How We Judged Over 2,000 CPG Products: Inside the Startup CPG Shelfie Awards Methodology (and What It Takes to Win)

Every year, hudreds of emerging CPG brands ship their products to our team, hoping to earn a Shelfie. Behind that trophy is a process our team has refined over multiple award cycles – one built to be fair, thorough, and genuinely useful for the brands that go through it.

What the Shelfie Awards Are

The Shelfie Awards are the largest free awards program built exclusively for emerging CPG brands. We celebrate next-level product innovation, inspiring brand stories, and packaging that stops us in our tracks – and we built the program specifically to eliminate the barriers that keep early-stage brands out of typical industry awards. Whether you’re pre-revenue or approaching $5M, if you meet the criteria, you get a fair shot at recognition.

Step 1: Brands Submit Their Products

The process starts with an application that takes less than 10 minutes. Brands share details about their story, product, and category, then ship up to three SKUs – one unit of each flavor or product, exactly as a customer would purchase it off a retail shelf. Beauty and supplement brands send two to three units per SKU so multiple judges can evaluate the same product independently.

To keep the playing field level, every brand must meet a few core requirements:

• The application must be submitted by someone inside the business – not an agency or third party
• The brand must be part of the Startup CPG Slack community and Brand Database
• The brand must be under $5M in revenue
• Packaging must be retail-ready – we don’t accept prototypes

Step 2: Products Are Sorted into Categories

Brands submit into categories the same way they’d position themselves at a retailer. An alcoholic beverage goes into alcohol. A dairy product made specifically for kids can go into both kids and dairy. We ask brands not to “stretch” into categories where they don’t naturally belong – a water brand, for example, submits under beverage rather than non-alcoholic.

Categories aren’t fixed year to year. Our team evaluates the full pool of submissions each cycle and creates or retires categories based on what actually comes in, so the lineup reflects the real shape of the emerging CPG market rather than a template we hold onto out of habit.

Step 3: Our Judges Taste and Evaluate Every Submission

This is the heart of the process. Every product that arrives gets evaluated by a panel of judges with real, varied experience across the CPG landscape – buyers, marketers, sales leaders, and category specialists who’ve spent careers deciding what makes it onto a shelf and what doesn’t. Each judge brings a different lens, from retail buying backgrounds in body care and grocery to hands-on experience helping brands land in national retailers like Whole Foods.

Every submission is scored against the same five criteria, applied consistently across every category. No single factor decides the outcome – a product with an exceptional formulation but forgettable packaging will lose ground to a brand that nails both. That balance is intentional: it’s the same balance a retail buyer or a shopper applies standing in front of a shelf. Here’s what each criterion actually means, and where most brands leave points on the table.

Taste & Ingredients

This is the foundation. Judges are evaluating flavor, formulation, and ingredient quality the way a discerning shopper would – and yes, added fragrance or unnecessary fillers get noticed immediately. If your product’s ingredient list doesn’t match the story your packaging tells, that gap shows up in judging.

What this means for you: Make sure the SKUs you submit are the versions you’re proudest of – not necessarily your newest or your bestseller, but the one that best represents your formulation at its strongest.

Innovation & Differentiation

Judges want to know: what does this product do that others in the category don’t? This could be a genuinely novel ingredient, an underserved flavor profile, a format innovation, or a way of solving a category problem that hasn’t been solved well before.

What this means for you: Your application should make your point of difference obvious, not buried. If your innovation is easy to miss on shelf, make sure it’s easy to find in your submission story.

Brand Story & Social Cause

Judges evaluate the story behind the product – why it exists, who built it, and what it stands for. This can include a founder’s personal journey, a mission-driven sourcing decision, or a broader social or environmental commitment baked into how the brand operates.

What this means for you: Don’t treat this as an afterthought section of the form. A specific, well-told story lands harder than generic mission language every brand could claim.

Improving the CPG System

This criterion looks at whether your brand is pushing the category – and the broader CPG system – forward. That might mean more sustainable packaging, a more transparent supply chain, better labor practices, or simply raising the bar for what’s expected in your category.

What this means for you: If you’re doing something structurally better than how things have historically been done in your category, say so explicitly. Judges won’t infer it from the packaging alone.

