Happy Friday! Welcome back to 1 Smart Business Story, where the editors and writers of Inc. share our most entertaining and illuminating tales of entrepreneurial derring-do.  
 
Today: The emerging green gummy giant, Grüns, a two-year-old startup that’s already achieved startling growth that’d be the envy of any AI startup. Founder and CEO Chad Janis had a rollicking conversation with Inc., revealing  

Since we published this story, Grüns. released its winter limited edition gummies, Grinch Punch, its first licensed partnership, and it officially announced its forthcoming workout gummies, Jüced. All the more evidence how Janis is moving fast to serve all your functional needs in gummy form. 
 
Let me know about your gummy vitamin regimen (or anything else) by emailing me a [email protected]. And if you enjoy our newsletter, please share this link to subscribe with a friend.

Grüns founder and CEO Chad Janis reveals a revenue number for the first time, a new retail partner, and what’s next for the $500 million business.

BY DAVID LIDSKY

“David, you’ve never heard of creatine? I can’t believe you’re still alive. You need to be taking creatine.” Grüns CEO Chad Janis, who started exploring the idea of a gummies supplement brand in 2022, launched in 2023, and achieved a $500 million valuation earlier this year, isn’t literally chiding me. (I have heard of creatine.) 

Rather he’s referring to how most brands in the supplements market speak to their customers. He’s also not a fan of attaching Grüns’s products to a specific ingredient. “We take our efficacy and clinical studies very seriously,” Janis says, “but we talk to consumers in a fun, friendly way that’s a little bit sassy.”

That sass is paying off as Janis brings news. For the first time, he’s ready to share a revenue number, a milestone Grüns hit in August on its two-year anniversary in the market. Janis also reveals how he’s grown distribution in the five and a half months since he last spoke with Inc., and he talks about his latest product release and the public’s response to it.

In the process, Janis offers valuable insights into:

“We turned two on August 11,” Janis says, and in its 24th month, Grüns “crossed $300 million ARR.” (ARR is, of course, annualized revenue rate, which means taking one month’s revenue and multiplying by 12.) That means Grüns did $25 million in one month, and it likely puts it on a path to deliver well over $200 million in 2025 revenue.

For context, consider the hottest startup market in history: the AI boom we’re currently living through. Cursor, the popular AI vibe coding app, hit $100 million ARR in 12 months in February, a record at the time. Working backward, Grüns was probably not far behind, which is remarkable for a consumer good.

What’s more, Janis says that Grüns has been profitable for more than a year, which is not something any of the highest-profile AI startups can claim. In July, Janis appeared on the Operators podcast, where he discussed how disciplined he is on customer acquisition costs (CAC) and that he runs Grüns with a minimum three times lifetime value (LTV) gross profit to CAC. (Meanwhile, the best-known AI companies run at a negative gross margin.)

“Chad’s focus on financial discipline while building a consumable business has paid off,” says Mike Beckham, co-founder and CEO of the drinkware brand Simple Modern and co-host of the Operators podcast. “The mark of a great operator is the ability to build a great business without destroying a lot of capital. Chad and his team have been laser focused growing Grüns intelligently so the business has been able to scale at an incredible rate.” 

Janis chalks up his success first to his team of more than 100 employees “who are extremely customer obsessed.” That maniacal focus emanates from Janis, who spent almost the full first year trying dozens of product iterations with a rotating group of more than 100 consumers to land upon the product formulation he launched with in August 2023, and which the company continues to evolve.

The majority of Grüns’s business is still direct-to-consumer, allowing it to have a close relationship with customers and hear what they want. The brand is also now in 6,300 retail stores, up from fewer than 5,000 in May, seeing key expansion among its major retailer wins such as Walmart and Target. Grüns entered Target in February, for example, and is now nationwide in all 1,900 locations. It’s in 3,500 Walmarts, up from about 2,000 six months ago. Both retailers carry Grüns’s nootropic gummies brand, Nütrops (for cognitive function), as well as the flagship brand.

Janis also tells Inc. exclusively that Grüns is now in every Sam’s Club (Walmart’s warehouse club offshoot) with three SKUs. It launched with a special 25-count box of individual gummy sachets for $29.98 and Grüns Kids at $23.98.

Why does Janis think retailers are so willing to stock Grüns? “We bring people into the stores,” he says. “They’re coming into our aisle faster and more frequently than the category average.” As Inc. wrote about in July in a story about how Target decides what to stock, the ability to drive customers to shop there is a key consideration.

