Welcome to Willpower HQ, our new hub for wellness, performance, and the brands shaping culture.

This first edition lays the ground floor for what we’re building in 2026, the insights, the threads, and the community that anchors it.

If you’re enjoying where HQ is headed, we’d love for you to share it with a friend or teammate who should be here too.

— The Willpower Team

Q1 always arrives with this promise of a clean slate, but let’s be honest: it’s really more like Q5. A continuation. A reopening of December’s tabs and conversations, except now we’re trying to approach them with a little more energy and a lot more optimism. Deals that were left hanging get revisited, strategies get a second chance, and brands with refreshed minds actually use this window to make some of their smartest moves of the year.

It’s a big moment for the wellness industry, not just in the predictable “new year, new habits” way (though kudos to everyone following through), but in the way categories are repositioning themselves and audiences are shifting their expectations. Those fresh-start behaviors create real opportunity, and brands are already using this window to signal where they’re heading next. Even though half the industry is still waiting for their computers to finish booting up, there are already cues worth paying attention to.

Now that the year is kicking into gear, here’s what’s moving, what’s shifting, and what’s shaping the early signals for 2026.

2025 was motion; 2026 is precision.

Brands that move from scattered experimentation to strategic integration, across consumer behavior, wellness, tech, and economic reality, will be the ones that pull ahead.

The era of experimentation is over 2026 rewards the brands that commit.

David has this pattern where everything they put out just… works. (Frozen Cod aside.) The new Bronze Bar follows the formula, a more indulgent, crunchy, coated format that still feels very “David” in its nutrition profile and overall polish.

What makes this bar especially interesting is how it fits into the brand’s broader shift. Over the last year, David’s marketing has gotten noticeably more editorial, tapping into moments like New York Fashion Week, putting bars in the hands of models, and positioning themselves closer to culture than to traditional CPG.

The product itself edges closer to Barebells’ crunchy-coated silhouette, but the branding is operating on a different plane. If David keeps pushing in this direction, they’re not just competing with Barebells, they’re rewriting what a modern protein brand can look like.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out David Protein’s new Bronze campaign with Julia Fox, a little unhinged, definitely risqué, and impossible to ignore.

Premier Protein is expanding beyond its core shakes and cereal with a move into high-protein granola, a simple horizontal extension into a category where consumers already have strong morning habits. The two flavors, honey almond and chocolate, offer ~17g of protein from whole-grain oat clusters and plant-based protein, making it an easy add-in for yogurt, oatmeal, or smoothie bowls.

It’s a practical, functional step that broadens Premier’s breakfast footprint and reinforces its position as a go-to brand for protein-first routines.

And while this isn’t a new product, the new year is prime time for a smart rebrand, which is why the shift from It’s Skinny to It’s That Simple lands well. The original name creates room to pull the focus toward diet culture instead of ingredients, overshadowing what the product actually offers. It’s That Simple brings the attention back to the food: straightforward ingredients, a clear promise, and language that better fits where consumers are today.

January is when brands either reinvent or refine, and this move does both, sharper messaging, a clearer point of view, and a positioning that cuts through noise in the “better-for-you” aisle. Simplifying without losing substance is hard, but this rebrand feels intentional and aligned with how people actually want to think about eating now.

Sometimes the best January launch isn’t a new SKU; it’s a reset.

Frozen waffle brand Evergreen kicked off 2026 with a $15.2M equity raise, adding new investors and board members from Melitas Ventures and Critical Mass Group. The Chicago-based brand is best known for its clean-label frozen waffles made with vegetables and simple ingredients, a positioning that has helped it stand out as the breakfast aisle gets more crowded. With a growing retail footprint and fresh capital behind it, Evergreen now has the runway to double down on growth and strengthen its foothold in the frozen breakfast set.

It’s a reminder that even legacy occasions like breakfast are drawing serious venture interest when a brand shows real traction and category momentum.

Laird Superfood is making a major portfolio play, agreeing to acquire Navitas for about $38.5 in cash. The deal pulls Navitas’ organic superfood offerings, think acai powders, cacao sweet nibs, berries, seeds, and functional snacks, under the Laird umbrella, giving the coffee-and-creamer-led brand a much deeper stake in nutrient-dense pantry staples and wellness-oriented nutrition.

It’s a sizable swing (nearly double Laird’s own market cap) and a clear example of how brands can scale by building cohesive ecosystems within wellness, broad enough to matter, narrow enough to still feel like one point of view.

Jason Kelce is back in the consumer mix, this time through his investment firm, Winnie Capital, which has taken a stake in Hank Sauce, a Jersey Shore hot sauce brand that started as a small-batch recipe shared among friends and locals in Sea Isle City. Known for its herb-forward flavor and beach-town cult following, Hank Sauce has grown from a community staple into a regional brand with real pull.

