Sprouts Farmers Market has placed three varieties of The Cycle, described by founder Anastasia Sartan as the first canned ready-to-drink menstrual-care beverage assortment sold in US retail, in all 500 of its stores—just two months into a trial program.

The brand debuted in Sprouts's Forager Finds, a three-month trial program for emerging brands, in May with four SKUs. The retailer selected Pre-Period Comfort, Period Comfort and Perimenopause Comfort for permanent distribution, leaving out Menopause Comfort.

The path to that shelf began with a personal problem. A couple of years ago, Sartan, a tech entrepreneur who co-founded StyleHacks, was experiencing severe PMS and walked to an Erewhon near her home in Venice Beach, California. She stood in front of a shelf of functional beverages and saw a gap.

"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."

None targeted her symptoms. "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?'"

Sartan had found an online source for sea buckthorn juice, a traditional remedy in her native Russia, and had been mixing the tart juice with sweeter juices. She found it helped her PMS, and friends she fixed tonics for liked them too. She had spent two decades in tech, not CPG, but the product idea formed anyway.

"I was like, 'OK, I need to put it in cans so it's accessible,'" she said.

The Cycle rolled off the production line in September 2025, launching with two varieties and a modest inventory of 4,000 cans of each. The packaging inverts category convention: the variety name sits above the brand logo on the label.

"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."

She said she faced skepticism from industry insiders, especially men, who questioned whether women would "feel comfortable" walking down the street drinking from a can emblazoned with the word "period." Consumers, she said, have "never, ever had an issue around it."

Sprouts's selection carried weight. Kim Coffin, chief forager at Sprouts, has said her team focuses on "product development" and "brand building" and chooses "innovative, health-forward and sustainable products."

Sartan's go-to-market strategy ran against common startup advice. Emerging brands typically focus on DTC first, using the channel to learn what works, tweak products and build a fan base before rolling out to retailers—Glossier, for instance, went viral on Instagram years before landing national retail distribution.

Sartan rejected that playbook.

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

Her reasoning: an e-commerce site and content alone would not establish credibility for a genuinely novel product.

"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."

The Forager Finds program inverted the usual trajectory. Instead of building a following online before adding retail, The Cycle used retail to find its customer base.

"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."

For startup brands with unconventional products, The Cycle's rapid jump from trial to permanent placement in 500 stores offers a template: retail distribution itself can serve as the trust-building mechanism that DTC usually provides.