Brand-operator holding · Est. 2019

We don’t advise food brands. We own them, and we run them.

ROAS MARKETING LAB LLC acquires and builds direct-to-consumer food and beverage brands, then scales them with an in-house engine: performance media, creative production, conversion-rate optimisation and lifecycle retention — all under one roof, all paid for by contribution margin rather than a retainer.

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Revenue managed · 2025
$128M
Annual ad spend deployed
$41.6M
Orders shipped to date
3.4M
Blended ROAS, portfolio
4.2×

Retail, logistics and platform partners across the portfolio

The operating model

Four things we do, over and over, until the unit economics work.

Every brand we own runs the same playbook. It is deliberately boring, deliberately measured, and it is the reason a 28-month-old olive oil label now ships to eleven markets.

  1. Acquire

    We buy founder-led food brands doing $1M–$15M with real product love and broken marketing. Diligence takes 30 days: we rebuild the P&L at the SKU level, stress-test contribution margin after shipping, and only sign when we can name the three levers that move it. Founders can stay, or hand over the keys and keep equity.

  2. Build

    Positioning first, pixels second. We re-write the brand story, redesign the packaging system, rebuild the storefront on a hardened Shopify stack, and ship a creative library — 60 to 90 assets per quarter, produced in our own studio, tested against each other rather than against opinion.

  3. Scale

    Media is bought against marginal contribution, never against a vanity ROAS target. We run Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon and retail media from one cockpit, with a daily incrementality read and a hard rule: spend expands only while the next dollar still pays for itself inside 45 days.

  4. Retain

    Food is a repeat category or it is nothing. Subscription architecture, replenishment timing modelled per SKU, lifecycle email and SMS written by people who taste the product — that is how we take second-order rate from 19% to 43% inside four quarters.

The portfolio

Two flagships, two in the incubator.

We own our brands outright. That means we live with the returns rate, the freight invoice and the reorder curve — not just the click-through rate.

Category · Extra virgin olive oil

Casa Verdante

Single estate. Single harvest. Bottled the week it was pressed.

We acquired Casa Verdante in March 2023 from the Ferrante family, third-generation growers on 41 hectares outside Ostuni, in Puglia. They had extraordinary oil and a website that sold eleven bottles a month. We kept the estate, the mill and the family — Elena Ferrante-Sorbo still signs off every lot — and rebuilt everything downstream of the cap.

Every bottle carries its harvest date and free acidity on the front label, because in a category built on vague words like “imported”, a number is the most persuasive thing you can print. Olives travel from tree to mill in under four hours, crushed at 24 °C, and the oil ships in UV-blocking glass within nine days of pressing.

  • Acquired March 2023
  • Estate Ostuni, Puglia
  • Markets 11 countries
  • Subscribers 14,200

Selected range

  • Classico Blend €24

    500 ml · Ogliarola & Cellina di Nardò · 0.21% acidity

    Soft green almond and warm artichoke, with a rounded, low-bitter finish. The everyday pour.

  • Coratina Riserva €38

    500 ml · Monocultivar Coratina · 0.14% acidity

    Cut grass, black pepper and a genuine three-cough pungency. High polyphenols, built for finishing.

  • Biologico Organic €32

    750 ml · Certified organic · 0.18% acidity

    Ripe tomato leaf and green banana, gentler on the throat. Our best seller for raw dressings.

  • Harvest Duo Gift Set €59

    2 × 250 ml · Riserva + Classico · linen-wrapped case

    The tasting pair, boxed with a pressing card. Forty-one percent of December revenue.

Category · Specialty coffee & subscription

Northbound Roastery

Roasted Tuesday. On your counter Friday. Never sooner than it should be.

Northbound started as a two-drum operation in a Portland warehouse run by Marcus Oyelaran, a former green buyer who was tired of watching great lots get flattened by dark roasts. We took a majority stake in November 2021 and left the sourcing entirely alone. What we changed was everything the customer touches: the subscription logic, the grind selector, the freshness promise, and the eleven emails that follow a first bag.

Nothing is roasted before it is ordered. Bags carry a roast date, not a best-before, and the subscription engine learns your actual consumption rate from reorder timing instead of asking you to guess it. Median time from roast to doorstep across the US is 62 hours.

  • Acquired Nov 2021
  • Roastery Portland, OR
  • Subscribers 31,800
  • Repeat rate 68%

Selected range

  • Meridian Espresso $19

    340 g · Medium-dark roast · Brazil & Colombia

    Dark cocoa, toasted hazelnut and a molasses body that survives milk without turning ashy.

  • Yirgacheffe Kochere $24

    280 g · Light roast · Single origin, Ethiopia

    Bergamot, white peach and jasmine, with a tea-like clarity. Washed, 1,950 m, lot 44.

