Commerce Riff with Sri & PVSB - April 28, 2026

SPEAKER_00 0:01

It's April 28th, 2026, and this is the Commerce Rift brought to you by the CPG guys. Ten minutes of the news stories that matter in commerce this week. I'm your co-host, PVSB. I'm joined as always by Papa Raj, the father of Pop Stars, co-founder of Think Blue Consulting. Shri, how's the week been treating you?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

It's a long week in the Northeast. You know, you and I got to work together up in Connecticut. I got to go to my um, I want to call it my Alma Marahim down at Stanford, Connecticut, which is the first place I lit that up while working for I and I, my first job after college. And then we hosted a dinner, which is very nice for Product Win. Locals from the Stanford area came by, which is pretty cool. A bunch of CPT brands. How was uh your early weekend Saturday morning?

SPEAKER_00 0:50

All good, took night dance class. Let's not forget, we also had dinner with our dear friend uh Anna Meo from Nielsen IQ. That was a wonderful little sojourn at our favorite restaurant, Italian Siena. Uh they treated us extremely well. So it was great for you. All's good here. Let's kick things off in the beverage aisle because Keurig Dr. Pepper had a strong week. So let's unpack the numbers. KDP reported first quarter 2026 net sales of just under$4 billion, up 9.4% year over year and ahead of analyst expectations. What's the headline? Well, cold beverages actually carried the quarter. U.S. refreshment beverages grew 11.9% to$2.6 billion, driven by 7.2% volume mix growth and nearly five points of net price realization. International was up nearly 20%. The offset was U.S. coffee, which slipped 2.3% on softening curing pod volumes. But that track with guidance and the company reaffirmed its full year outlook. Now let's talk about what's actually driving the cold side of the business tree. Energy is the engine Ghost, which KDP majority acquired in late 2024 and has been rolling into its direct store delivery network through 2025, is clearly contributing. You also have C4, Black Rifle Energy Bloom. KDP has been intentional about building a portfolio of complementary energy brands targeting distinct consumer occasions. It appears to be working. The company has gone from essentially zero energy market share three years ago to over 6% today with a double-digit share goal ahead. Here's the CPG strategic lens. KDP's 2-1 result is a proof point for the portfolio diversification thesis. A company that used to be primarily defined by its coffee platform is now generating outsized growth from a cold beverage engine built on DSD distribution scale, intrude minority stake MA. The Ghost acquisition framework, 6% now, 40% in 2028, at a performance-based valuation, is exactly the kind of disciplined deal structure that lets an acquirer get distribution leverage before paying the full growth premium. The question for CBG Peers: how many of you are watching energy at 6% share and still treating it as a challenger category? Because KDP is acting like it's already won. Watch the shelf. The DSD network is about to get a lot more crowded and a lot more competitive. Shri?

SPEAKER_01 3:32

All right. We'll move from there to a consumer behavior story that is funny on the surface and alarming underneath for anyone. The alcohol, hospitality, or brand, beverage businesses, indeed. The Wall Street Journal this week put numbers because something anyone who's been out recently already knows in their gut drinks are expensive, that grown adults are pre-gaming again, like what they did in college. Remember those$1 pictures of Killians right back in college, Peter, on game day? Here's the data. Nearly a third of the 1,000 people surveyed by ZapI. Zappi, a consumer inside platform, said they free drinks before going to bars or concerts specifically to avoid paying for overpriced drinks and venues. The numbers justify the behavior. Tall clan of black cherry, white clawed, a Massachusetts concert venue, 20 bucks. Cocktails at Madison Square Garden, 25 bucks and up. National Frock in Washington, DC,$15.40. Here at Fenway, nearly$11. The cheapest MLB beer you can find in the country right now is Coolest Fields in Colorado. And brands have noticed. Specifically optimized for on-the-go pre-game consumption. Now, this is more than a quirky cultural moment, it's a structural signal about where the alcohol purchasation is migrating. When a third of consumers are deliberately shifting their drinking dollar from on-premise to at home, from the bar to the living room, from the venue to the parking lot, that has real category implications for CPG alcohol brands. This is a moment of opportunity, but only turn the right format, the right price here, and the right retail channel. The consumer of free gaming at home is buying at the grocery store, at the convenience stores, at clubs. They're price conscious for the spending. They want their brand of choice that is sized and price point that makes the math work before the show starts. And for retailers, the off-prints channel just became even more critical to capture beverage alcohol wallet share. When you has priced itself out of the first drink, the drink is now yours to win at the shop. If you're assortment, your promo architecture, and your shopper media are pointing at the right consumer at the right moment, aka the first moment of truth. Now, Peter, let me append to that. Here's our viewpoint from the CPG guys. Alcohol consumption has changed over COVID last few years. The younger generations are drinking less. That is a reality that has to be dealt with if you're in the alcohol business. We invite you here on the CPG guy to come talk to us, tell us what's on your mind if you are in one of those categories and a brand leader. Over to you, Peter.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yes, Ryan. Also, thanks to our dear friend Laura Cooper, who penned the article in the Wall Street Journal that inspired today's story that we just covered. Now let's talk about something that isn't a CPG story on its face, but has more implications for the industry than most people are giving it credit for. This week, Microsoft announced a voluntary retirement program targeting approximately 7% of its U.S. workforce, roughly 8,750 employees out of 125,000. First time in the company's 51-year history, it has done buyouts at this scale. The program uses what it calls a rule of 70. Eligible employees are those at senior director level and below, whose combined age and years of service equals 70 or higher. Full details go to the eligible employees and their managers on May 7th with 30 days to make a decision. Stated context is cost management amid a massive AI infrastructure build-out. Microsoft is spending tens of billions of dollars on data centers, GPUs, and AI development. The workforce math has to evolve to fund that investment. They are not alone. Amazon, Google, and Meta have all been trimming headcount while simultaneously expanding capital expenditure on AI infrastructure. The pattern is clear. So why does this matter for CPG and retail? Because Microsoft is effectively the operating system for a significant portion of enterprise CPG. Office, Teams, Azure, Dynamics, Co-Pilot, the tentacles are everywhere, sorry. And the employees being offered buyouts are the senior experienced layer, the people who are built and manage those enterprise relationships, who customize implementations, who support business critical workflows. There's also a talent implication. When the experienced operators leave a technology company voluntarily, many of them don't disappear. They will go into consulting, they'll go into CPT companies directly, they'll go into agencies and solution providers. Talent circulation that follows a Microsoft scale voluntary separation program seeps into the entire ecosystem over the ensuing 12 to 18 months. And the macro signal is simply this. Even the most valuable technology company on the planet is reconfiguring its human human capital model for an AI native future. If you're a CPG or retail organization that has not started asking hard questions about where AI replaces labor and where it doesn't, Microsoft just put a very large clock on the wall. Should we close this out?

