Expo West 2026: 60,000 People Looking for Something to Believe In

Borrowed

"Know thyself: Before you go to market, know what you are selling and to whom. It's a very rare business that can -- or should -- be all things to all people. Be the best you can be within a reasonably tight product focus. That will help you to improve yourself and help your customers to know how and when to buy your product."

From "Setting the Table" by Danny Meyer [Book]

Learned

When I was growing up, my Pop-Pop used to say that one day we’d skip the meal and just take a pill.

I got back from Expo West last week, and it seems like every other brand is on that trajectory. I only wish he were here to see it.

This was the show’s 45th year. To get a sense of scale: 60k people, 3,600 brands, 500,000 square feet of convention center in the shadow of Disneyland. For Barrel, it was a milestone. David, Alex, Nadia, and I were on the floor together as a growth team for the first time. We split up to cover ground, reconnected over samples, had client booth stops, and had prospect conversations throughout. Always feels nice to get IRL time with someone you’ve been emailing for months. A couple of highlights were joining Ketone IQ for an Expo West Run Club and co-sponsoring an evening event with friends from Express Checkout, Skio, Glimpse, Wayflyer, and Veriti. It was a fun night all around.

I almost didn’t write about Expo because it went by in such a flash, but as I gave Dana a recap and looked through my stash of snacks, I couldn’t help it. The floor had a story to tell this year, and it’s kind of a strange one. Consumers are done trusting by default, and while there are trends, founders and brands are all reacting differently.

Apps like Yuka have millions of people scanning barcodes before they put something in their cart. Ultra-processed food is under regulatory scrutiny. MAHA is in the cultural conversation. The distrust of long ingredient lists has been building quietly for years, and it’s now changing what people actually buy. Walk the floor, and you can see three distinct shifts happening at once.

Some brands have responded by going back to basics. They’re putting whole foods in pretty packages. Eggs. Dried zucchini and broccoli. And my favorite, dates. One brand that stopped me in my tracks was Daddl. They dress up dates as candy, using only unprocessed dates and natural sweeteners, and they’re delicious.

Others are making genuinely good food with a clear point of view. Not functional or loaded with stuff you didn’t ask for. A healthier version of something you already love, or an indulgence that doesn’t ask you to compromise. Cookies, waffles, brownies. Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings is a great example – baking mixes and pasta sauces rooted in the recipes she actually cooks at home, with no artificial ingredients and food that tastes like food. The carrot cake kit they previewed was inspired by her and John (Legend)’s wedding cake. They were both there, but I didn’t find out until after the show. Sad I missed them. I once ran into John in an elevator and told him how great his music was. As if his 13 Grammys weren’t enough to know.

And then there’s most everything else: food we thought we knew, engineered into something new. Creatine in coffee (and more and more). Mushrooms in mocktails. Protein in pasta sauce. Nadia just wanted water at one point and couldn’t find any that wasn’t fortified with something. Liquid Death is the last one laughing. With 25 million Americans projected to be on GLP-1 drugs by 2030, every brand is doing the math on what a product needs to deliver when people are eating less. It’s a serious shift. But it’s a crowded answer.

What strikes me about the brands that stand out – in any of these buckets – is that they’re not just picking a trend. They know what they are, and they’re running toward it. That’s It launched a funky granola made with just a couple of fruits and protein puffs. Not a reinvention, just the same idea applied to a new format by a brand that’s always been about getting more fruit into people’s diets. Sweet Loren’s keeps deepening their lane in refrigerated, and the scones they showed this year are sooooo good. Magic Spoon has stayed locked on a nostalgic breakfast you can feel good about. I’ve been enjoying their play on Pop-Tarts.

And then there’s Spindrift. They launched a tea line, and while it’s a long way from sparkling water, the same belief runs through it – real brewed tea, real squeezed fruit, no sugar-heavy shortcuts, nothing you can’t recognize but everything you can taste. Three years in development to do it right. None of these brands is chasing the loudest thing. They’re filtering everything through who they already are.

When you look at the acquisitions over the last few years, they tell the same story at a different scale. Poppi started as a home-brewed drink Allison Ellsworth was selling at a Dallas farmers market. Stayed focused on one idea, built a community around it, and sold to PepsiCo for nearly $2 billion. Bachan’s built a condiment business on a single-family recipe, kept the ingredients clean, and agreed to sell to Marzetti for $400 million. La Colombe spent 30 years being a great coffee company, and Chobani paid $900 million for it. Different categories, different stories, same lesson. Get really good at one thing. Create trust and keep building.

The trend cycles show what happens when you don’t. CBD was everywhere in 2018 and 2019, then quietly contracted as consumers started asking what it actually did. Plant-based meat peaked around 2022 on the premise that proved harder to sustain than the hype. Now Beyond is “innovating” with seltzer water.​

And then there's private label. I'll never forget a brand I talked to last year. They'd been around for almost 40 years, struggling with awareness, trying to figure out DTC, and looking for help growing. As they described their products, I had this moment of recognition. I was buying their private label version every month at Giant. When I asked, they confirmed. That's the other side of this. When you haven't built something people seek out by name, a retailer can make a version of the same thing for less, and most people won't notice, including people in your own industry. That's not a marketing problem. It started years before anyone noticed.

It's only getting harder. Right around this year's show, Kroger launched 20 new premium meals under their Private Selection brand -- beef bulgogi, chicken parmesan, gnocchi alla sorrentina. Restaurant quality at store brand prices. Target has over 45 owned brands generating more than $30 billion in annual sales. Ten of them are over a billion dollars each. Private label across the industry hit a record $283 billion in 2025. And most consumers now say they can't tell the difference between a premium store brand and a national one.

The floor is full of brands making bets. It's a fascinating time to have a front seat -- as a consumer, and as someone who gets to help these brands figure out how to tell their story.

I just wish I could bring Pop-Pop on as an advisor.

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Couple of my LinkedIn posts from the show here and here.

& Thought

Is your business running toward something, or reacting to something?