Dek: The health supplement company counts investors like Lewis Hamilton and Alex Honnold.
Kat Cole is no stranger to a career pivot. At Hooters, she went from waitress to vice president as she worked her way up the restaurant chain’s corporate ladder. Then, over the course of more than 10 years at Cinnabon parent Focus Brands, she built a career selling sweet treats to consumers.
In 2024, Cole made the leap from selling fast food to health supplements by becoming CEO of AG1 (formerly known as Athletic Greens), which sells a green multivitamin and nutrient powder.
Valued at $1.2 billion in 2022, AG1 has been endorsed by athletes like Olympic runner Allyson Felix and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, as well as an endless roster of wellness and fitness influencers. (Some doctors have questioned the need for supplements like multivitamins altogether).
Cole spoke to Most Innovative Companies host Yasmin Gagne about growing AG1’s business, the brand’s Ozempic opportunity, and whether she thinks it will ever end up in the grocery aisles.
Listen to our conversation with Cole and a segment with Ankler Awards Editor and Prestige Junkie host Katey Rich, who explains how studios have conducted their Oscar campaigns this year.
https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-studios-navigate-the-oscars-race/id1576874503?i=1000694523411
How does a former fast food executive come to run a health company?
There’s a few ways to look at this. One is just the journey that I’ve gone on as a woman, as a mom, and over time how nutrition and health has become more important to me personally. We’re also so much more informed now. Even people who are in their thirties are thinking of healthspan and nutrition. There are things, like my mom getting breast cancer when my kids were very small and she was starting her business, or when I had my kids at 39 and 41 after a few miscarriages in between, that put nutrition and health more squarely in my focus as an individual. Health also became a bigger part of one where I believe consumers were going and therefore what the market opportunity and business would be. I am also a leader experienced running companies at scale, and 10 years ago there weren’t a lot of scaled healthful nutrition companies that made sense for someone like me to manage. Now AG1 is big enough for me to come in and lead this chapter.
Do you have any guilty pleasures?
I used to say everything in moderation. Now I think that phrase, in some cases, has been used to the extreme where in aggregate, a few things in moderation are no longer moderation. I think very seriously about what my kids see me eat and how we make decisions when I treat myself. But I am a human, not a robot. I treat myself once in a while with an ice cream or a cookie—I have a 5 and a 7-year-old
During COVID, sales of multivitamins and supplements in general increased by 50% between 2018 and 2022. AG1 is 15 years old—how do you compete with the explosion of newer brands in the sector?
In any market, the presence of growth and competition is an indicator of consumer demand. So as it relates to health and wellness, if there are more consumers demanding more options, then that means those consumers are going on a health awareness journey. As a businessperson, that means I’m in the right space. That said, consumers have more options. It can get tougher to appreciate the distinction between those options.
So when I think about the things that are required to stand out today that may not have been on customer’s minds as much 10 years ago. That’s things like human clinical trials and research for supplements that is not required of the industry, but is what we have invested in for years. I think about third-party certifications—we’ve been NSF[-certified] for sport for eight or nine years, which is a third-party certification that not only verifies that what’s on the label is in the product, it also ensures there are no contaminants or doping agents. We pay a third party to keep our product all the way through the supply chain in check. Those are things we’ve always done, but years ago we actually didn’t brag about it. We didn’t market it because there was so much demand. Now we are showing proof of the third party studies we do. It’s a different approach to education information and go to market.
I was surprised to find out there’s an even gender split among AG1 customers. I was surprised because I assumed that most would be men into biohacking.
I assumed that as well when I was an early customer. I thought I was this outlier lady. Once I got into the business and saw the demographic split, I wanted to accelerate that shift to a more female customer base. When I joined, it was like 40% or trending that way, and now it’s 50-50. One reason [for your misconception] might be that some of our more popular creator partners thought leaders, academics, people with big podcasts, or platforms were male. The reality is women—and this has been accelerated by COVID—want to live long and strong. It’s not about being frail or delicate, it’s about fuel, it’s about strength, it’s about power and nutrition.
What I see in our customers is the fastest growing customer group by age is 45-plus. As we get older, we age into new reasons to need to supplement and want to supplement an already healthy lifestyle, and there are new ways to afford a premium product.
Our younger consumers tend to be athletes and fitness enthusiasts who really value their nutrition and take it more seriously. That has evolved over time. Then I started interviewing our customers, our female customers in particular, in the early years when I joined. What I found is they had heard about it from a partner, a trainer, a physician. Their recommender tended to be male in those earlier years. But then they didn’t have as many options being marketed to them as we have now.
Now we’re in an interesting space where our split is 50-50 both for existing customers and new ones joining us, but women in particular are so marketed to in this space. It’s confusing. It’s difficult to know what to trust, and we have so many distinct life stages, from pre and postnatal, perimenopausal, menopausal, postmenopausal. There’s a lot of support that can come from nutraceuticals or nutrients to help with those life stages. So now the job we need to do for our female customers is being really clear where we fit into their stack and explain why they should trust AG1 in the confusing landscape of supplements.
At Focus Brands, you brought brands like Cinnabon to different sections of the grocery aisle, with products stocked in the snacks section, and the frozen food section, for instance. Are you going to bring the same playbook to AG1?
The core AG1 is this daily health drink in a powder form that people mix on their own in water or put in their smoothies. Retailers love this idea. It’s a very straightforward supply chain. It’s shelf-stable in its packaging, and there is built-in demand that is not necessarily being fully realized by the e-commerce platform. So retailers love the idea of a brand people know but haven’t yet tried. There’s brand awareness, product fit, and the format makes sense. You can imagine some retailers that have a heavy inclination toward sampling and education and letting people try and learn about a product before they buy. That’s the opposite of our current model. If you hear about it and you go online, the best value is to subscribe. So you’re actually subscribing before you try retail. Some of the retailers can help us reach a customer that we haven’t been able to reach.
AG1’s valuation—$1.2 billion—is a huge number for a CPG company. And I think we’ve seen a lot of CPG companies struggle to live up to that kind of valuation. You have investors, including Lewis Hamilton and Alex Honnold, who are probably curious when they’re going to see a return. Is the company ever going public?
I won’t speak to what the particular outcome is. That valuation was on $160 million in revenue we did that year. January 2022 was peak market fervor, there was a lot of froth. However larger marquee investors who came to the table are supersmart. They saw the fundamentals of the business. We were $160 million in revenue that year, growing at hundreds of percent with an incredible body of opportunity in front of the business. So if you look at what’s happened since then, we were at $160 million at the end of 2021, we’re projecting $600 million in revenue now. We’ve well over 3X the business. So even if valuations have come down to earth a bit, the business has grown unbelievably. And so our investors are very happy.
Do you plan on launching more AG1 products?
Our customers have asked us to launch so many things, but if we did it, it would create confusion. AG1 is foundational nutrition. It’s this idea that first and foremost, the best driver of health from a nutrition perspective is whole foods. Then this idea of something called a foundational nutrition layer, which essentially is nutrients and gut health support. Foundational nutrition is an idea that there is such a thing as a group of supplements that help most people cover many [health] gaps. It’s like the future of what the multivitamin was supposed to be, except no one takes a multivitamin and says, “my digestion’s better.” No one takes a multivitamin and says, “I feel more energy.” But they do with AG1 because it’s more comprehensive. This idea of having a foundational routine is the base of the business. As we innovate products, the question is: what do our customers need from us? And I’ll just give you a few examples. Might they be at different life stages? You can imagine what some of those might be that emulate some of the journey multivitamins.
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