This ecommerce category is currently worth $9 trillion.
By 2034, it’s expected to reach $15 trillion.
Every year, this category produces multiple $100M+ exits.
Here’s a recent video I published to my YouTube channel discussing this plus two other “boring” categories that include some of the best opportunities in ecommerce:
The most underrated category: food & beverage
Recent announcements in this category:
- Feb 6, 2026: TRUBAR acquired for $201M CAD
- Feb 6, 2026: Once Upon a Farm raises $198M in IPO
- Feb 5, 2026: Beverage brand Willie’s Remedy+ hits $80M run rate in less than a year since launch
- Feb 4, 2026: Tony’s Chocoloney hits revenue of 240M EUR
- Feb 3, 2026: Cottage cheese brand Good Culture raises $55M after an investment the month prior, valuing it at $500M+
Food & beverage is the largest consumer product category globally.
Yet, most early-stage entrepreneurs don’t touch it.
Instead, they sell kitchen products, sporting goods, supplements, beauty products, and anything other than food products.
Why this category is underrated
Most ecommerce entrepreneurs avoid food & beverage for reasons such as these:
- The products are perishable (limited shelf life)
- They’re subject to additional regulatory approvals. (To create your own cottage cheese brand, for example, you or your manufacturer would need approval or certifications from all of the following: FDA, USDA, state-level dairy plant permit holders such as the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), Interstate Milk Shippers (IMS), Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO), FSMA, and HACCP.)
- They’re typically retail-centric. Around 90% of food products are still bought in brick-and-mortar stores.
It all seems like too much work.
It’s much easier to slap your new AI-generated logo on the 8 millionth vitamin D3 with K2 product.
Why I like this category
Despite the extra hassle with selling a food or beverage product, here’s the power of this category:
- Less competition. Because fewer people want to jump through the hurdles necessary to sell a food product, there’s far less competition for most products.
- Ad platforms (and influencers) love you. So few companies have done good ecommerce marketing for food products. That means your ads are almost always approved, get high Quality Scores, and receive disproportionately positive reception by social media users.
- Consumable. This category’s products are the very definition of consumable. People eat them, want to keep eating them, and buy them every day.
- Huge scalability. Because it’s the biggest consumer product category that grows every year, you can build a business of nearly any size in this space. For example, the Garza family scaled their tortilla chip business, Seite, to $500M in sales and sold it to PepsiCo for $1.2 billion last year.
How to get started in the food & beverage category
I think the cottage cheese brand Good Culture is a perfect example of how to enter this space.
Cottage cheese gained popularity in 1917 to conserve meat for the military during World War I.
Jesse Merrill and Anders Eisner founded Good Culture in 2015 to reinvent this century-old product, which had only stale, boring options available to consumers.
They focused on making a healthy, high-protein, simple-ingredient cottage cheese.
Today, they do hundreds of millions in revenue.
To enter this category, find a sub-category within food & beverage with high sales (do your research online) and only boring, stale, outdated options available to consumers.
If you plan to sell online first and avoid retail until a few years later, look for products that are lightweight, compact, and less perishable (such as protein bars, drink mixers, or concentrated beverages).
Create a modernized version of the product that leverages current trends, including high-protein, high-fiber, simple-ingredient, non-GMO, no-seed-oil, gut-friendly, and convenience.
As with all ecommerce products, test small until you nail product-market fit.
Beyond food & beverage: what really matters
If you already own an ecommerce business, you don’t need to abandon it and start a cottage cheese brand.
Here’s what really matters, which you can apply to almost any major consumer product category (remember, Apple, a $4T company, doesn’t sell food products):
- Go big. It takes just as much time, effort, and sacrifice to launch a product with a $1 million potential as it does to launch one with a $100M potential. Don’t sell yourself short—go bigger.
- Choose a large, growing market. Give yourself ample room to expand without having to sell multiple products.
- Identify stale, well-selling products and create a modernized version. Align your product features and branding with current trends that are likely to last 5-10+ years. (Example: Native Deodorant entering the boring deodorant category and creating a cleaner, simpler product. Sold for $100M.)
Time-sensitive: $1M+ brand owners only
I have some bad news…
This year, I decided to work with a few 7-figure ecommerce brand owners to help them scale on Shopify.
I’m walking them through a blueprint to double their businesses while removing themselves from 80% of day-to-day operations.
The current group is fantastic. Average annual sales are approximately $4 million.
So here’s the bad news: I can only take two more right now.
I want to keep the group intimate, and I only have so much time available outside the four businesses I own.
If you want in, get more info and apply here:
SCALE YOUR $1M+ BUSINESSYou need to hurry. I’m closing this cohort soon due to a major personal event in September. This program runs for 20 weeks, and I need to complete everything before then.
For everyone: I’ll be in touch with the next newsletter on Friday.
Have a great week,
—Matt