How this founder landed her menstrual-care beverages on Sprouts’s shelves

A couple of years ago, Anastasia Sartan, a tech entrepreneur who co-founded StyleHacks, was having severe PMS and decided to take a break and walk to an Erewhon near her home in Venice Beach, California. She found herself standing in front of a shelf of functional beverages, agog.

“OK, here’s 30 drinks for energy,” she recalled thinking. “Here’s a drink for your skin. Here’s a drink for your hair. Here’s a drink for your libido.”

Not one, however, was targeted at the symptoms she was feeling at the moment.

“And I was like, ‘What the hell? Why is there not an actual drink for something that 51% of us are experiencing on a continuous basis?’”

At the time, Sartan had found an online source for sea buckthorn juice, a popular traditional remedy in her native Russia, and had been mixing the tart juice with sweeter juices and finding it helped with her PMS. She’d even been fixing it for friends who liked the tonics, too.

She’d spent two decades in tech, not CPG, but the thought formed anyway.

“I was like, ‘OK, I need to put it in cans so it’s accessible.’”

About a year later, in September 2025, her idea was figuratively and literally in the can: The Cycle, what Sartan described as the first canned ready-to-drink menstrual-care beverage assortment to be sold in US retail, rolled off the production line.

Drink different: The brand launched with two varieties in September, Pre-Period Comfort and Period Comfort, starting with a modest inventory of 4,000 cans of each. The brand logo is on the bottom of the label, and the variety names are above, which Sartan said is atypical.

“You’ve never seen a Period Comfort drink before,” Sartan said. “That’s why ‘Period Comfort’ is on top, and the brand name is on the bottom.”

Sartan said she has faced skepticism from industry insiders, especially men, who questioned whether women would “feel comfortable” walking down the street drinking from a can with the word “period” emblazoned on it. But in reality, she said, the brand has “never, ever had an issue around it” with consumers.

Not long after that production run, The Cycle was selected by Sprouts Farmers Market to participate in Forager Finds, a three-month trial program for brands. Kim Coffin, whose enviable title is chief forager at Sprouts, has said her team focuses on “product development” and “brand building” and that it chooses “innovative, health-forward and sustainable products.”

The brand debuted in that trial program in May with four SKUs, having launched two new varieties, Perimenopause Comfort and Menopause Comfort, at the same time. Just two months into the trial, Sartan learned that the retailer had selected three varieties (all but Menopause Comfort) for permanent placement in its 500 stores.

Shelf-reliant: Startup brands often focus primarily on DTC, since doing so gives them a bird’s-eye view of what’s working and not working for consumers. In the DTC channel, startups can tweak products as they find their footing and a fan base before eventually rolling out nationally on retailers’ shelves. That was the case for Glossier, which went viral on Instagram years before it had national retail distribution.

For The Cycle, however, that path seemed less viable to Sartan.

“I started with a bit of a counterintuitive strategy—counter to what was advised to me several times,” Sartan said. “The advice was to go heavy on DTC, and I decided on the opposite: We need to go heavier on retail.”

Sartan had come up with a novel product, and she didn’t think building an e-commerce site and creating a bunch of content would be enough.

“You can launch DTC with anything,” she said. “[That’s] why it’s not a trustworthy channel for such an innovative product—retail adds a trustworthiness to you.”

In other words, unlike a typical trajectory of building a following through DTC before adding retail, Sprouts’s Forager Finds enabled the brand to find a customer base in retail.

“When a girl sees it on a Sprouts shelf, it’s not like one out of these thousands of brands that are trying to get ads to [her] face on Instagram,” Sartan said. “It’s a different sort of discovery: It’s already trusted because it’s there.”