Branding & Packaging – Must Be Retail-Ready

This is a hard requirement, not just a scoring criterion: submissions must be retail-ready. We do not accept prototypes. Judges are assessing your packaging exactly as a shopper would encounter it on shelf – shelf presence, clarity of messaging, and whether the design matches the quality of what’s inside.

What this means for you: If your packaging is still in development, it’s worth waiting for a future cycle rather than submitting early. A prototype will be scored as unfinished, because that’s what it is.

Meet the Judges

The panel behind those five criteria is made up of people who’ve spent their careers deciding what earns shelf space – not a rotating cast of generalists.

• Patricia Menegoto is a founding team member of Startup CPG and Head of Marketing & Community for the 35,000+ member community. As a 5th-year Shelfie judge, she has a sharp eye for brands that are genuinely innovative, thoughtfully made, and built to last. LinkedIn / Instagram
• Caitlin Bricker is a former buyer and department lead in the natural products industry. She specialized in body care but had her hands in buying everything from grocery to supplements to lifestyle items. She’s also the host of the Startup CPG Podcast’s Founder Feature series. She likes to say she knows a good product when she sees it. LinkedIn / Instagram
• Quinn Sullivan was born and raised in Beijing, China, and grew up with a deep love for bold Asian flavors and ingredients – a perspective he still carries into every aisle. Now based in Austin, Quinn’s two cats and one dog make sure every pet product gets put through its paces. LinkedIn
• Alex Nguyen is a lover of all things innovative with a proven track record of uplifting the next generation of great emerging brands. He’s helped take a brand to Whole Foods nationally, and as a consumer, has impeccable taste (ask anyone). LinkedIn
• Peter Boyajian is a seasoned CPG sales leader with 15 years of experience across everything from pre-launch brands to billion-dollar enterprise brands. Based in LA, he draws inspiration from the grit and creativity of Startup CPG’s founder community. LinkedIn
• Katie Wild may be behind the scenes capturing content, but her background in grocery and personal care means she knows what’s good – added fragrance is an immediate red flag for her. She spent her high school years stocking the beauty and health aisle at a grocery store. LinkedIn

This mix is deliberate: buyers, marketers, sales leaders, and category specialists, each applying the same five criteria through a different professional lens. That’s part of why the judging holds up – a product has to hold its own with more than one kind of expert in the room.

Step 4: Finalists and Winners Are Announced

After the tasting sessions wrap, our team narrows the full submission pool down to finalists, then winners. Both stages come with real recognition – finalists and winners get access to a growing roster of sponsor prizes covering everything from ingredient verification and retail data to production credits and paid media, plus a physical trophy and media coverage from Startup CPG.

A Few Practical Things That Trip Brands Up

Beyond the five criteria, a handful of logistical details quietly decide whether a strong product even gets a fair shot:

• Submit under the right category. Enter as you would to a retailer, and avoid “stretch” categories. A water brand belongs under beverage, not non-alcoholic, even if the label technically fits.
• Pick your strongest SKUs. You can only submit up to three per brand, so don’t spread across your full catalog if it dilutes your strongest entries.
• Ship on time, to the right address. Shelf-stable and refrigerated/frozen products have different shipping windows, and the address is only revealed after you apply – so keep close track of it once it comes through.
• You can’t resubmit a SKU that’s already won. Past winners need a new product or flavor to be eligible again.
• Beauty and supplement brands should send 2–3 units per SKU, so multiple judges can evaluate the same product independently rather than passing around a single unit.

Why We Built It This Way

The Shelfies exist because the traditional awards landscape wasn’t built for brands still finding their footing. Entry fees, agency requirements, and opaque judging criteria shut out exactly the founders who’d benefit most from recognition and feedback. Our methodology flips that: free to enter, judged by people who’ve actually worked in this industry, and structured around the same criteria a retailer would use to decide what earns shelf space.

Every criterion above maps to something a real retail buyer or a real shopper is already evaluating, whether they’d put it in those words or not. The brands that do best in Shelfie judging tend to be the ones that treat the submission the same way they’d treat a retail buyer meeting – clear story, retail-ready packaging, and a product that backs up every claim on the label.

Check out the 2025 Shelfie Award winners here.

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