  • Midnight Decaf $21

    340 g · Medium roast · Sugarcane EA process

    Baked plum, brown sugar and cinnamon. Decaffeinated without solvents, and it tastes like it.

  • Meridian Capsules ×60 $34

    60 capsules · Medium-dark · Home-compostable shell

    The espresso blend, ground and sealed within an hour of roast. Fits standard home machines.

In the incubator

Two brands built in-house from a blank page. Both are past first revenue and inside our own fulfilment network, neither is ready for full media weight yet.

Incubating · Launched Feb 2025

Salt & Ember

Small-batch finishing salts smoked over applewood and oak in Vermont. Four flakes, one grinder-free ritual, and a jar people photograph. Currently $47k monthly revenue on organic and email alone — we have not spent a dollar on paid media yet.

  • 4 SKUs
  • $47k MRR
  • 52% gross margin

Incubating · Launched Sep 2025

Bitterroot

Non-alcoholic botanical aperitifs built on gentian, blood orange and Douglas fir. Made for the 6pm occasion rather than the hangover conversation. Early subscription cohorts are reordering at 3.1 bottles a quarter, which is the number we were watching.

  • 2 SKUs
  • $29k MRR
  • 3.1 bottles / quarter

The growth engine

Six in-house capabilities. No agency in the middle.

Thirty-four people in Sheridan, Lisbon and Portland. Every function that touches revenue sits on our payroll, which is why a creative brief becomes a live ad in nine days rather than nine weeks.

Paid media

Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon Ads and Pinterest, planned as one budget rather than five dashboards. Geo holdout tests every quarter, MMM refreshed monthly, and a marginal-CAC ceiling set per brand rather than a blanket ROAS goal.

$41.6M deployed in 2025 · 7 buyers

Creative studio

A real kitchen and a real photo bay in Lisbon, plus a UGC network of 140 vetted creators. We ship 60–90 net-new assets per brand per quarter and retire anything that has not beaten the control in two consecutive weeks.

1,140 assets shipped in 2025

CRO & storefront

Hardened Shopify builds, sub-1.4s LCP on 4G, and a testing calendar that never runs two experiments on the same funnel step. Last year: 214 tests, 61 winners, an aggregate +23% lift in conversion rate across the portfolio.

214 tests · 61 shipped winners

Email & SMS retention

Flows written per SKU, not per template. Replenishment timing is modelled from actual consumption — an olive oil household is not a coffee household — and win-back copy is written by someone who has tasted the lot they are selling.

34% of portfolio revenue from owned channels

Supply chain & fulfilment

Three 3PL nodes — Pennsylvania, Nevada and Rotterdam — plus temperature-aware routing so we stop shipping chocolate through Phoenix in August. Landed cost is recalculated weekly and fed straight back into the bidding layer.

98.4% on-time dispatch · 1.1% damage rate

Data & finance

One warehouse, one definition of contribution margin, one daily flash report that every operator in the group reads before 9am. Cohort LTV, marginal CAC and cash conversion sit on the same screen, because that is the only way the trade-off is honest.

Daily P&L to SKU level

Results

The numbers we are actually judged on.

Portfolio-wide, trailing twelve months to 30 June 2026. Audited by Hartwell & Voss LLP.

$128M

Portfolio revenue managed

+38% year on year

4.2×

Blended return on ad spend

up from 2.6× at acquisition

3.4M

Orders shipped to date

across 19 markets

43%

Second-order rate, 90 days

portfolio average

31%

Contribution margin after shipping

+9 points since 2023

62 hrs

Median order-to-doorstep, US

98.4% on-time dispatch

Casa Verdante

From eleven bottles a month to a category contender in 24 months.

At acquisition the estate sold beautiful oil through a single wholesaler and a storefront with no harvest information anywhere on it. We put the pressing date and free acidity on the label and above the fold, built a two-bottle subscription with a December gifting spike designed in from the start, and moved 62% of media budget into recipe-led video that shows the pour rather than the bottle.

  • ×19 revenue in 24 months
  • 3.8× ROAS at scale
  • 14,200 active subscribers
  • −34% cost per acquisition

Northbound Roastery

Fixing the second bag, not the first.

Northbound had no acquisition problem. It had a 19% second-order rate, which meant every dollar of media was buying a one-night stand. We rebuilt the subscription around measured consumption rate, added a grind-and-strength onboarding quiz that halved first-brew disappointment, and rewrote eleven lifecycle emails around roast dates. Acquisition spend did not increase for two quarters.

  • 68% repeat purchase rate
  • +127% lifetime value, 12mo
  • 31,800 subscribers
  • 4.6× blended ROAS

About us

Seven years, four brands, one very stubborn thesis.

That the best food brands are not built by agencies renting attention, but by operators who own the inventory, the margin and the consequences.

