Nutrition Capital Network (NCN) brings together active investors, business service provider sponsors and innovative companies in health, nutrition and wellness.
Our community receives year-round access to deal flow, mentorship opportunities, educational sessions and our virtual platform to stay connected and engaged. NCN hosts six investor meetings each year, where selected companies give live presentations to a group of active industry investors, business service sponsors and mentors. These exciting events provide a unique opportunity for our community to create long-lasting, meaningful connections.
Led by industry veterans and experienced industry partners, NCN is here to support the growth of the nutrition and health and wellness industries. Learn more about our sponsor partners below:
Whipstitch Capital
Whipstitch Capital is the largest independent investment bank in the U.S. solely focused on the better-for-you and emerging brands consumer sectors. Over the past 14 years, the Whipstitch team has completed nearly 150 transactions on behalf of their clients, who have included KeVita, Spindrift, Blake’s All Natural, Purely Elizabeth, Flying Embers, Core Nutrition, Country Archer, GoodBelly, LesserEvil, Yasso, Purple Carrot, Uqora and others. At Whipstitch Capital, we believe the companies, brands, products and people with whom we work should make our homes and communities better. This is all we do, and we have been doing it for a long time. In doing so, we have learned a lot over the years, and we want to share our expertise with you. We want you to succeed. We hope what we have shared here can help. The right approach matters. With us, it’s personal.
Advantage Solutions
Advantage Solutions leads from the heart of commerce as the unifying force connecting brands, retailers and people—shaping every way people shop. As the strategic advisors for brands and retailers, they deliver the best returns and create momentum in the marketplace by leading with a people-first, purpose-driven, performance-focused approach to grow sales, transform businesses and enrich lives. FDM, an Advantage Solutions company, is the leading brokerage agency providing commercialization and headquarter sales representation for emerging, insurgent and mid-sized brands across conventional, natural/specialty and independent channels. With a team averaging over 20 years of industry experience, we help brands navigate every stage of the retail journey—from concept and first placement to sustained distribution growth—through a dedicated single point of contact model. A people-first, performance-focused team with the deep retail expertise and passion to help emerging brands win.
Advanced Ingredients for Dietary Products
For over 25 years, AIDP has been distributing specialty and functional ingredients to the nutrition, food and beverage markets. At AIDP, we specialize in clinically researched brands that provide benefits for immune health, cognitive wellness, digestive health, joint support, healthy aging, cosmeceuticals and more. Our novel brands are carefully evaluated based on intellectual property, clinical support, sustainable sourcing methods, safety and rigorous quality control. Our broad specialty portfolio of key ingredients includes products targeted for new and established trends in the nutritional, food, beverage and cosmeceutical markets and includes an extensive range of vitamins and minerals, plant proteins, amino acids, botanical solutions and novel actives to enrich your formulations. At AIDP, we work with market-leading brands as well as emerging companies. We are there to help you at every step and meet every challenge you have with innovative solutions to grow your business.
CalNutri
From ideation to commercialization, the team at CalNutri empowers brands to focus on building their brand and distribution, while CalNutri focuses on the product development, manufacturing and supply chain operations. Most CPG brands spend many months vetting raw material suppliers, contract manufacturers and supply chain vendors. This frustrating vetting process results in several months of sunk capital and extreme delays in time to market. Our primary objective is to streamline and manage this process, allowing the CPG company and their creative team to develop their go-to-market strategy and rapidly acquire market share. The CalNutri team is composed of food, beverage, supplements and natural products industry veterans who have cultivated trusted relationships throughout the value chain over the past 20 years. The CalNutri team has built, led and serviced some of the most respected consumer brands and contract manufacturing companies in these respective industries.
Creative Alignments
Creative Alignments turned the recruiting industry on its head—about time, right? We make hiring easier, quicker, more transparent and actually enjoyable. Our hourly Time-Based Recruiting model has saved natural products/CPG companies nearly $20 million (and a whole bunch of headaches) over the past 15 years. Because we are not incentivized by commissions (we charge by the hour for our time), we are fully aligned with our client’s specific needs, goals and culture. We’ve partnered with hundreds of growing brands—taking many from startup to exit, like RXBAR, HaloTop and Ritual Zero Proof. Creative Alignments is B Corp certified, using recruiting as a force for good.
Davis Wright Tremaine
At DWT, a 600-plus attorney national law firm, our commitment to the natural products industry runs deep. DWT’s team of 40-plus food and beverage lawyers spends all day, every day helping food and beverage clients seize opportunities and solve the unique challenges of their industry. Our Food Venture Financing team works with emerging “seed” (0-$2 million annual revenue), “scaling” ($2 million-$50 million) and “seasoned” ($50 million-$1 billion) privately held food and beverage brands and the investors who fund them. Our clients are based in all of the major food innovation hubs in the United States. We created DWT’s Food Venture Legal Lab specifically to provide a one-stop shop for all of their food industry legal needs. Whether you’re an emerging food and beverage or natural products company looking to stand out, or an investor in the sector, we can help you craft a recipe for success.
