For many founders, the sale of their brand to a larger company is the endpoint to the journey. Sure, there are consulting arrangements and slow fades, but it’s rare for an entrepreneur to find a permanent home within the world of the CPG giants. Sadly, it’s also becoming a rare thing for many of the entrepreneurial beverage brands that are sold to strategics to make a long, successful run as well, and with the movement at many companies turning toward simplicity and core strength, there have been an inordinate number of established entrepreneurial brands available for those founders and executives who might be interested in a buyback deal.

That raises the question: Is it actually possible to engineer a successful brand resurrection? We’re about to see, as the lineup of founders who have either bought back their brands after selling them to a larger company – or, in the case of Seth Goldman and the tea business, set themselves up for an encore with a near-indistinguishable product – is growing.

It started with Jeff Dunn raising a massive fund and making one of its first purchases the reclamation of Bolthouse Farms, after he’d watched acquirer Campbell’s – whom he’d sold the brand to in 2012 – sour on the business. Dunn also recently purchased Evolution Fresh, a juice brand that was once the upscale Neiman Marcus to Bolthouse’s Macy’s, and as our channel check shows, has identified the room in the juice space to get Bolthouse back on the move.

Another guy hoping for a second squeeze of the orange is Matt McLean — everybody’s favorite Uncle Matt — who is a couple of years into trying to reinvigorate his own, eponymous juice brand. There’s certainly something to having control over the brand that’s got your name on it, and McLean was able to get to his company right before the window closed on the Dean Foods bankruptcy in 2020. McLean has changed the business’ sourcing a bit as a result of agricultural and pandemic-related factors, and the brand has also found traction, albeit in a smaller arena.

What is it about founders who can’t stay away, though? Seth Goldman reinserted himself into the fray over the summer, effectively moving into the philosophical condominium abandoned by Coke after the soda giant discontinued his first big brand, Honest Tea, by launching Just Ice Tea as part of his current venture, Eat the Change. The free publicity that has accompanied the launch has given Just Ice Tea quite a bit of momentum as Goldman hacks together old friends, investors, employees and suppliers into a brand network.

While Goldman couldn’t buy Honest back from Coke, the soda giant did allow the rusted-out bodies of a couple of other brands it purchased to go back to their founders for new engines. The most prominent one, Zico, was bought by founder Mark Rampolla in early 2021. (Rampolla has actually become something of a collector of these kinds of brands, picking up Chameleon Cold-Brew from Nestlé USA earlier this summer as well.)

Bossa Nova is another long-buried brand that’s finally made its way home to its creator. Founder Alton Johnson was one of the first founders to try to incubate within a larger beverage company under a hybrid strategic/investor strategy when Coke’s nascent VEB group picked up a chunk of Bossa Nova for about $13 million. But the Acai brand struggled to find its feet in the Coke system (sound familiar?) and was quickly sold to Sunny D.

Now that Johnson has Bossa Nova back, re-launching it as a line of botanic sparklers, he’s working with Neil Kimberley, a strategy savant who is fresh off a run in which he helped engineer the growth of Essentia Water. The kismet there, of course, is that Kimberley himself was part of the best known brand resuscitation in recent memory, that of Snapple. In the 1990s, the brand went on a roller coaster ride, selling to Quaker Oats for $1.7 billion, then getting fire-sold to investor Triarc for $300 million in 1997, and then, with Jack Belsito and investor Nelson Peltz at the helm, being re-sold to Cadbury Schweppes in 2000 for another $1.4 billion.

Compared to the scale of these recent buybacks, Snapple had a lot more recognition and infrastructure, of course. Among this crop, Honest carried the most weight in the culture, while Bolthouse turned itself into a big player in the pre-HPP premium juice rush of the late 2000s. But thanks to the internet and social media movements, we’re also living in a time when niche plays don’t quietly go away – both Surge and Crystal Pepsi have been brought back over time as special items; a VC fund bought the rights to Slice; can TaB be far behind?

It’s easy to understand the motivations of the founders when they go back in for their brands. Goldman, for one, was clearly disappointed that the broad community of stakeholders in the Honest community was being effectively cut out of the business by Coke’s discontinuation of the tea brand. With Just Ice Tea he’s hoping to reactivate that network. For others, though, maybe it’s the opportunity to do it again, to do it right, to finish the job, only this time with the benefit of the right kind of experience, or better timing, or more startup cash, and the hope it might alleviate the emptiness that comes at the end of any long campaign.

The business case seems to be that these brands have either name recognition, solid brand fundamentals, or a cause that shouldn’t be abandoned. If they worked once, they should be able to work again, better and faster.

That’s not unique to beverages, either. Look at Jonathan Sebastiani buying back Krave Jerky from Hershey, or even the founder of fitness brand TRX, Randy Hetrick, coming in to buy the company out of bankruptcy. Certainly KIND founder Daniel Lubetzky made a similar bet when he bought control of his company back from investor VMG. John Bello always wanted another shot with SoBE, to the point where he tried to turn Adina into SoBE 2.0. There’s something about your first love, I guess, like a novelist bringing a favorite character back for another go.

There’s always another run, these founders believe, and for an increasing number, the reins are back in their hands. The big companies left their brands for dead – but there might be some life there yet. You just hope it’s a resurrection that comes closer to Snapple, and not Frankenstein.