“There's nothing pleasant about diligence. It's like going to the doctors and getting into a gown and just being very exposed and having to do a lot of explaining and a lot of promising, a lot of proving. And it's just like a lot of holes are being poked and you just feel like you're on your heels always. And that's with a successful business.”
The Startup CPG Podcast · Alternative Proteins · October 2026
The founder of a cold-pressed juice brand describes selling it to a large food company. Because her company had built its own production facilities, the sale meant breaking long leases and sorting out what to do with staff. Her advice to founders is to build with the likely acquirer in mind.
Transcript
Thanks.
…there due. What was the acquisition process like in terms of the diligence side? What made sense for them with the acquisition? What milestones or qualities do you think mattered most to the buyer? About your business. And what was it like behind the scenes going through that evaluation process?
It was challenging, definitely challenging. There's nothing pleasant about diligence. It's like going to the doctors and getting into a gown and just being very exposed and having to do a lot of explaining and a lot of promising, a lot of proving. And it's just like a lot of holes are being poked and you just feel like you're on your heels always. And that's with a successful business, right? And I imagine that's to some extent true for, I mean, although, but for me, I just was like, I felt like there was still so much I had to prove in this process of diligence, right? Because you're kind of fighting for every penny. What was interesting about that was in that particular case, was just building it in that time. There was, again, there was no one else doing it, right? So there was no blueprint for Blueprint. Like we were the first to create the juice, the coal press juice category. We couldn't go to a manufacturer and say, this is what we want. Can you make it for us? And like, we're going to pay you this price and tolling fee or whatever. And we're not going to worry about any of that stuff. Like, we had to build out our own…
Yeah, no, that's very smart. And I think especially in Food and Bev, a lot of people kind of start their growth journey having to self-produce because they're starting in farmers markets or they're starting very small and then they're kind of scaling up from there. And I think if you start day one…
I think there was a lot of strength in the brand, definitely a lot of strength in the brand. But I think beyond that, it was speed. I think it was just like being nimble and moving so fast. And with Blueprint specifically, we were making raw juice, right? So we were making unpasteurized raw juice…
Your commitment to not just making sales, but to your product delivering the health benefits and kind of that original reason why you started doing this in the first place shines through so clearly all the way to like such a foundational piece of why you were able to achieve your acquisition. You…