Megan Burton

Chicago, IL

📦 Consumer Brands & CPG

“Built a brain health sparkling water brand from zero, and grew it from a campus store to Amazon nationwide.”

What I've Built

About

I launched brainfood because I was living the problem. Running on sugary drinks and caffeine while trying to think clearly through long days, I knew they weren't the real answer. My co-founder is a psychiatrist-in-training, and together we saw a gap nobody had filled. We wanted a sparkling water designed specifically for brain health, built around ingredients that actually do something. Building a CPG brand from zero meant figuring everything out in real time, most of it during grad school, and now alongside a demanding day job. I developed the formula, onboarded our first co-manufacturer through a university food lab, built the brand and website from scratch, and got our first product onto shelves at the Penn campus store. From there I worked the distribution up step by step, into other universities, local retailers, and eventually Amazon nationwide. None of it was a straight line. There were pitch competition failures, moments of real doubt, and plenty of problems that had no obvious answer. But each one taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way. If you're building a physical product (CPG, packaged food, anything that needs to get from an idea into a real customer's hands) and you're navigating co-manufacturing, vendor negotiations, or the scrappy early retail game, I'm happy to talk.

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