Heffernan Insurance Brokers
Established in 1988, Heffernan Insurance Brokers is a leading independent brokerage firm in the U.S. With a nationwide and London, U.K., presence, we provide a full range of insurance and financial services to businesses and individuals. Our collaborative and consultative approach delivers effective risk management and cost control through innovative solutions tailored for the consumer packaged goods industry. With expertise in employee benefits, retirement and 401(k), financial services, personal insurance, compliance and claims support, Heffernan is dedicated to protecting our clients and helping them thrive.
Know Agency
At Know Agency, we specialize in SEO, search, Google, PPC and digital marketing expertise and leadership for supplement and health companies. We learn what your challenges are, who your prospects and customers are, and what your digital footprint looks like. Based on this, we give you a custom SEO, search, PPC, content and digital marketing strategy. We are a dynamic and nimble team of subject matter experts: SEO and search; technical website analysis and design; UX/UI reviews and recommendations; content creation, auditing, planning and marketing; paid search and pay-per-click ad campaigns; on-page and off-page SEO and keyword research; SEO, search, content and digital marketing speakers, trainers and educators; Google algorithms, compliance, analytics and search results auditing. We know how to give you the competitive advantage that gets you noticed by Google and your prospects. Rely on us to give you proven SEO and search strategies based on Google data.
McCormick Flavor Solutions
Consumers today want it all, and they expect their food and beverages to do more for them. Brands have to balance the demands of great taste, regulatory hurdles and consumer acceptance. The experts at McCormick Flavor Solutions can help. McCormick Flavor Solutions creates and produces complete taste solutions including flavors; taste modification; extracts; seasonings; spices and herbs; and culinary flavor, broth and stock bases for food, beverage and nutrition companies around the world. Leveraging McCormick’s global footprint and expertise in building consumer-beloved brands, while maintaining its award-winning culture and quality, McCormick Flavor Solutions is a unique proposition in the flavor industry. We support our customers’ growth through both cutting-edge technology and personalized customer service. Design, develop and scale up using our Innovation Studios in Geneva, Illinois, and Irvine, California. From ideation to launch, we help create a seamless, winning path for our customers, both large and small.
Nutracom
Nutracom combines world-class manufacturing with scientific formulations and innovation around market trends to drive successful product launches for CPG brands, private label retailers and entrepreneurs in the sports nutrition, performance nutrition, GLP-1 support and general pet and human nutrition spaces. The company was recently relaunched by Nutrition Innovation Inc. dba Nutracom in 2025 as the first CIDMO co-manufacturing, co-innovation, co-development organization, born as a spinout of a successful MLM company. With over 100,000 square feet of NSF-certified manufacturing and temperature-controlled warehousing space, Nutracom is the partner of choice to launch products in jugs, capsules, bottles, stick packs, pouches or even sustainable composite cans with reasonable MOQs. We have space designed to facilitate new product innovation for brand managers and operate four laboratories on-site for innovation, quality and testing. Our plant is perfectly located in St. Louis in the center of the U.S., providing ideal logistics.
PLT Health Solutions
PLT Health Solutions is a discoverer, developer and marketer of high-quality, scientifically supported ingredient solutions for the natural products, food and beverage, and cosmeceuticals markets. Our goal is to bring innovative and impactful solutions that help our consumer products customers develop new concepts, new products and grow successful brands. An important part of our ability to serve our customers is our network of global strategic partnerships. Our partners are some of the world’s most innovative people, and we help bring them and their companies to market via proprietary ingredient brands with the type of support services that are required by leading consumer products companies. This dual role of solution provider to health and wellness consumer companies and commercialization partner for international ingredient suppliers is one of the things that make us unique in the industry. By delivering an unsurpassed mix of expertise, resources and service, PLT Health Solutions is committed to helping both our strategic partners and valued customers grow.
Pure Branding
Pure Branding is a high-impact brand strategy, research and growth consultancy exclusively serving dietary supplement and functional food brands. Since 1999, we’ve helped companies deepen loyalty, increase market share and grow enterprise value through proprietary research and actionable insights. Our clients include Gaia Herbs, MegaFood (acquired by Pharmavite), Nature’s Sunshine, Standard Process, Nordic Naturals, Xymogen, NeoCell (acquired by Clorox) and Persona Nutrition (acquired by Nestlé Health Science following our brand strategy work and early investment). In the past year, our rebrand of Biocidin Botanicals led to their acquisition by Kainos Capital, while our strategy supported WM Partners’ acquisition of Metabolic Maintenance. We diagnose your brand opportunity, validate it through our census-balanced Supplement Consumer PureSegmentation research, define your brand strategy, translate it into brand expression and build your growth marketing strategy. This disciplined approach consistently drives exponential ROI for our clients—and positions them for successful acquisition, integration or strategic investment.
Specialty Nutrition Consulting
Specialty Nutrition Consulting is a nutrition brand-building firm focused on commercializing innovative, IP-protected nutritional and health-promoting technologies. SNG acts as co-development partner with large consumer products and nutrition companies to rapidly commercialize nutrition innovations, represents academic institutions and individual inventors to find new commercial applications for their inventions, and develops brands for commercial launch in the commercial market. The professionals of Specialty Nutrition Consulting have been responsible for launching new nutraceuticals products with current annual retail sales of over $2.8 billion.