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Dek: The health supplement company counts investors like Lewis Hamilton and Alex Honnold. Kat Cole is no stranger to a career pivot. At Hooters, she went from waitress to vice president as she worked her way up the restaurant chain’s corporate ladder. Then, over the course of more than 10 years at Cinnabon parent Focus Brands, she built a career selling sweet treats to consumers. In 2024, Cole made the leap from selling fast food to health supplements by becoming CEO of AG1 (formerly known as Athletic Greens), which sells a green multivitamin and nutrient powder. Valued at $1.2 billion in 2022, AG1 has been endorsed by athletes like Olympic runner Allyson Felix and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, as well as an endless roster of wellness and fitness influencers. (Some doctors have questioned the need for supplements like multivitamins altogether). Cole spoke to Most Innovative Companies host Yasmin Gagne about growing AG1s business, the brand’s Ozempic opportunity, and whether she thinks it will ever end up in the grocery aisles. Listen to our conversation with Cole and a segment with Ankler Awards Editor and Prestige Junkie host Katey Rich, who explains how studios have conducted their Oscar campaigns this year. https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-studios-navigate-the-oscars-race/id1576874503?i=1000694523411 How does a former fast food executive come to run a health company? There’s a few ways to look at this. One is just the journey that I’ve gone on as a woman, as a mom, and over time how nutrition and health has become more important to me personally. We’re also so much more informed now. Even people who are in their thirties are thinking of healthspan and nutrition. There are things, like my mom getting breast cancer when my kids were very small and she was starting her business, or when I had my kids at 39 and 41 after a few miscarriages in between, that put nutrition and health more squarely in my focus as an individual. Health also became a bigger part of one where I believe consumers were going and therefore what the market opportunity and business would be. I am also a leader experienced running companies at scale, and 10 years ago there werent a lot of scaled healthful nutrition companies that made sense for someone like me to manage. Now AG1 is big enough for me to come in and lead this chapter. Do you have any guilty pleasures? I used to say everything in moderation. Now I think that phrase, in some cases, has been used to the extreme where in aggregate, a few things in moderation are no longer moderation. I think very seriously about what my kids see me eat and how we make decisions when I treat myself. But I am a human, not a robot. I treat myself once in a while with an ice cream or a cookieI have a 5 and a 7-year-old During COVID, sales of multivitamins and supplements in general increased by 50% between 2018 and 2022. AG1 is 15 years oldhow do you compete with the explosion of newer brands in the sector? In any market, the presence of growth and competition is an indicator of consumer demand. So as it relates to health and wellness, if there are more consumers demanding more options, then that means those consumers are going on a health awareness journey. As a businessperson, that means I’m in the right space. That said, consumers have more options. It can get tougher to appreciate the distinction between those options. So when I think about the things that are required to stand out today that may not have been on customer’s minds as much 10 years ago. That’s things like human clinical trials and research for supplements that is not required of the industry, but is what we have invested in for years. I think about third-party certificationswe’ve been NSF[-certified] for sport for eight or nine years, which is a third-party certification that not only verifies that what’s on the label is in the product, it also ensures there are no contaminants or doping agents. We pay a third party to keep our product all the way through the supply chain in check. Those are things we’ve always done, but years ago we actually didn’t brag about it. We didn’t market it because there was so much demand. Now we are showing proof of the third party studies we do. It’s a different approach to education information and go to market. I was surprised to find out theres an even gender split among AG1 customers. I was surprised because I assumed that most would be men into biohacking. I assumed that as well when I was an early customer. I thought I was this outlier lady. Once I got into the business and saw the demographic split, I wanted to accelerate that shift to a more female customer base. When I joined, it was like 40% or trending that way, and now it’s 50-50. One reason [for your misconception] might be that some of our more popular