  1. 2019

    Founded in Sheridan, Wyoming

    Two former in-house growth leads leave a $200M DTC brand with a simple observation: the agency model is paid for spend, not for margin. ROAS MARKETING LAB LLC is incorporated with four people and a single client-side consulting contract to keep the lights on.

  2. 2021

    First acquisition — Northbound Roastery

    We stop consulting entirely and buy a majority stake in a Portland roastery doing $2.1M with an outstanding green book and a leaking subscription. It becomes the proving ground for the retention playbook we still run today.

  3. 2023

    Casa Verdante joins the group

    A 41-hectare single estate in Puglia, acquired with the Ferrante family staying on in production. Our first European operation, our first cross-border VAT nightmare, and the brand that taught us harvest transparency sells better than heritage copy.

  4. 2024

    Creative studio opens in Lisbon

    We bring production fully in-house — kitchen, photo bay, edit suite and a fourteen-person team. Cost per usable asset drops 71% and the brief-to-live cycle goes from six weeks to nine days. It is the single highest-return decision in the group’s history.

  5. 2025

    $100M revenue managed · incubator launched

    The portfolio crosses nine figures in managed revenue. We open the incubator to build brands from zero rather than only buying them, and Salt & Ember ships its first order in February. Rotterdam fulfilment node goes live in August.

  6. 2026

    Thirty-four operators, nineteen markets

    Bitterroot enters its second quarter, the group ships to nineteen countries, and we are actively reviewing two acquisitions in ambient pantry categories. We remain entirely founder-owned and have taken no outside capital.

In their words

Founders who sold to us, and partners who work with us.

I spent nine years building the roastery and about nine minutes a week thinking about the second purchase. They did not touch my sourcing, my roast profiles or my staff. They fixed the part I was bad at, and I still own a third of something four times the size.

Marcus Oyelaran Founder & Head Roaster, Northbound Roastery

We were sceptical about selling to marketers. What arrived instead was a team that asked about our polyphenol counts before they asked about our email list. Three harvests later my family still runs the mill, and our oil is on tables in eleven countries instead of two.

Elena Ferrante-Sorbo Third-generation grower, Casa Verdante · Ostuni

We fulfil for a lot of food brands. ROAS Marketing Lab is the only group that sends us a landed-cost model before peak and then actually changes their promotions when the freight number moves. It makes them unusually easy to plan capacity around.

Dana Reyes-Whitmore VP Client Operations, Northgate 3PL

Questions

Things founders, operators and candidates ask us.

If your question is not here, write to us directly — a person reads every message and replies within two business days.

Ask us something
What size of brand do you acquire?

Our sweet spot is $1M to $15M in trailing revenue, food or beverage, with genuine product quality and a gross margin north of 45% before shipping. We have bought smaller when the product was exceptional and the category was under-served. Below roughly $600k the integration cost stops making sense for both sides, and we will tell you that in the first call rather than the fourth.

Do founders have to leave after the sale?

No, and most do not. Two of our four brands still have their founder running product and sourcing, with rolled equity in the group. If you would rather hand over completely, we structure a six-month transition and buy you out entirely. What we do not do is keep a founder in place while quietly removing every decision from them.

Will you manage marketing for a brand you don’t own?

Very rarely, and never on a standard retainer. We occasionally take a minority stake plus an operating agreement where the brand is a strong strategic fit for our fulfilment or media footprint. If you are looking for an agency relationship, we are genuinely the wrong partner, and we can point you toward three good ones.

How long does a deal take from first call to close?

A first indication of interest within seven days, a non-binding offer within twenty-one, and close in sixty to ninety days depending on jurisdiction and how clean the books are. Cross-border deals — Casa Verdante took 104 days — run longer because of tax and food-safety registration, not because of negotiation.

Are you hiring, and what do you look for?

Continuously. We are currently looking for a senior paid social buyer in Lisbon, a lifecycle strategist in Portland, and a supply chain analyst in Sheridan. We hire operators who can read a P&L and write a subject line — the split between “creative people” and “numbers people” is the most expensive fiction in this industry. Send us your work through the contact form and choose “Careers”.

Have you taken outside investment?

None. The group is entirely founder-owned and funded from operating cash flow plus a revolving facility with Stonewell Capital used for inventory seasonality. That constrains how fast we can acquire, and it is a deliberate trade: we would rather buy one brand a year and run it properly than five and run none of them well.

Get in touch

If you have built something people re-order, we should talk.

Whether you are considering an exit, looking for an operating partner, or want to build inside the group, start here. Every message is read by a partner, not a routing rule.

  • First response within two business days
  • Mutual NDA before you share a single number
  • An honest no is faster than a polite maybe
ROAS MARKETING LAB LLC
30 N Gould St Ste R
Sheridan, WY 82801, United States
partners@roasmarketinglab.com

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