Food & Beverage
Turn retail complexity into your competitive advantage.
Five years ago these clients would have called themselves CPG; the category has split since. Beauty moved toward wellness, DTC-native brands became their own thing, and food and beverage kept the hardest parts: trade spend, retailer economics, and inventory that ties up cash exactly when you're growing fastest.
CPG founders we've partnered with
Why founders in food and bev build with Propeller
Your fastest-growing SKU could be your biggest cash problem. Cash tightens as inventory scales. Trade spend disputes surface months after shipping. This is food and beverage finance, where standard finance teams can't tell which number matters when.
We've spent years alongside CPG founders managing this exact math, embedding full-stack teams who understand the difference between velocity and profitability, and stick around to help you optimize both.
How our embedded teams support food and bev brands.
Finance expertise built for CPG realities, from managing trade spend to modeling retail expansion.
Strategy
Scale with certainty
Make smarter sales and financial decisions with tried-and-tested knowledge from hundreds of CPG companies.
Operations
Simplify trade spend management
Our specialized team extracts and analyzes your trade spend data, providing insights that improve terms and resolve disputes faster.
Operations
Streamline inventory management
Evaluate, select, and implement the optimal inventory system for your business needs while optimizing your cash flow.
Strategy
Get specific guidance for food and beverages
Navigate changing CPG dynamics with expertise from our team. Access insights on retail economics, channel strategy, and competitive positioning.
Strategy
Secure funding
Raise capital by proving unit economics to investors who understand CPG. We help you find the right partners and secure better terms.
Cash management
Improve cash flow
Stabilize cash flow and extend runway with expert foresight that anticipates your future needs as you grow.
Built for food and beverage.
Eighteen years of financial infrastructure for the brands that built this industry.
359
Clients served
4
Food & bev unicorns
$1.5M
annual revenue
57
Client exits
Stores
2,300+
Funding
$47.5M
Hero Bread • Building Financial Systems That Scale
How Embedded Finance Operations Transformed This High-growth CPG Brand
Mela Water • Rapid expansion from startup to thriving beverage business
Mela Was Looking for a Financial Partner in Growth
Profitability target met, up from from 3-5% EBITDA
10-15% EBITA
Wholesale partners
400
Equator Coffees • Wholesale to omnichannel with strategic financial guidance
Building the Foundation for Accelerated Growth
"I think having functional financial systems allows you to make decisions better, quicker, and faster. More informed people feel more empowered, removing guesswork. What’s unique about Propeller is the efficiency and professionalism that help you get it done."
YC Cheng
CEO, Hero Bread
Ready to build something remarkable?
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1,500+
Clients served
18+
Years of experience
26
Unicorns partnered with
$100B+
Enterprise value created
$29B
Raised by clients
230+
Exits
1,500+
Clients served
18+
Years of experience
26
Unicorns partnered with
$100B+
Enterprise value created
$29B
Raised by clients
230+
Exits
FAQs
Questions your board will ask.
A fractional CFO is one person, part-time, with no team behind them. Propeller's embedded teams put a full finance function — CFO, FP&A, controllership, and accounting support — inside your company, working in your weekly rhythms and board prep from day one.
Fractional relationships reset when the person's calendar fills up or they move on; embedded teams are built to scale with you from seed to exit. The distinction isn't semantic, it's structural: you're not renting hours, you're building institutional memory that compounds.
AI can accelerate bookkeeping, but it can't yet run it unsupervised: when it comes to finance, 95% accuracy still isn’t good enough. Propeller's teams use finance-grade AI to handle data aggregation and pattern recognition, but every output is validated by people who know your business well enough to catch what the algorithm misses. The result is bookkeeping that's faster because of AI and accurate because of human judgment, not one or the other.
Context is what lets a finance team anticipate a problem instead of just reporting it after the fact. A CFO who's been in the room for your last three board meetings will catch a cash flow issue before it becomes a crisis; a new hire reading last quarter's reports won't. Propeller's embedded model is built around this: the longer we work inside a company, the more we understand its business logic, its decision patterns, and its blind spots — which is why context, not headcount, is the real asset.
The moment you ask this question you likely need more than a single hire can provide. Propeller provides an embeded CFO, FP&A, controllership, and accounting support working together, typically running 20-35% less expensive than a full-time CFO hire alone. Instead of choosing between "not yet" and "one very expensive person," you get the full function at the stage where you actually need it, and years before a solo hire would make financial sense.
Propeller works with venture- and growth-stage companies from seed through exit, typically in the $5M–$300M+ revenue range, with teams that flex up or down as you scale. Engagements run month-to-month rather than requiring a fixed minimum term, so the team you start with at Series A isn't the team you're stuck with at Series C.