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Hey Peter, thanks for the notification on Microsoft and the retirement that they're offering. One thing I want to point out, they've publicly announced, Peter, that they are rolling back co-pilot in a big way and moving funding towards AI. I thought copilot was AI, but it looks like the money is going to go into the compute infrastructure versus the actual software programming. And that announcement shook some waves earlier this week. But let's end on a story that sits squarely at the intersection of our niche retail media, brand safety, and the ongoing challenge of making social advertising actually accountable. Because TikTok has a consequential week on the measurement front. This week, TechStar expanded its partnerships with integrated ad science and Zephyr, bringing campaign measurement and brand safety capabilities to four additional ad formats, including TikTok search, creation tools for smart plus traffic, TikTok wide in the US, and GMV Max in the US. Separately, Double Verify became the first measurement vendor to receive media rating council accreditation specifically for TikTok, video viewability, covering impressions, viewable impressions, viewability metrics, and sophisticated invalid traffic filtration. I want to put that in context. TikToks is expected to capture nearly 5% of global digital advertising revenue in 2026, reaching an audience of 136 million unique US users. That's not a niche platform. That's considered a mainstream media VCO, but it's scary to trust deficit with serious brand advertisers, particularly due to the ownership and regulatory complexities that played out over the past 18 months, partly because the measurement infrastructure simply hasn't kept pace with the scale of the opportunity. With this week's announcement, what it represents is TikTok systematically closing that gap. Aye, it's that for double verify. They're not fringe players in the measurement space. They are the currency that institutional advertiser communities relies on across digital channels. Getting MRC accreditation for TikTok viability to double verify, kind of third-party credentialing and move the platform from test and learn and betas into a media plan to the committed investment line in a media plan. For CPG brands, this matters in a very specific way. TikTok's GMV Max ad format, which is now getting brand safety and measurement coverage in the US, is a commerce integrated placement engine to drive direct purchase. The fact that IAS's measurement will now be available within GMV Max at launch means brands can finally deploy against TikTok Commerce inventory with the same accountability framework they would expect from a performance channel on the open web. But here's what CPG guys say. TikTok is no longer asking brands to trust their own faith, it's presenting the receipts. Indeed, the measurement infrastructure being built out in 2026 is the foundation for TikTok becoming a serious, recurring line in CPG media plans, including especially in the context of retail media and social commerce. Question is no longer whether TikTok is a legitimate advertising vico. Question is whether your brand has created the content strategy, the commerce integration to compete on TikTok at scale. And I'm gonna beg to defer here. Brands aren't ready. They were using measurement, and regulatory compliance is an excuse.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

That's a wrap on this week's Commerce Riff reminder. Catch up on a recently released episode. First one featuring Shelly Zalis from the female quotient, and of course the one we recorded at Shop Talk, Patrick Nomanson from, of course, TikTok, which we just discussed. If any of this sparked a thought, drop it in the comments, send us a message, we read them. And if you're not already following us on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, now is the time to do so. We'll see you next week.