What’s more, Janis notes, “we’re selling out at a 4.3x velocity compared with the category average.”

I ask Janis whether he prefers having DTC customers, many of whom are on recurring subscriptions. “I don’t necessarily worry about where you want to buy Grüns,” he replies, adding that there’s no intentional effort to try to convert his retail customers either. “Our customer is everyone in the United States,” he adds. “We’re all about being accessible.”

As much as Janis feels a sense of loyalty to the retailers “who took a chance on us early,” as he tells me, Grüns is very committed to serving its DTC audience. This summer, it did its first seasonal offering, a limited-time raspberry lemonade gummy. For fall, it introduced a granny smith apple flavor that’s available only on its website. Or in the company’s brand parlance, Grünny Smith Apple. (Groan—or Grün—if you must.)

What initiated the idea of these seasonal specials? “Surprise and delight,” Janis says. “How do we celebrate that consumer?” He adds that there will be a “regular cadence” of new flavors. The strategy brings to mind Oreo’s longstanding limited-edition strategy, which has seen it create riffs on everything from Swedish Fish to blueberry pie in sandwich cookie form.

When I wonder if these offers are being attached to regular orders and therefore spurring more sales, Janis says no, that’s not the goal. It’s a “frictionless swap” for customers to pick the fall apple gummies for that month’s order.

So with the holidays near, I ask, what can we expect? Peppermint-flavored gummies? Cocoa? Peppermint hot chocolate gummies?

Janis smiles and laughs, but refuses to give it away. All he’ll say is that I’m going to love it.

In September, Grüns introduced its third major product, Immün, which are, you guessed it, immunity gummies. Janis seems particularly proud of this one, going on at length about how this isn’t just a vitamin C gummy. “The closest analogy is one of those shots,” he says, referring to the small bottles of concentrated juice that usually contain such ingredients as elderberry, ginger, and turmeric.

Immün has all those things plus nine other ingredients (so 13 total), from MCT oil “nature’s rapid absorption ace,” per its marketing, to black pepper (“turmeric’s absorption aid”). Rather than those one-off shots or powders designed to be taken when one starts to feel sick, Janis presents Immün as a preventative rather than a reactionary product. 

I can’t quite tell if Janis is so boosterish because Immün is his latest product, or if he’s still smarting a little from when I had asked him earlier about articles questioning Grüns’s efficacy. “When customers turn around our package to look at the nutritional panel, we want them to let out an audible ‘Whoa!’” he says, owing to the “credible, high-quality ingredients.”

And the vast majority of customers are drowning out any naysayers, audible “whoa” or no. Janis says the company believed it had at least a one-month supply of Immün for new subscribers, but “we sold out in one day,” he tells me. The company is currently having interested subscribers join a waitlist on the Immün website and they’re filling orders in batches.

A major factor in Grüns’s being able to release products at such a rapid clip (Nütrops debuted in December 2024, just nine months before Immün) has been Janis’s decision to have “in-house gummy scientists.“ That dream job does not come with that moniker, alas, even though it would almost certainly be the best LinkedIn job title ever. They’re technically R&D managers, Janis says.

Nonetheless, the two individuals in that role are core to the Grüns product roadmap, as well as developing those seasonal flavors. He even goes so far as to call it “gummy science.” 

“We are pushing gummy science forward,” Janis says, adding that it’s also “an art. It’s an art and a science.”

What’s next? He indicates that “a product consumers may take around a workout” is on the way. On the Operators podcast in July, he noted that “we play in big categories that are not going anywhere.” 

Befitting Janis’s ambitions for Grüns to be a lifestyle brand, the final form that takes is to have a spokescharacter. (Or maybe a Grüns-themed hotel?) Janis is way ahead of me when I suggest that the bear on all its packaging, which is known as Barry the Bear, could be the company’s Duolingo Owl. Grüns started looking for performers to play Barry back in November 2024, an anthropomorphic version of the stylized cartoon bear on all its packaging.

“Barry allows customers to ID us quickly,” Janis says. With other brands starting to adopt Grüns’s once-novel sachets of individual servings of a day’s gummies, it gives him brand strength in such a crowded market. “We own the bear.”

Janis, who detailed his fundraising journey for Inc. in May, says he’s not in the market looking to raise more. When I ask him to articulate his vision for Grüns given his rapid growth and further ambitions, he demurs, telling me he can’t say.

But with a huge grin on his face, he promises that it’s “grandiose.” Who knew that promising better cognition might just be a better business than one promising superintelligence?

This story originally appeared on Inc.com.