In 2025, Numerator launched a quarterly webinar series hosted by Nick Keswani, Senior Vice President of Mid-Market and Emerging Brands, featuring in-depth conversations with leaders from some of the fastest-growing emerging brands. Designed to inspire and equip emerging brand innovators, these sessions showcased how today’s most dynamic companies are unlocking exponential growth through consumer-led insights. This article highlights key lessons and themes from the three standout brands we featured this year: Chomps, Nutrabolt, and The Good Crisp Company.
Brand Lessons from Chomps
In our first interview of the series, Numerator spoke with Matt Landen, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Chomps, to explore the brand’s remarkable rise. From 2021 to early 2025, Chomps scaled household penetration, buy rate, and repeat rate, growing projected annual sales from $80M to more than $500M. Matt attributes this rapid growth to strong company culture, deep commitment to the brand, and a disciplined reliance on data and insights.
Early on, Chomps identified a significant opportunity for consumer incrementality within the meat stick category. Historically, the aisle skewed male and failed to align with clean-eating values, causing many potential customers to overlook the category entirely for more wellness-focused categories. By moving Chomps products outside the traditional aisle, the brand created opportunities to educate shoppers on nutritional benefits and brand values—unlocking new audiences and accelerating word-of-mouth growth. They also recognized that merchandising at checkout limited usage occasions, so Chomps introduced pantry packs and leaned into broader snacking routines, which expanded the snacking occasions they were winning and unlocked exponential growth.
Data has remained central to these decisions. A 2023 segmentation study helped Chomps understand what resonates with its core consumer and identify new high-value targets who share similar motivations, widening the pool of potential customers. This commitment to insights extends well beyond consumer targeting; Matt noted that data also strengthens retailer partnerships by demonstrating a clear understanding of emerging trends and helping retailers steward category growth. For Chomps, data ensures that both the brand and the broader category are positioned for long-term success, serving as a forward-looking guide rather than a snapshot of today.
The brand’s internal motto, “be delicious, be different,” reflects how Chomps approaches this growth. Matt explained that success requires delivering clear value that stands apart in a crowded market, while continuing to meet rising consumer expectations. He emphasized that brands must continually evaluate how they differentiate, elevate their offerings, and stay aligned with consumer desires to remain competitive.
For emerging brands, his advice centers on two priorities: stay obsessively focused on the consumer and build pricing architectures that can scale without creating channel conflict. He cautions against accepting early retail price points that may undermine long-term strategy or relationships as the brand grows.
Brand Lessons from Nutrabolt
Our second session with TJ Moore, Vice President of Category Insights at Nutrabolt, unpacked the company’s strategic decision to invest in Bloom and expand into two fast-growing categories: energy drinks and modern soda. Numerator played a central role in validating where Bloom could win, why the timing was right, and how both brands, C4 and Bloom, could accelerate category growth without cannibalizing existing demand.
C4 had already established itself as a breakout success in energy drinks, growing household penetration from 6% in 2021 to nearly 14% as of May 2025, while projected sales surged from $150M to more than $700M. Before the Bloom investment, Nutrabolt relied heavily on Numerator’s source-of-volume insights to prove incrementality. As the energy drink category added more than $10B since 2020, data showed C4 wasn’t stealing share from category leaders like Red Bull or Monster; instead, it was expanding the category by attracting new buyers with high-stimulation offerings and differentiated functional benefits. Licensing partnerships, supported by data to validate brand affinity, also fueled trial and brand credibility, with collaborations like Starburst introducing entirely new consumers to the franchise.
As Nutrabolt evaluated Bloom, incrementality again became the north star. Bloom’s core greens and superfoods business had already grown from $15M in 2022 to more than $100M by May 2025, driven by years of strong digital brand building. When Bloom entered the energy drink category last year, the launch quickly became one of the most successful category entries Nutrabolt had ever seen. In its first 12 months, Bloom Energy drinks delivered $55M in projected sales, reached 3.5% household penetration, and achieved a repeat rate exceeding 30%—all fueled by early results in Target before expanding across mass, grocery, and club.
Nutrabolt viewed Bloom as additive, not duplicative, to C4. Consumers are expanding their search for energy solutions outside traditional convenience channels, favoring cleaner ingredients, moderate caffeine, and functional benefits. Bloom’s brand equity and core audience aligned naturally with these needs, enabling the brand to unlock new energy drink occasions and broaden category reach. Numerator’s research also identified strong overlap between Bloom’s greens consumers and modern soda shoppers, validating the decision to extend into gut-health-forward soda offerings. These insights helped Nutrabolt secure retailer support by proving that Bloom could both generate demand and maximize shelf performance across multiple departments.
