Nosh Live Winter 2025 Recap

Nosh Live 2025 hit the ground running this year in Marina del Rey with a packed schedule of founders, CPG food stakeholders, and a very famous protein popcorn founder.

The annual conference included insightful discourse and educational presentations covering everything from marketing and investment strategies to carving out a niche in functional products and using viral social media moments to build lasting retail success.

Opening the two-day event was a fireside chat with Khloud Protein Popcorn founder Khloé Kardashian and CEO Jeff Rubenstein. While Nosh Live attendees might have noticed the Hulu camera crews filming for the Kardashian family reality series, the real show was on the stage, where a substantive discussion about balancing fame and authenticity took place with someone who has to do that all the time.

“[Consumers] know if something is authentic, they know if you’re just trying to pop a product, for a lack of a more sophisticated term,” Kardashian said.

While a celebrity can help bring consumers to a brand, it takes more than that to grow a brand organically, said Rubenstein. “Visibility plus credibility equals, I think, success.”

Launched in April, the functional popcorn plans to hit over 29,000 retail doors this coming spring as it expands from three to 19 SKUs.

Later that morning, another person who is famous, albeit more internally to the packaged food industry, Jeni Britton, spoke about the progression of building Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams and how that has shaped her new fiber-packed, nutritional bar brand, Floura.

Britton discussed how her journey as an entrepreneur was not an uninterrupted climb upwards, but pockmarked with challenges and lessons she uses now with Floura.

“We can’t just launch a brand on people,” she said. “This is something we have to build with people. It was the same in artisanal ice cream when that first started in the ‘90s. No one had that language; we had to create it.”

In a panel featuring the founders of Actual Veggies, meat snack maker Archer and Daily Crunch, brand leaders offered their respective strategies for managing fast-growing businesses.

One theme the founders all spoke about was transitioning from a growth-at-all-costs mindset to creating a capital-efficient business that can weather unforeseen challenges.

“Profitability is table stakes,” said Archer founder and CEO Eugene Kang. “Knowing your margins, knowing what your burn-rate is and how you think about the road to profitability is crucial.”

Day Two of Nosh Live kicked off with a presentation from SPINS senior director of brand strategy, Kelli Howard, who highlighted the impact of healthy-eating trends and GLP-1 usage among consumers.

She called it the “Say/Do” dynamic, which separates what consumers claim they’re paying attention to and the reality of spending habits appearing in retail sales data.

“What this tells us is that consumers aren’t lying – no sugar [and] low sugar is important to them,” Howard said. “Sugar reduction is important, but the way they want to get there varies by who the consumer group is.”

The key takeaway from SPINS data was that the term “healthy” does not mean the same thing to everyone. What does seem clear is that health is about “balance,” she said. “Consumers are eating healthy to feel a certain way, and they’re also looking to increase their healthspan, not only their lifespan.”

In two retailer-focused sessions, representatives from CVS and Walmart spoke about how brands can align on reaching those health-conscious shoppers in efficient ways.

Lauren Castro, lead director of healthy consumables and grocery at CVS Health, explained how the drugstore chain identifies new products to bring to store shelves and when to scale those brands nationwide.

CVS is a supporter of emerging brands and “likes to get involved pretty early,” Castro told Nosh managing editor Monica Watrous. “When it comes to net new products, net new flavors, we love providing feedback and really working with them to identify the right way to launch in our stores.”

Later in the day, Walmart U.S. VP of Wellness Merchandising Kristin Piper and Katie Wilson, co-founder of BelliWelli, sat down with Watrous to discuss how the mass channel retailer strategized its partnership with the digestive health brand.

The opportunity of getting on Walmart shelves can be a huge boon to an emerging brand, but it needs to be done at the right time. Piper explained that Walmart has been steadily building its wellness category offerings as demand has grown. It is deeply collaborative in its approach to storytelling and how it can support its brand partners.

“We have some of the most passionate merchants in the space,” she said. “They want to see brands succeed, and they want to see brands bring in incremental customers and have unique marketing campaigns that work.”

During the final session of the show, returning CEO of Justin’s, Peter Burns, spoke to attendees about his plan to “double the business” and return it to the entrepreneurial spirit that helped shape the nut-butter brand before Hormel’s acquisition.

Nosh Live 2025 ended with the announcement that better-for-you candy brand Rotten had won the annual Pitch Slam Competition. Founded in 2023, Rotten’s low-sugar and gut-friendly attributes, paired with its distinctive branding, beat out competition from the other six semifinalists: frozen Salvadorian pupusas producer Xinca Foods; Keya’s Snacks, a line of Indian-inspired potato chips; Filipino hot sauce maker Djablo Sauce; Shooka, a brand of Mediterranean-spiced tomato sauce; and Oh So Easy!, which offers a line of globally-inspired baking mixes.