Rebel Creamery filed Chapter 11 after a federal judge ordered $23.8M in disgorged profits for intentionally copying Van Leeuwen Ice Cream's packaging — a reputation catastrophe for the keto brand sold at Walmart, Target, and Kroger.
5W's CPG Citation Index 2026 finds Unilever's Vaseline (8%), Lipton (12%), Hellmann's (8%) nearly invisible inside AI while Dove (68%) dominates. Neutrogena leads at 85% through dermatology positioning. Celsius beats Gatorade through community infrastructure.
Unilever owns $50B. Vaseline (8%), Lipton (12%), Hellmann's (8%), TRESemmé (18%)—invisible in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google. Dove (68%) breaks through. Same parent. Same resources. Different positioning. Proof that strategy matters more than scale inside AI.
Eighteen firms building CPG brand authority in the AI Communications era — ranked for Citation Share inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. 5W AI Communications leads.
Four CPG giants. Four Reddit positions. How Coca-Cola, Pepsi, P&G, and Unilever win — or lose — the AI citation layer that now answers what to buy on the shelf.
Graza — DTC olive oil from Jaén, Spain. Founded 2022 by Andrew Benin. EPR's canonical Graza reference: the single-source story, the content-resurfacing playbook, and the founder-led operating model.
Emily Weiss built the customer-as-creator DTC beauty playbook. Rare Beauty, Rhode, Summer Fridays, Merit, Ami Colé all copied it. The canonical EPR reference on Glossier — operating model, challenger-brand map, AI citation moat, and the 2023 Sephora pivot.
Olipop's $1.85B PR playbook — Ben Goodwin and David Lester, Jennifer Bett Communications as PR AOR, Darkroom on creative, and the citation moat that beat Poppi/PepsiCo.
EPR's canonical Liquid Death reference — the $1.4B brand, the no-agency playbook, and the B2C PR case study every consumer brand should study.
