In June, Loonen water hit Vogue’s cafeteria. The office’s front of house manager isn’t on TikTok, so was intrigued when editors expressed their delight to see the tough-to-get water available in One World Trade Center. “We just ordered it ’cause it looked good,” he told my colleague and I.
That’s the idea — or at least, part of it. Loonen is among a new crop of brands banking on good-looking packaging and fashion-forward marketing to get consumers’ attention. Once intrigued, these products then often sell themselves through an added health or wellness benefit that justifies the higher-than-usual price point. Call it the Erewhon-ificiation of consumer packaged goods (CPG), where the price is still far lower than any other item dubbed ‘luxury’.
“In this cost of living crisis, we’re seeing the rise of little treat culture and food as a status symbol. It has always been political, reflecting class, status, and access, so the premiumization of basic food items is very apt right now,” says Seyi Oduwole, lead food and beverage analyst at The Future Laboratory. “The merge of fashion and beauty just shows how it is crossing over into popular culture, the mainstream, and social media.”
As food becomes more intertwined than ever with fashion and beauty, the relationship is a win-win: fashion and beauty brands can lean into food for its accessibility and sensoriality à la Rhode, while CPG look to the former as blueprints for cultivating desire. From Magnum’s Charli XCX paparazzi shot in Cannes and an appearance at Rhode’s Lemontini Mallorca beach club pop-up, to Poppi’s big Coachella house moments, this past year sowed the seed for successfully embedding CPG brands into the cultural conversation.
David isn’t the only brand generating buzz by showing up in spaces traditionally reserved for fashion and beauty. Brands including Loonen, Doctor Stolberg’s herbal tea, Rocky’s Matcha, and Ballerina Farm’s protein products are breaking through to consumers by establishing themselves as cool — and attainable — status symbols, as likely to be discovered on an influencer’s grid than a supermarket shelf.
As food and beverage brands continue to break the marketing mould, they’re bridging chic, palatable aesthetics and wellness proof points to get influencers, celebs, and, most importantly, shoppers on board.
Flashy feeds
The ease of integrating CPG products into consumers’ routines — and onto their feeds — has been key to their rise, says Chloe Lee, co-founder of community receipt-sharing app Selleb, which uses clustering to spot emerging patterns and trends on the platform. “Food and beverages are the easiest items to integrate into daily content, so we’re seeing a huge trickle-down effect from GRWM and WIEIAD [what I eat in a day] TikToks and Instagram Reels.”
Both Doctor Stolberg and Loonen have leaned heavily into influencer gifting. This ease of integration — into both an influencer’s daily routine and content output — has been central to the success of Doctor Stolberg’s herbal tea, founder Natazia zu Stolberg believes. “One thing that’s been fascinating is watching consumers increasingly treat wellness products the way they once treated fashion accessories or beauty products,” she says. “We’re building a wellness brand that people are proud to have discovered, want to display on their counter, carry in their bag, and share with friends.”
The tea has just two ingredients — coriander and cumin — and is designed to debloat. What sets it apart, though, more so than its ingredients, is its packaging: an instantly recognizable bright yellow box, with silver lettering, to signal consumers have ‘good taste’ in their day-to-day products.
Though Loonen co-founder and CEO Clara Sieg believes the product’s success is down to the purity of the product, it hasn’t earned the nickname “influencer water” for nothing. The blue and yellow label has become a fixture on feeds from Tinx to Lisa Rinna, cementing its status as a covetable product to signal that you’re ‘in the know’. “[It’s an] IYKYK item that shows that you know your shit and follow culture,” says Claire Lee, co-founder of Selleb, which partnered with Loonen in May on its latest tote drop. It has a real insider factor that makes it likely to be posted online, she adds.
The wellness crutch
It’s not just about the look. The product needs to have an edge, founders agree. Wellness has long been beauty-adjacent, but as it’s evolved from a budding craze to fully fledged category, CPG brands — alongside traditional fashion and beauty — have begun to package and sell wellness as consumable products you can purchase in service of being holistically well.
