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Summary
Suja Life (SUJA) recently went public at $21/share (~$812 million market cap), but has traded lower in recent weeks → no IPO pop.
Suja is a well-known and well-liked cold-pressed organic juice company that sells various juices, wellness shots, and soda through its Suja, Vive Organics, and Slice brands.
The company has done well to expand into various retailers, which has allowed Suja to have its products in over 37,000 stores with >380,000 points of distribution → average of 10 SKUs per store.
Despite healthy gross margins of just under 50%, the company is still not GAAP profitable, but is profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis.
While PE-owned, the IPO proceeds are largely meant to pay down debt and improve FCF as they look to grow and scale the Slice soda brand.
Suja’s business is easy to understand, but there are underlying points of concern that make us cautious about underwriting the investment opportunity at this point in time.
The company is reporting its first quarter as a public company on June 9th (after the bell), where revenue is expected to grow ~21% y/y at the midpoint.
While CGCM does not currently have a position in SUJA at the time of this post’s publication, we are eager to see what management’s commentary is going forward.
To look at our previous work on either IPOs or Shorts, click the link here to access our table of contents.
With that, let’s get started.
Context
As we previously said in our most recent CPG IPO notes for Once Upon A Farm (OFRM) back in March, Food & Beverage (F&B) and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies rarely go public. The reason being that these smaller F&B and CPG companies often act as proof of concept for bigger strategics that don’t want to start from scratch to launch a new brand/product for consumers. They’d rather other companies try them out first, and if they work out well, then they’re typically not too far behind to acquire them, apply their vertical integration and network distributions as gas to a fire, and quickly expand them.
That’s why so many strategics like Coca-Cola (KO), Pepsi (PEP), or Post Holdings (POST) typically acquire these smaller companies before they go public. It’s a founder’s dream to get acquired and have the resources of a behemoth to continue scaling.
That’s why we called out that odd behavior for OFRM, and now we’re not too confident in Suja Life (SUJA) going public either.
Below, we’re going to break down this company and why we are still hesitant to underwrite the name, even a few weeks after the IPO, and trading well below its IPO pricing.
Company Background
Similar to OFRM’s cold-pressed kids and babies pouches, SUJA primarily sells cold-pressed juices, wellness shots, and functional sodas under three brands. With “farm-to-bottle” in as little as 8 days, calories typically range from 35 to 90 per 8-oz serving (or 50 to 120 calories for a standard 12-oz bottle), and 80% of Suja Life branded SKUs have less than 6 grams of sugar per serving.
Suja Organic: Organic cold-pressed juices and wellness shots.
Vive Organic (acquired in Oct’22): Organic wellness shots.
Slice (acquired in May’24): “Better-for-you” soda → 10% real fruit juice.
Slice is still very much in its infancy, and because of that, it is a very small part of the business (at the moment, and more on this later). SUJA breaks down its segment revenue by Suja Core (Suja Organics + Vive) and Emerging Brands (Slice).
Despite Slice being newish, SUJA has been in business since 2012, and the company highlights that its products are currently being sold in >37,000 stores with >380,000 points of distribution. A little over 10 SKUs per store.
This level of distribution has allowed the company to see its sales increase pretty well over the last few years. Increasing from $224.4 million in 2023 to $326.6 million by the end of 2025.
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