About
A 360° view of CPG, built from the inside
Socratic CPG is led by an operator who's worked distribution, retail data, and a public listing — now focused on the brands stuck in the missing middle between promising startup and profitable market leader.
John Henry Behrens III
Founder
John Henry Behrens provides a 360-degree perspective on the CPG ecosystem, built over 14 years of driving growth in the natural and specialty sectors. As the founder of Socratic CPG, he bridges the gap between complex data and operational execution.
John Henry's career is rooted in the industry's primary engines of growth. He mastered the nuances of distribution and supplier development at KeHE Distributors before moving to the data-tech firm SPINS, where he consulted for middle-market retailers on data-driven category management strategies.
Drawing on his experience architecting the financial and operational frameworks for a high-growth brand's 2021 public listing, John Henry now focuses on the "missing middle" of the industry. He helps emerging and international consumer brands navigate the difficult transition from promising startups to profitable, sustainable market leaders.
Why Socratic CPG exists
There are exceptional operators scattered across the CPG ecosystem — people who have built supply chains, run trade programs, scaled retail networks, and managed P&Ls from startup to scale. What the industry has lacked isn't that talent. It's a structure that lets those operators work where they're needed most: embedded inside early- and mid-stage brands, at the moments the decisions actually matter — as true members of the org, from day one all the way to exit.
Socratic CPG exists to be that structure. We're a fractional C-suite and operations firm, built around operators who sit inside the business rather than advise it from the outside.
How we work
A few things we hold to regardless of engagement:
Confidentiality by design. What we bring to each engagement is pattern recognition built over years across the industry — full discretion, always.
A named human on everything. Our internal tools help us draft and move faster. They never ship a deliverable to a client without a named operator who reviewed it and stands behind it.
Specific over generic. We'd rather tell you what's actually wrong, what we'd do differently, and what we got wrong ourselves than hand over advice that could've come from any business book.
We operate inside brands, as true members of the team — not consultants passing through. That's the vantage point everything we do comes from.
If that's the kind of operator you're looking for, we'd welcome a conversation.