Unlike prebiotic sodas and the likes, wellness credentials can infiltrate a product through its positioning, as opposed to solely its functional formulation. “The brands standing out right now understand that they’re selling more than a drink; they’re selling a lifestyle, a ritual, or a desired state outcome,” Oduwole says. Stolberg thinks of her tea as a lifestyle product. “People aren’t just buying tea. They’re buying a routine, a result, and a philosophy around wellness that is based on indulgence, not restriction,” she adds.
Meanwhile, Selleb has seen an uptick in “simple delights” across wellness categories that don’t break the bank. This easy sense of wellness is what Loonen is billing itself on. “The piece of wellness that to me feels a little bit exhausting is the optimizing and tracking everything,” Sieg says. “I think there’s a shift back to focusing on eating good food, drinking clean water, moving your body, and living a happier life.” Instead of a 20-step skincare routine, just buy a bottle of water.
For Loonen, the timing at which it entered the marker also played a hand. “Had we launched when I had the idea, it would’ve been pushing an educational boulder up a hill,” Sieg says. “But I think consumer awareness around these issues [of water contamination] has grown dramatically over the past couple of years, in large part because the research has caught up.”
Oduwole has observed a similar awareness shift, noting that consumers are drawn to better-for-you brands amid the “healthification” of the food and drink industry. Yes, consumers are into the health benefits of these products, but performativity plays a role, too. Consumers want to be seen consuming brands that will optimize their wellness, so, Oduwole flags, it ultimately comes down to the branding. “They’re not reinventing the wheel, but they’re reimagining everyday categories [such as food and drink] through better branding and stronger storytelling,” she explains.
Building desire and heritage
If wellness is what these brands are selling, it is a tightly orchestrated method for doing so that sets them apart. “The product has to work first, but the brand also cannot just feel like a list of claims on a package,” David Protein’s Rahal says. “The product, packaging, imagery, retail, partners, and campaigns should all feel like they come from the same world.”
To this end, many standout food and beverage players are working with branding agencies that have experience in the fashion and beauty space. Colony, which helped design Loonen’s branding, has also worked with Californian womenswear brand Doên, while David works with agency Day Job, which primarily works with CPG brands but has also worked with Nike and skincare brands.
This alignment isn’t random, Rahal says. “Some of the strongest brands in the world are in fashion and beauty. If the goal is to build one of the strongest brands, you study the best brands. Not just the best food brands,” he says.
Stolberg thinks of her instantly recognizable yellow box of tea as Doctor Stolberg’s hero product. “We market our product the same way a fashion or beauty brand might market a hero product: through storytelling, community, and aspiration rather than focusing exclusively on functional benefits,” she says. “Although the tea does work exceptionally well, and that’s what drives our repeat customer rate and strong word of mouth growth.”
Now, she’s taken it a step further, having launched a bright yellow leather pouch to carry the teabags in. It sold out in under a month, and marks a move into the categories it’s previously taken inspiration from. “All the cool girls were bringing Rest + Digest with them to dinner or on travel, but always in a ziploc bag,” Stolberg says. “I just knew we could do better than that.”
Beyond branding, this next crop of players are rethinking their advertising — and not just through strong influencer gifting rosters. One TikTok comment compared Ballerina Farm’s ballerina-focused advert for its protein powder to an A24 horror trailer (for better or worse). For David’s latest campaign, the brand went straight to the source, casting Obsession breakout star Inde Navarrette in its latest campaign. “Inde made sense because she brought performance, taste, and cultural momentum,” Rahal says. “With her, we could make something that felt more like a short film than an ad.”
This next generation of CPG brands aren’t simply focused on getting from shelf to pantry. Instead, they’re building out brand worlds to last, a mission not so long ago reserved for less utilitarian, more creative-led categories. “I have been really focused on our design, on not feeling [exclusively] Gen Z or millennial,” Loonen’s Sieg says. “I want us to build a heritage American brand that stands for quality and making you feel good.”
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