Chasing Trends vs. Building a Category: What CPG Founders Get Wrong
Trend-riding feels like strategy in CPG. Here's why it almost never is — and the framework Jeff Church uses to tell the difference before it costs you.
We got a call from Trader Joe's in the spring of 2019. Celery juice had just exploded — Anthony William posted about it, Rachael Ray picked it up, and suddenly every health-conscious American had heard about the "miracle drink." Trader Joe's wanted in. Fast.
The thing is, Trader Joe's doesn't usually move fast. Their bureaucracy is intentionally slow. They typically want their own private label, which takes months through their internal process. But the window was narrow — trends don't wait for procurement cycles — so we did a third-party-branded deal instead.
From first call to product on shelves nationwide: under six weeks.
I remember feeling pretty good about that. And honestly? I should have. Six weeks to national distribution at Trader Joe's is extraordinary execution. The team earned that.
But here's the question I should have asked more carefully: was this building a brand, or riding a wave?
The Trap Looks Exactly Like Strategy
Trends are seductive in CPG. They look exactly like strategy. There's consumer demand, retailer enthusiasm, velocity... for a while. You get into doors. You move product. You feel the momentum.
And then the wave passes. And you find out whether you built something or just surfed.
I've watched this happen more times than I can count. A brand chases a keto trend, gets into 4,000 stores, moves like crazy for eighteen months, then watches velocity crater when the next thing captures the zeitgeist. The stores don't wait. The buyers don't care why it happened. They just know it stopped performing, and they need those inches for something that is.
The trap isn't riding a trend. The trap is mistaking trend distribution for brand building.
The Principle That Changes How You See It
There's a line I come back to constantly: don't confuse distribution gains with velocity gains.
I've seen founders celebrate getting into 2,000 stores when what they should be watching is the velocity curve inside those stores. Distribution without velocity is just a countdown to delistings. You're buying time. That's it.
And here's the deeper truth: you can market your way into trial, but you cannot market your way into loyalty.
Trends drive trial. They create curiosity, urgency, the "I've heard about this" moment that gets a consumer to actually try your product. That part is real. But loyalty? Loyalty comes from something else entirely. It comes from the product genuinely delivering on its promise, enough times, to earn a place in someone's routine. No trend tailwind can manufacture that.
What builds a category is different from what rides one. Category builders solve a real, durable problem. Trend riders solve a problem that was invented by the trend.
What Durable Velocity Actually Looks Like
At Suja, we watched this in real time.
The products that became everyday staples — the ones that survived category reset after category reset, that made it from Costco rotation to permanent listing — were the ones that had repeat purchase as the engine, not just trial.
When we launched a new Costco rotation, we'd know very early whether it was going to stick. Not from the initial numbers, because those are almost always good. Costco shoppers are curious and the demo program is extraordinary. We watched the repeat curve. If repeat was strong by week four or five, we had something. If it wasn't, we started the wind-down conversation with the buyer ourselves, before they had to have it with us. That bought us trust. More importantly, it kept us honest.
Here's a metric more founders should be tracking obsessively: buyer penetration vs. repeat rate. Your syndicated data shows both. High penetration with low repeat tells you the trend drove trial and the product didn't earn a second purchase. That's a category that's dying, even if the top-line numbers still look okay.
The Trend Trap Is Also a Financial Trap
When you over-index on trend-driven growth, you compound the problem at every level of the business.
You over-invest in marketing to sustain trial rates your product can't sustain organically. You over-extend distribution — getting into accounts that will delist you when velocity fades, and leaving behind a graveyard of deductions, chargebacks, and damaged buyer relationships. You build infrastructure around a volume curve that's borrowed time.
And because CPG is a "Penny Profit" business — the margins are already thin — any revenue you don't defend with actual repeat purchase becomes a liability, not an asset. You've taken on all the cost of getting to shelf, and you don't get to keep the return.
Revenue without margin is ego. But revenue without repeat purchase is a ticking clock.
When Trend-Riding Is the Right Move
I don't want to overstate this. Trends aren't inherently dangerous. The celery juice play at Trader Joe's was the right call — it was fast, capital-light, and it strengthened our relationship with a retailer that matters enormously. The mistake is treating a trend play as your foundation rather than your opportunity.
Here's how I think about it: a trend can accelerate your entry into a category, but it can't substitute for category building. If you already have strong repeat purchase on a core product, loyal consumers who trust the brand, and gross margins that give you room to invest... a trend play is low-risk amplification.
If you don't have that foundation, a trend play is a loan you're taking out against the future. The interest rate is brutal.
The brands I've watched navigate this well have one thing in common: they're building around the trend, not toward it. They have a core product, a real consumer, a loyal purchase cycle. The trend expands awareness. The foundation captures it.
Before You Chase a Trend, Ask These Four Questions
1. What's my repeat rate on existing products?
If it's below 25–30%, you haven't earned the right to chase distribution gains yet. Fix the foundation first. An honest look at your panel data will tell you whether you're building loyalty or living on first-time buyers.
2. What's the exit scenario if the trend fades in 18 months?
Model it. If you're committing co-manufacturing capacity, promotional budget, and buyer relationships to a trend window, know what happens when it closes. The Rule of Twos applies here too — assume it takes twice as long to ramp and ends in half the time you expect.
3. Is this category durable without the trend narrative?
Celery juice, for instance, has a functional benefit that's real and persistent. People who drink it regularly feel better. That's a category that can survive the trend cycle. A lot of trend plays don't have that. When the media attention moves on, is there still a reason a consumer builds a habit around your product?
4. Does this fit your brand soul?
The brands that build lasting velocity have a coherent identity that consumers trust. Every trend play that feels inconsistent with who you are erodes that identity a little bit. A few of those, and you stop being a brand and start being a collection of SKUs. The shelf doesn't remember your intentions. It only sees the velocity number.
The Decision You're Making Right Now
The decision that saves you is almost never the one you make on the day you needed saving. It's the one you made eighteen months earlier, on a Tuesday, when nobody was watching.
At Suja, the wellness shots we launched almost as a side experiment — roughly 60% gross margins, a small team, minimal fanfare — became the category that actually saved the company when everything else got hard. Not because of a trend. Because we had identified a real, durable consumer need, built around it, and kept investing in the foundation while the trend cycle churned around us.
Build for Tuesday. Not for the wave.
The wave always ends. The question is whether you're still standing when it does.
And the founders who are still standing... they weren't the ones who surfed the best. They were the ones who kept building something real underneath their feet, even while the wave was up.
If you're navigating these decisions for your CPG brand and want a framework that's been tested against real exits, real failures, and real shelf performance — The MBA for CPG is built for exactly that. And if you want hands-on work applying it to your specific situation, the 90-Day Breakthrough program is where we go deep.
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