imputing a $1.1B valuation at close. Against $558M of assets acquired, roughly $315M, or 36% of the imputed value, went to intangibles alone: brand, subscriber base, growth. The remaining 20% stays with prior shareholders under a recognized buyout liability that reads as a put option, the same structure Unilever used on Nutrafol. That 36% is the number worth keeping, because it is what a strategic paid for a three-year-old DTC brand's demand, net of everything tangible. Mark Anthony Group bought RTD brand The Finnish Long Drink for $325M, and Laird Superfood added Terrasoul for $48M plus a $5M earnout.

April also produced the year's most eye-catching rumor, and it has since turned into a firm no. Sazerac made a roughly $15B unsolicited approach for Brown-Forman at about 12.5x EBITDA, aiming to put Jack Daniel's and Buffalo Trace under one roof. The board rejected it at $32.00 per share cash in May. Sazerac came back in late July on materially the same terms and was turned down again, this time as "not actionable," after the board took the views of Wolf Pen Branch, LP, the Brown family vehicle that holds most of the Class A shares. Sazerac says it will improve terms if the board engages. Two rejections in eleven weeks, with a controlling family bloc behind both, reads as a structural refusal rather than an opening position on price. Authentic Brands Group also emerged as a potential buyer for Converse at an estimated $1.7B to $2.5B as Nike refocused. That one still has not converted.

March 2026, the
busiest month.

March was the year's densest deal month and it went out on beauty. L'Oreal completed its roughly $4.6B Kering Beaute acquisition on the 31st, Henkel agreed to take Olaplex private for about $1.4B at a reported 15x adjusted EBITDA, and Danone struck its roughly $1.15B Huel deal at about 3.4x sales. Advent bought a majority of body-care brand Salt & Stone in the same stretch.

March also carried one of the year's largest exploratory tags. L Catterton was reported to be exploring a sale of supplement brand Thorne at an ask of up to $4B, with Unilever and Haleon named as possible bidders, though the company itself framed it as a process rather than a signed deal. That process closed on Aug 4, when P&G agreed to buy Thorne for $3.8B, just under the reported ask. Oddity Tech announced a $200M buyback, and Pernod Ricard and Brown-Forman were reported in early spirits-merger talks.

February and January,
where 2026 opened.

The year opened fast. January alone produced the $2.25B Clorox purchase of Purell maker GOJO, Anta's $1.8B Puma stake, and Authentic Brands Group taking majority control of Guess IP. February added Bain's $1.29B FineToday buy, Gallo's $715M Four Roses deal, and Agrolimen's $600M acquisition of fresh dog-food brand Ollie. The two tables below cover both months.

January also produced a buyout proposal worth flagging: Great Dane Ventures proposed to take pet retailer BARK private at $154M, or $0.90 a share, about 0.34x trailing sales, a reminder that not every public consumer brand is exiting at a premium. February closed with Bob's Discount Furniture going public, raising $331M at $17 a share for a roughly $2.22B valuation, the year's notable consumer IPO.

What the full ledger
tells you about
2026.

Step back from the individual rows and three patterns organize the year. Food and beverage led volume, beauty led value density, and brand-licensing houses emerged as a distinct third buyer type. Across the full tracker, food and beverage accounted for 202 of the logged items and beauty for 104, so the two categories together made up roughly three-fifths of all 2026 consumer deal activity. The table below breaks the acquisition ledger down by category.

The buyer side tells the more useful story for founders. Three camps did the buying, and each priced differently. Strategics and CPG majors (L'Oreal, Danone, Clorox, Unilever, Nestle, Church & Dwight, P&G) wrote the biggest checks for scaled, profitable, gap-filling assets, paying the low-to-mid-teens EBITDA multiples in the multiples table. Private equity and platform aggregators (Advent, Bain, L Catterton, Yellow Wood, Bansk) rolled up sub-scale brands and underwrote to cash flow, which is why they cluster a rung below the strategics on price. This is the same three-camp dynamic I break down for beauty brand acquisition multiples, and it holds across the whole ledger. For the full roster of who is buying, I keep a separate map of the institutional acquirers active in consumer.