TJ also highlighted how conversations with retailers have evolved as Nutrabolt now represents two complementary brands. With a broader portfolio spanning multiple need states, Nutrabolt used data to guide assortment strategy—ensuring the right pack types, flavor configurations, and placement across cold, multipack, and center store. Tools like Numerator Leakage Trees have become essential in demonstrating missed revenue opportunities, especially in accounts that carried C4 powder but not ready-to-drink formats. The consumer lens remains equally critical for innovation, helping Nutrabolt identify where new buyers enter the category and how to target them through segmentation work done with Numerator.
Reflecting on navigating growth during a period of uncertainty, TJ emphasized that “knowledge is currency” in the CPG world. Data enables credible, future-focused conversations internally and externally, ensuring both C4 and Bloom maintain their competitive edge. For Nutrabolt, insights are more than a diagnostic tool—they are foundational to capturing new consumers, driving category expansion, and sustaining long-term brand success.
Brand Lessons from The Good Crisp Company
In our final Spark Session, Numerator sat down with JP Mackey, Vice President of Sales, and Alex Torti, Senior Vice President of Marketing at The Good Crisp Company, a better-for-you snack brand that has surged in recent years. The brand has doubled household penetration while retaining a third of its shoppers—an especially notable feat in a mature category—showing that Good Crisp is driving trial, bringing in new buyers, and deepening loyalty, with buy rate up 25%. Even within the highly penetrated potato chip aisle, one in ten Good Crisp shoppers are incremental to the category, proving the brand is creating true growth rather than shifting share.
As the brands experienced impressive growth, JP and Alex reflected on how consumer signals have shaped their long-term vision. Alex explained that Good Crisp’s evolution has consistently followed what consumers want, whether responding quickly to new flavor trends or making ingredient adjustments that meet rising expectations. JP emphasized that strong velocity across channels and healthy performance have unlocked expanded distribution, a combination not always achieved simultaneously. At the core of this progress is a product experience rooted in nostalgia and familiarity, modernized in a way that feels relevant and intuitive for today’s shoppers.
The pair also acknowledged the increasingly crowded better-for-you snacking space. While they keep a close eye on competitive activity, JP emphasized that Good Crisp remains focused on what’s true to their brand—their performance, their differentiation, and how they communicate with consumers. In buyer meetings, they anchor discussions in incrementality, using Numerator data to demonstrate how Good Crisp adds new value to the category even when broader macroenvironmental factors are challenging. Alex added that the brand’s strategy has adapted alongside shifts in consumer behavior since COVID, as convenience now plays a central role in how shoppers discover and purchase snacks. By leaning into click-and-collect, delivery, and digital promotion across Instacart, Target, Walmart, and other platforms, the brand ensures it shows up where shoppers expect it, balancing an in-store presence with the realities of modern shopping behavior.
When asked how the brand maintains authenticity as it scales, JP pointed to brand loyalty as both a signal and a strength. Consumers who adopted Good Crisp in canisters followed the brand into cheese balls and potato chips, reinforcing that Good Crisp’s identity is resonating in the chip category. The founder’s story remains central to the brand’s ethos, helping preserve a sense of honesty and simplicity that translates across product lines. The team remains intentional about merchandising, ensuring Good Crisp aligns with family-friendly appeal and delivers on its core promise: sensible snacks that fit today’s households.
Buyers, JP noted, are increasingly interested in how Good Crisp can grow the category rather than duplicate existing offerings. Some retailers have even approached the brand, highlighting its category-leading repeat rate, asking how to accelerate trial. This is where data becomes critical. The team uses insights to understand their core consumers’ journey beyond traditional grocery—where they shop, how they snack, and what occasions drive discovery. These insights have shaped the sales strategy and helped the brand expand into less obvious, more captive environments, creating new opportunities to build household penetration.
As Good Crisp continues to scale, profitably supporting growth has become a priority. JP shared that the focus now is on making smarter decisions—building new ways to interact with consumers, leveraging display activity, optimizing merchandising, refining pricing, and expanding into channels where their shoppers already are. Much of the brand’s success stems from creating unexpected moments of visibility, ensuring consumers encounter the product in ways that feel organic and relevant to their routines.
In closing, Alex and JP offered advice for leaders balancing mission with growth. Passion, they said, is essential; it fuels culture, sharpens decision-making, and keeps the brand’s purpose alive. Surrounding yourself with the right people and working on a product you truly believe in matters just as much. Data will always tell the story—but belief in the brand, clarity about the consumer, and a commitment to moving the conversation forward are what ultimately drive long-term success.
Conclusion
Together, these conversations with Chomps, Nutrabolt, and The Good Crisp Company underscored the power of consumer-led insights in driving meaningful, sustainable growth. Each brand, while distinct in category, stage, and strategy, shared a common thread: a relentless commitment to understanding their shoppers and using data to guide decisions that unlock new demand. As we look ahead to the new year, we’re excited to continue this series and bring even more emerging brand leaders into the conversation to inspire what’s possible. To watch these Spark Sessions on demand, or to learn more about omnichannel consumer data and how it can help your brand guide better decision-making and ignite sustainable growth, check out our Emerging Brands Learning Hub or reach out to your Numerator representative today.
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