creator partners thought leaders, academics, people with big podcasts, or platforms were male. The reality is womenand this has been accelerated by COVIDwant to live long and strong. It’s not about being frail or delicate, it’s about fuel, it’s about strength, it’s about power and nutrition. What I see in our customers is the fastest growing customer group by age is 45-plus. As we get older, we age into new reasons to need to supplement and want to supplement an already healthy lifestyle, and there are new ways to afford a premium product. Our younger consumers tend to be athletes and fitness enthusiasts who really value their nutrition and take it more seriously. That has evolved over time. Then I started interviewing our customers, our female customers in particular, in the early years when I joined. What I found is they had heard about it from a partner, a trainer, a physician. Their recommender tended to be male in those earlier years. But then they didn’t have as many options being marketed to them as we have now. Now we’re in an interesting space where our split is 50-50 both for existing customers and new ones joining us, but women in particular are so marketed to in this space. Its confusing. Its difficult to know what to trust, and we have so many distinct life stages, from pre and postnatal, perimenopausal, menopausal, postmenopausal. There’s a lot of support that can come from nutraceuticals or nutrients to help with those life stages. So now the job we need to do for our female customers is being really clear where we fit into their stack and explain why they should trust AG1 in the confusing landscape of supplements. At Focus Brands, you brought brands like Cinnabon to different sections of the grocery aisle, with products stocked in the snacks section, and the frozen food section, for instance. Are you going to bring the same playbook to AG1? The core AG1 is this daily health drink in a powder form that people mix on their own in water or put in their smoothies. Retailers love this idea. It’s a very straightforward supply chain. It’s shelf-stable in its packaging, and there is built-in demand that is not necessarily being fully realized by the e-commerce platform. So retailers love the idea of a brand people know but haven’t yet tried. There’s brand awareness, product fit, and the format makes sense. You can imagine some retailers that have a heavy inclination toward sampling and education and letting people try and learn about a product before they buy. That’s the opposite of our current model. If you hear abut it and you go online, the best value is to subscribe. So you’re actually subscribing before you try retail. Some of the retailers can help us reach a customer that we haven’t been able to reach. AG1’s valuation$1.2 billionis a huge number for a CPG company. And I think we’ve seen a lot of CPG companies struggle to live up to that kind of valuation. You have investors, including Lewis Hamilton and Alex Honnold, who are probably curious when theyre going to see a return. Is the company ever going public? I wont speak to what the particular outcome is. That valuation was on $160 million in revenue we did that year. January 2022 was peak market fervor, there was a lot of froth. However larger marquee investors who came to the table are supersmart. They saw the fundamentals of the business. We were $160 million in revenue that year, growing at hundreds of percent with an incredible body of opportunity in front of the business. So if you look at what’s happened since then, we were at $160 million at the end of 2021, we’re projecting $600 million in revenue now. We’ve well over 3X the business. So even if valuations have come down to earth a bit, the business has grown unbelievably. And so our investors are very happy. Do you plan on launching more AG1 products? Our customers have asked us to launch so many things, but if we did it, it would create confusion. AG1 is foundational nutrition. It’s this idea that first and foremost, the best driver of health from a nutrition perspective is whole foods. Then this idea of something called a foundational nutrition layer, which essentially is nutrients and gut health support. Foundational nutrition is an idea that there is such a thing as a group of supplements that help most people cover many [health] gaps. It’s like the future of what the multivitamin was supposed to be, except no one takes a multivitamin and says, my digestion’s better. No one takes a multivitamin and says, I feel more energy. But they do with AG1 because it’s more comprehensive. This idea of having a foundational routine is the base of the business. As we innovate products, the question is: what do our customers need from us? And I’ll just give you a few examples. Might they be at different life stages? You can imagine what some of those might be that emulate some of the journey multivitamins.