Geography is the quieter story in the buyer column. A striking share of 2026's deals were cross-border: Anta of China taking its Puma stake, Bacardi buying out Ireland's Teeling, Reliance Retail of India acquiring Anomaly, Lactalis of France taking UK sports-nutrition brand Protein Works, and Danone reaching into Australia for Made Group. Capital chased brands that travel, and a brand with a credible path into a second region drew interest that a purely domestic one never would. If your brand exports, or plausibly could, that widens your buyer universe in a way the multiples table understates.

The third camp is the one worth naming, because it barely existed as a headline a few years ago. Brand-licensing houses, led by Authentic Brands Group, treated 2026 as a shopping year: Lee, Guess, and Care Bears all landed with ABG, which buys the IP and licenses the operating business to a partner. WHP Global did the same with Lands' End and Marc Jacobs. This is a fundamentally different exit than a strategic or a sponsor, and if your brand has strong IP but tired operations, it is increasingly a real third path. It also shifts more risk and upside into the licensing structure, which changes what "sold" even means.

There is a cautionary thread running under the trophies, too. Allbirds sold for $39M, a fraction of its former valuation; Everlane went to Shein for a reported $100M against more than $200M raised; BARK drew a buyout proposal at 0.34x sales. Distress is the flip side of this ledger, and it is a bigger story than the megadeals suggest. I track the failures and down-round exits separately in the 2026 consumer brand shutdowns and distress tracker, because a brand sold at a loss is still a data point about where the category is hard.

Timing matters as much as category. Deal flow was not spread evenly across the half-year. March was the densest month, stacked with the L'Oreal, Henkel, and Danone closings, while the first eight days of July alone already carried a $1.4B Danone deal. Strategics buy in waves, driven by their own portfolio gaps and the capital freed up when they shed a division, so a process run into a hungry buyer at the right moment clears a higher number than the same brand sold into a quiet stretch. Reading the tape is part of timing an exit well, which is half the reason I keep this ledger in the first place.

For a founder or an operator, the practical read is this: the exit environment in 2026 rewarded profitable, scaled, category-defining brands and punished capital-hungry ones, exactly as the multiples table shows. If you want to understand which side of that line your own brand sits on before a buyer decides for you, that is the work I do. The fractional DTC growth consultant exists for pre-deal readiness, and the companion 2026 M&A window explainer is where I argue what all of this activity actually means.

This tracker is maintained and updated weekly at a minimum, and more often as new deal intel lands (sometimes several times a day). It was last updated September 21, 2026. The window here runs from January 2020 to the latest update, and it extends as new deals land. Deals move from rumored to reported to verified as terms firm up, and I update the confidence and the figures when they do. If a notable exit is missing, it is either because terms were never sourced or because it closed after the last update, not because it did not matter. Use the ledger as a benchmark, not a promise: the row that matches your category and your profitability is worth more to you than the biggest number on the page.

What counts as an
exit, and how the
rows are sourced.

One methodology note behind the tables. Every figure here traces to a real source. Primary sources are the origin: for a public-company deal I link the SEC filing (the 8-K and its press-release exhibit), the acquirer's investor-relations release, or the relevant regulatory body, and treat trade press as the secondary confirmation. Verified deals cite the acquirer's investor-relations page or press release; the rest cite trade press (Retail Dive, BevNET, NOSH, Beauty Independent, BeautyMatter, WWD, Business of Fashion) or Drew Fallon's Making Cents transaction roundups, a well-sourced deal feed. Where terms were reported rather than officially disclosed, the row says so. Multiples are shown only where the acquirer or a credible report disclosed them; enterprise value and revenue timing are rarely published cleanly, so treat the implied ratios as directional. Nothing here is invented. If a number could not be sourced, it was left out.

An exit here means a brand changed hands: a full acquisition, a majority or controlling stake, a take-private, an IP-and-license sale, or an IPO. I include the notable exploratory processes too, clearly labeled, because a sale being shopped is a real market signal even before it closes. I exclude minority growth rounds and venture funding, because a brand raising money is still owned by its founders. That line matters. A $200M raise is not an exit; a $200M sale is.

