How Did Gruns Build a $1.2B Acquisition in 3.5 Years?
Building a consumer brand that gets acquired for over a billion dollars is the kind of outcome most founders only dream about. Chad Janice, founder of Gruns, actually did it — and he did it in just three and a half years, starting from a dorm room at Stanford Business School. When Unilever announced the $1.2 billion acquisition, the question everyone wanted answered was simple: how? The answer, according to Chad, comes down to three things — novel innovation, unrelenting urgency every single day, and an elite team where every person operates like the CEO of their own domain.
The idea came to Chad in a moment of brutal honesty. Two weeks before he was set to start his MBA, he was drinking a greens powder at his dad's place and thought, "There's no way I'm keeping this habit past 30 days." That one thought sparked a year of formulating, piloting, and testing — including sampling roughly 25% of his entire Stanford class on early iterations of the product before a formal launch in August 2023.
02:15
Chad describing the original epiphany moment — drinking greens powder and realizing no one would keep that habit
Watch at 02:15 →
What Marketing Channels Actually Drove Gruns' Hypergrowth?
For most DTC brands trying to figure out what marketing channels work best, the honest answer is that Meta is still king — and Chad doesn't sugarcoat it. Meta was and remains the primary growth engine for Gruns, but Chad was quick to point out that brands running 85–90% of their spend through Meta alone are playing a dangerous game.
"Meta is always going to be a beast," he said, "but I'm surprised when I hear mixes that heavy. You should probably diversify that a little bit." For Gruns, the strategy has always been to build defensibility against the media mix — investing in awareness channels beyond Meta and Google rather than becoming entirely dependent on a single platform. As the brand scaled, diversification wasn't just a hedge; it was a strategic priority baked into the growth plan from early on.
Creative volume also played a massive role. Gruns developed a reputation for producing high volumes of performance creative, though Chad was careful to note that AI hasn't meaningfully replaced human-generated content in their ad account. As of now, over 99% of their creative is human-made — whether that's UGC, influencer content, or edited video. They're testing AI tools but remain cautious about brand safety.
How Do You Successfully Move From DTC to Retail?
The DTC-to-retail transition is one of the most talked-about challenges in the consumer brand world — and Gruns navigated it deliberately. Chad never saw Gruns as a purely DTC business. From day one, he knew it needed to be omnichannel. "There's no reason to have pride in being solely DTC," he said. "There are consumers everywhere. Meet them where they are."
14:30
Chad explaining the 20-person hand-packing operation that ran for the first 6-8 months of the business
Watch at 14:30 →
He started having retail conversations as early as January 2024, despite advisors telling him it was too soon. His reasoning was simple: retail selling cycles are brutally long, so starting early was the only way to be ready when the time was right. That patience paid off. Gruns launched in Sprouts in October 2024, Target in February 2025, Walmart in April 2025, and a wave of other retailers shortly after.
The single biggest change they made to prepare for retail? A complete rebrand. The original packaging — Chad openly admits — was designed in Canva in an afternoon and was a dark green color that didn't communicate the product clearly at shelf. The rebrand gave shoppers a way to identify what the product was within three seconds, which is the essential test for any retail packaging. New design, cleaner messaging, ready for the shelf.
How Did Gruns Find a Co-Manufacturer When Everyone Said No?
One of the most overlooked parts of Gruns' origin story is just how hard it was to get the product made at all. When Chad set out to find a co-manufacturer who could put dense, robust nutritional blends into gummy form, he called 20 different co-manufacturing partners. Nineteen of them said no — flat out. The common feedback: it would taste terrible, it wouldn't work in a gummy, it had never been done.
The one who agreed to try? He wasn't even confident it would work. But they produced a batch, tasted it together, and while it needed iteration, it wasn't a disaster. What followed was months of refinement with Stanford classmates serving as the test group. The bigger operational challenge, though, was packaging. The individual daily packs that Gruns became known for required infrastructure that simply didn't exist. For the first six to eight months of the business, 20 people stood around a table manually placing gummies into packs and sealing them with a clamp sealer that looked like a staple gun. The shift to automation was one of the defining operational milestones of the company's early life.
22:10
Chad breaking down the rebrand from Canva-designed packaging to retail-ready design
Watch at 22:10 →
Today, Gruns ships 10 million gummies per day. Getting from hand-packing to that scale — across multiple co-manufacturers, multiple production nodes, and both 3PL and in-house fulfillment — is, as Chad put it, "the part people are going to overlook."
How Did Chad Build a 130-Person Team That Runs Itself?
When people ask how to build a startup team from scratch, the advice is usually generic. Chad's version is more specific and more honest. The hardest part of the early days, he says, is that the founder has to do too much. That's unavoidable. But the discipline is in recognizing — as quickly as possible — where you're no longer the best person in the room.
"Pick off each function slowly over time," he said. "Either things you don't enjoy that are dragging down your energy, or things where someone could do it way better than you." One early hire that raised eyebrows was bringing on a Chief People Officer earlier than most startups would. The reasoning was straightforward: company success is ultimately about people. If you want to attract and retain the best talent, you need someone dedicated to building that culture from the start.
The culture Gruns built centers on autonomy and accountability. Every person is expected to operate as the CEO of their function. "When you stack 130-plus people who are each the CEO of their domain," Chad said, "you end up in a place like where we've ended up." That's not a coincidence — it's a compounding effect of urgency and ownership applied daily over years.
How Is Gruns Actually Using AI in Their Business?
The question of how to use AI in a consumer products business gets a lot of hand-wavy answers. Chad's version is more grounded. The foundation, he explains, is data infrastructure. Gruns built a robust data warehouse that serves as a single source of truth for the entire company — and that warehouse is connected to Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, so that every team can query it directly.
The CX team, the finance team, the marketing team — all of them have immediate access to accurate, live business data through AI. "That's probably the biggest unlock," Chad said. The internal goal they set for themselves is almost provocatively stated: make yourself replaceable. Every employee is going through their role systematically and identifying what can be automated. The productivity gains, he says, have been real.
On the creative side, they're not there yet. Gruns is still almost entirely human-generated in its ad creative, and Chad is cautious about the brand safety implications of AI-generated content. The opportunity is visible, but the execution is deliberate.
What Happens When a Subscription Brand Almost Runs Out of Stock?
Six months into the business, on January 29th — a date Chad remembers exactly — the company nearly ran out of inventory. For two weeks, he'd been warning his co-manufacturer that supply was looking thin. For two weeks, he heard, "We're good, we're good." Then the answer changed. They had to cut marketing spend by 93% overnight.
The golden rule at Gruns, established in that moment and never broken since: we do not go out of stock. Subscribers take the product daily. They expect it to arrive. If that means pausing new customer acquisition entirely, that's the trade-off. Delivering for existing subscribers always comes first. That principle shaped how the team thought about inventory management, SKU complexity, and supply chain scaling for every decision that followed.
From that harrowing early moment to shipping 10 million gummies a day and landing a $1.2 billion exit, Gruns' story is a masterclass in what it actually takes to build a consumer brand worth acquiring — product conviction, operational obsession, and a team that treats every day like it matters.