Category:
E-Commerce
Trump wants to make English the official language of the U.S.and is using an executive order to deliver the action, White House officials tod CNBC on Friday. This marks the first time in the history of this country that it will have an official language. Trump’s order rescinds a 25-year-old directive from former President Clinton, which required federal agencies to provide services for those with limited English proficiency. According to a summary of the report shared with CNBC, agencies will not be forced to abandon their current policies. “Agencies will have flexibility to decide how and when to offer services in languages other than English to best serve the American people and fulfill their agency mission,” the summary states. However, the move will encourage “new Americans to adopt a national language that opens doors to greater opportunities. Trump’s latest order comes amid a swift crackdown on illegal immigration since he took office. Trump deployed additional troops to the U.S. southern border, suspended entry to the U.S. for all undocumented immigrants seeking asylum, and expanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) authority. The administration has not only encouraged more deportations, but is allowing officers the power to conduct raids in areas that were previously deemed off-limits, such as schools, hospitals, even houses of worship. As the administration has been working to deport more undocumented immigrants, the numbers haven’t yet topped Biden’s deportation numbers. According to a recent Reuters report, Trump’s deportation numbers are averaging less than Biden’s monthly average during his last year in office. Trump deported 37,660 people during his first monthsubstantially less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals during Biden’s last year in office. Sources told NBC that Trump has expressed anger that deportations have been taking so long. And last week, amid chatter of the lower-than-anticipated numbers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Caleb Vitello was reassigned. English is by far the most common language in the U.S., but more than 350 other languages are spoken, according to USA.gov, a truth Trump has often lamented. “We have languages coming into our country. We dont have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “These are languages, its the craziest thing, they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. Its a very horrible thing.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Do you know how many pens are in the average American household? The answer is 114and Gonzalve Bich, CEO of Bic, the French manufacturing giant for pens, lighters, shaving razors, and more, is likely one of the few people in the world to know that. Thats because its his job. As the 46-year-old chief executive of the company that was originally founded by his grandfather in 1945, Bich also likely has intimate knowledge of how many disposable razors the typical American uses every year, and how many lighters we burn through as well. But hes also ready to hang it all up at a relatively young age. In December, Bich announced that he would step down by September, and make way for a new CEO to assume the companys reins. And while many business or political leaders are seemingly unwilling to retire, even at much more advanced agesPresident Trump is 78, President Biden was 82 when he left the White House, and Warren Buffett is 94, to name a fewBich, a relative spring chicken, is ready to focus his energy in other areas. From “sell more pens to “a human expression company” Bich tells Fast Company that he feels that age 46 sounded better to try something else and reinvent myself, adding, I did a lot, and I think that there are other opportunities Im equally excited about. I joined this business over 20 years ago as a family member and held a lot of different positions, he says. When I became CEO, I wanted to transform the business and needed to. Bich notes that when he assumed control of the company, nearly everything was trending in the wrong direction, and that interestingly enough, Bic never really had an overarching business strategyso, he set about implementing one, allowing that to be his legacy at the company. We never had a strategy. Every year, it was just grow, but there was no concerted plan to take the organization forward in terms of growth, Bich says. And that in terms of overall goals, he says Bic was merely looking to sell more pens, or open another factory. So, he decided to reimagine the companys verticals; and over the past several years, he was able to turn Bic from being a pen company to being a human expression company. That included strategic acquisitions in some surprising areas, such as the acquisition of Tangle Teezer, a hairbrush company, and Tattly, a temporary tattoo brand. Tattoos are an area that Bich is passionate about, and as Bic digs into the temporary tattoo space, it will offer an expanding range of offerings, including temporary tattoos that can last from a few hours to several weeks. Its that type of diversification thats helped put Bic in a better financial position and helped Bich become more comfortable with the idea of allowing the company to find a successor. Today, if I hit pause on the movie, Bic is a dynamic organization with people who are highly capable and a brand that is closer to consumers than ever, he says. Whats next Looking ahead, Bich says that he has his eye on a number of potential projects, but his immediate attention will turn closer to home. Specifically, Bich is gearing up for the launch of a foundation thats close to his heart; one that will support projects in and around local communities to help families with autistic childrenwith a focus not only on helping parents but siblings of those children too. Bich, a father of four, has an autistic child, and knows firsthand how difficult it can be for the entire family. I want to help families in our communities go through this differently, with support and structure, he says. But thats not all. I intend to also have professional activities beyond that, he says, though he remains mum on what, exactly, those could be for now. Looking back, though, Bich is bowing out at a time when his company is profitable, diverse, and growing. Im proud of our financial results; we get our investors and stakeholders a very healthy return, he says. The numbers speak for themselves: Bics latest earnings report, released February 19, showed sales and profitability increasing company-wide. As for whats next for the company, Bich says he plans to work with his successor for a smooth handoff, which should be completed in the fall. Succession is absolutely a part of business and a part of leadership, he says. As such, Bich says, he will pass the pen.
Category:
E-Commerce
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