Kelce’s involvement gives the company more than capital, it adds cultural weight and momentum as Hank Sauce prepares for broader expansion. It also fits a growing pattern: athletes investing to back regional food brands with authentic lifestyle roots, not just headline value.

Whole Foods is taking a meaningful swing at circularity with an industry-first food-waste initiative. Beginning in 2027, the grocer will deploy Mill Industries’ on-site food-waste conversion technology across its stores, using AI-powered systems to grind, dehydrate, and repurpose fruit and vegetable scraps into a nutrient-rich ingredient for chicken feed used by its private-label egg suppliers.

The approach isn’t just about reducing waste; it cuts hauling emissions, shrinks operational costs, and ties directly into Amazon’s Climate Pledge strategy through an investment in Mill from its Climate Pledge Fund.

More importantly, it aligns with how consumers want brands to behave today: actions that reflect their stated values in the way they operate day-to-day, not just sustainability claims on packaging. By turning waste into a resource that feeds back into its supply chain, Whole Foods is building circular practices into its business model, a rare example of sustainability that is both strategic and tangible for customers and suppliers alike.

Novo Nordisk’s new Wegovy® pill, the first FDA-approved oral GLP-1 for weight loss. is now broadly available across the U.S., marking a major shift in how metabolic health tools reach consumers. A needle-free option with widespread pharmacy and telehealth access pushes GLP-1s deeper into everyday healthcare, reinforcing the 2026 trendline we’ve been tracking: wellness and medicine fully converging.

As tech-driven health solutions become easier to adopt, brands across food, fitness, and lifestyle will have to reassess how people eat, train, and manage long-term well-being. We’re entering a world where “optimization” isn’t niche or aspirational, it’s the default.

Life Time just opened its fifth Austin Athletic Country Club, and this one is built to make a statement, it’s a massive 57,000-sq-ft campus designed as a full lifestyle ecosystem. Since the first Life Time opened in 1992, the brand has barely missed a step, evolving right alongside the shift in gym culture.

They were early to add co-working lounges, recovery and spa amenities, social spaces, and performance-driven training, a formula that’s fueled year-over-year membership growth and even waitlists at select locations. The new South Lamar club takes that evolution to its highest expression: a luxury, all-day environment built for people who want their fitness, work, and community under one (very large) roof.

Hotel gyms used to get away with anything, a dusty treadmill, a yoga mat that’s falling apart, and whatever mismatched dumbbells happened to be lying around. And the photos on booking sites only make it worse, often presenting a “fitness center” that looks nothing like what you walk into in real life.

TravelTone is one of the first platforms pushing back, giving travelers real photos, real reviews, and real context before they book. The demand is obvious: more people want to keep their training rhythm on the road, carve out some personal time during a trip, and choose hotels where the gym isn’t an afterthought. For many, gym quality is now a deciding factor.

As wellness travel shifts toward maintaining routines, not escaping them, a tool like this feels inevitable. TravelTone is still new, but the need is obvious, and the best intel comes from travelers who care about training on the road as much as you do.

A new wave of preventive-health wearables is emerging from university research labs and early innovators, all aiming to help older adults stay independent longer by detecting early signs of frailty and functional decline before they become crises. These devices go beyond steps and heart rate, using sensors to track gait changes, balance shifts, movement asymmetries, and other subtle indicators that often precede falls or mobility loss.

Rather than intervening after an event, the goal is to surface risk early enough for caregivers and clinicians to act, whether that’s adjusting care plans, recommending strength and stability work, or preventing hospitalizations altogether. It’s a meaningful reframe of what wearables are for: moving from performance optimization to everyday health infrastructure that supports aging with more autonomy, predictability, and dignity.

eithio is putting the care back into skincare.

founded by jess peters, eithio was created around a simple belief: care feels better when it’s shared. going beyond self-care, eithio encourages collective care with skincare made to share.

their first product, calm rush, is a soothing face mask that delivers instant calm, hydration, and barrier support. packed with colloidal oatmeal, ashwagandha, manuka honey, and coffee bean extract, and is dermatologist-tested, hypoallergenic, and safe for even the most sensitive skin.

we’re sharing the love with the WILLPOWER community. join the calm & grab 10% off with code WILLPOWERCARES.

In this article you'll see our partner runs a packaging company called Arka and is offering a free packaging audit to brands in the Willpower network.

They’re helpful and often find ways to lower packaging costs.

Let us know if we can connect you with the founder!

Our third annual SXSW Wellness House is on the horizon, and this year we’re expanding the experience: more programming, more partners, and more ways for the community to tap in. Details are dropping soon.

HQ will be the first to know.

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Willpower is a performance and wellness brand ecosystem building community through events, storytelling, and the experiences that bring people together.

From movement-centered mornings to Catalyst Series gatherings to our growing work in performance, everything we do ladders back to connection and momentum.