First Run is excited to announce that Jack Hamrick is joining the firm as General Partner.

Jack is a founder and operator with firsthand experience building, scaling, fundraising, and exiting venture-backed consumer businesses. Prior to joining First Run, he founded and led Foraged, a specialty food marketplace backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and leading founder-investors across the consumer and technology ecosystem. He built the company from concept through national scale and guided the business through its 2025 acquisition by E-Fish, Co.

The night before InvestCPG 2026, we kicked things off the right way.

We hosted an intimate seated dinner that brought together founders, investors, and operators who are serious about building what America eats next. It was a high-signal evening with real conversation, no forced pitches, just people who understand what it actually takes to create products customers love and keep buying.

The menu told the story of First Run with each course coming from companies building the right way, from day one.

Most investors in consumer brands spend their time chasing trends.

At InvestCPG 2026, the focus was different: finding founders building products people genuinely love and keep coming back to.

InvestCPG is an event that brings together early-stage consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, investors, and operators to connect around what’s next in food, beverage, wellness, and consumer products.

When we first met Jesse Konig and Ben Johnson, they had just graduated from Wake Forest University and were starting a food truck called Swizzler.

At First Run, our thesis has never been about chasing trends from a spreadsheet. It has always been about customer obsession. Find what people genuinely love in real life. Watch what they choose when they have infinite options. Then test, refine, and double down.

Jesse and Ben understood something instinctively that many founders miss: people do not just buy food. They buy comfort, nostalgia, joy, convenience, and trust. The best founders obsess over those emotional moments and then build products that earn repeat behavior.