Read each row as a standalone fact: brand, category, price, buyer, date, and source. Prices are the reported deal value, in US dollars unless noted, with earnouts flagged where the structure was disclosed. "Undisclosed" means the buyer did not publish terms, which is common for private and cross-border deals. "Reported" means a credible outlet published a figure the parties did not officially confirm. Multiples live in their own table in Section 02, because most rows do not carry a public one and a column full of "n/a" helps nobody.

The categories follow the tracker's own tags: food and beverage, beauty, wellness, apparel, home, pet, and other. "Other" catches the hygiene, IP, and adjacent-consumer deals that do not fit a product shelf cleanly, like Purell or Care Bears. Where a brand sits on a category line, for example a body-care brand that reads as both beauty and wellness, I tag it where the buyer and the shelf place it, and note the ambiguity in the row. The point of the taxonomy is to let you filter by where the money went, not to win a definitional argument.

A quick note on what this is, and what it is not. My companion piece, the 2026 consumer M&A window explainer, is the opinionated narrative: why the buyers came back, who is writing checks, and what they want. This page is the raw data companion to it. Fewer arguments, more rows. Read the narrative for the why; keep this one open for the what, the who, and the how much.

The biggest deals
logged, 2020 to 2026.

The 20 largest disclosed prices in the ledger. Most deals never disclose one: 427 of 1458 rows carry a price, so this is the top of the priced set, not of the market.

* Capri Holdings (Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo, Versace): agreed by both sides, then never completed. The agreed price stays on the list because it still shows what a buyer was willing to pay.

What the ledger is
made of, by category.

This ledger holds 1458 deals logged between 2020 and 2026. The rows below sum to that figure. Shares are of the ledger. Unlike a total, a category's share holds up even though coverage differs from year to year.

How the category mix
shifted, year by year.

Each cell is that category's share of the deals logged for that year. Shares are shown instead of counts on purpose. A share describes the mix inside a year, while comparing one year's row count with another's would describe our sourcing, not the market. The final row gives each year's logged total, labelled for what it is.

Where the disclosed
prices landed.

Bands over the 427 rows that carry a normalized USD figure. The denominator is those rows, never the whole ledger: a row marked undisclosed has no price, which is not the same as a price of zero.

The deals that came with
a published multiple.

104 of 1458 rows carry a revenue or EBITDA multiple. Read these as the disclosed cases, not as a distribution.

Who did the buying,
and how often.

Who did the selling,
where a seller is named.

A seller is recorded only where the source named one, so this table covers a subset of the ledger and its counts do not sum to the headline.

How much of each
market this ledger holds.

This table sets the ledger against the category counts that sector banks publish. Scopes differ between publishers and from ours, so a ratio compares this ledger against that publisher's own count and nothing more, and the ratios are never pooled across publishers. A series is one publisher, one category, one edition and one underlying dataset. Each of those is recorded separately, because these publishers restate their own counts and at least one changed dataset mid-series, so a ratio computed across two of them would show movement that never happened. 11 further benchmark rows are held back because this ledger exceeds their count in at least one year, which means they are counting something narrower than we are and the ratio would not be a coverage figure: Capstone Partners, Kroll, Park Street. A further 27 rows are held back because two different census values are logged for the same publisher, category and year, so no single ratio exists for them: BeautyMatter, Capstone Partners. Benchmarks tagged all-consumer are excluded because that is not a category this store uses, so the numerator would be zero and print as no coverage.

Earlier years, on
their own pages.

Each year before 2026 has its own page carrying that year's rows month by month, its own composition table and its own price bands.

Questions I get about
2026 consumer deal
flow.

What were the biggest consumer brand acquisitions of 2026?

What multiple do consumer brands sell for in 2026?

Who is buying consumer brands in 2026?

How many consumer brand deals happened in 2026?

How is this consumer brand exit tracker sourced and kept current?