Belle Robinson on Inventing the Functional Ice Cube + P&G Buys Thorne for $3.8B, Celsius Loses 17% on Record Revenue

Celsius posted record revenue last week and the stock fell 17%. The reason is in the breakdown.

Plus: an interview with Belle Robinson, the London nutritionist who invented the functional ice cube.

THIS WEEK IN CPG

P&G agreed to buy Thorne for $3.8 billion. L Catterton took it private for $680 million in 2023. And roughly a quarter of Thorne's revenue reportedly comes from creatine, an ingredient that was still being sold as gym powder two years ago.

Celsius set a record and lost 17%. Revenue hit $818 million. Alani Nu supplied $364 million of it. The core Celsius brand fell 11.7%. Monster reported the same week with its flagship segment up 21.6%, which is the whole contrast.

80 Acres Farms is winding down after raising more than $350 million and supplying 18,000 retail locations. Not a demand problem wearing a startup costume. An economics problem wearing a technology costume.

Kraft Heinz took $7.4 billion in impairments and a $6.4 billion operating loss, while raising guidance that still projects a full-year decline.

Plus: Axum takes control of Barcode, Sargento enters the deli case, The Farmer's Dog buys Woof, Bain agrees to acquire Gong cha, and WK Kellogg pulls artificial colors a year early.

INTERVIEW: BELLE ROBINSON, ROXII SUPERCUBES

Belle Robinson is a London-based nutritionist who got tired of her own wellness routine. Powders, tinctures, shots, pills, cupboards bursting at the seams. She was already adding ice to her drinks because most functional powders only taste good cold. So she asked what would happen if the ice cube was the supplement.

Roxii launched with four SKUs, each stacking three functional ingredients plus six grams of fiber: Hydration, Immunity, Glow, and Chill, the last one built off the viral Sleepy Girl Mocktail. All under five grams of naturally occurring sugar.

The brand skipped DTC entirely. Roxii went straight to retail, testing 30 stores in the Minneapolis market before launching nationwide at Sprouts and Wegmans two months later, backed by 90 in-store demos in the first three months.

We covered:

Why she built for habit stacking instead of adding another step to a wellness routine
Going retail-first and what you give up by skipping the DTC feedback loop
Creating a category versus creating a brand, and what retailers ask when you don't fit the existing set
Why frozen stopped being a stale aisle, and where functional fits in the freezer
Hyper-freezing, nutrient density, and why the format is a genuine USP
Building a Gen Z brand ambassador program from London
What the UK gets right that the US hasn't caught up to yet

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