How CVS Store Brands Handles Refreshing a 5,000-item Private Label Portfolio

Competitors crowd the co-pack matchmaking space

Keychain isn’t alone in trying to streamline how brands and private-label retailers find and manage external manufacturing partners. One notable example is CoPackConnect, an AI-enabled RFQ marketplace launched by the Contract Packaging Association and The Melville Group (TMG), positioned as a way to match brands with contract manufacturers and contract packagers when needs and capabilities align. 

CoPackConnect’s backers argue that the biggest bottleneck isn’t simply building a big directory.

“A huge list of products and providers is not the hard part, nor does it address the core frictions,” Carl Melville, managing partner of TMG and owner of CoPackConnect.com, told Packaging World earlier this year. Melville said the platform’s AI-RFQ approach is meant to reflect “decades of brand and manufacturer input” and “solves these problems at a fraction of the cost of other platforms.” 

When CoPack Connect launched at the end of 2024, CPA executive director Ron Puvak framed the same push in terms of supply chain dependence and speed. “Brands are more reliant on external manufacturing than ever before,” Puvak told PW in January. He described CoPackConnect as “a robust and focused solution for brands and manufacturers, enabling superior sourcing alternatives, improved speed-to-market, greater innovation, and more efficient production capacity utilization.”

Where packaging shows up—in search, in sustainability, and as a deal-breaker

For Packaging World readers interested in Keychain, the obvious question is whether “manufacturer capability” is defined only by product and process, or whether it extends to packaging specifics?

Hanrahan said the platform supports packaging attributes but described a boundary on technical specificity: “we’re certainly at the level of packaging properties for the outer packaging, packaging properties for the inner,” he said, adding that Keychain does not go “down to the level of what the degree of permeability of the barriers are.” Still, he said, “the product keeps getting better all the time… The more volume we put through the product, we’re constantly adding net new data points. We add around 10,000 net new data points on Keychain a day.”

On sustainability, he said Keychain avoids labeling any packaging as “sustainable” or not. “We don’t have a broad bucket of sustainable versus not because we find that that led us down a path of us being the determinant or arbiter of what was sustainable,” he said. Instead, he described enabling selection by packaging type—“paper or card or card with a film or card with no film”—and leaving tradeoffs and judgments to the user.

Most pointed, for packaging professionals, was his answer to what makes deals fail. Asked how often packaging becomes the gating factor versus formulation and processing, Hanrahan replied: “I think the two reasons why manufacturers don’t end up doing a particular deal most of the time is either the deal doesn’t hit [the manufacturer’s] MOQs, or the packaging format is not right.”

That “packaging format” mismatch can take many forms, he said: “they wanted resealable, they don’t do resealable,” or “they wanted one size versus another size,” or “they wanted a sustainable… format… [and] the person can’t do it.” His conclusion: “the pack format is a super, super important part of the equation.”

Keychain’s own press materials point to packaging as an expanding focus. In February 2025, the company said it was launching two new beta products, “Keychain packaging and Keychain ingredients,” intended to “streamline the process of sourcing packaging materials and ingredient suppliers.”

“We’re refreshing the brand across 3,000 items”—why retailers care

Wier’s CVS comments help show why product teams, especially private label, are sensitive to these workflow bottlenecks.

He told the audience that CVS store brands have 5,000 products and described how his team reorganized to prioritize the customer and feedback signals. “We… started to create a separation of what people really liked and what people didn’t like,” he said, and built a process to address under-performers in the portfolio.

He also described a push for differentiation that reaches beyond supply base management. “We need to create differentiation… We’re refreshing the brand across 3,000 items. We are working on elevating the packaging, the branding, the flavors, the scents… and just upgrading the customer experience.”

Wier also pointed to a future where localization increases SKU complexity: “localization is a big thing for us over the next three years,” he said, describing a scenario where CVS might carry 8,000 items across all locations, while keeping “5,000 in the right stores, at the right place, at the right time.”

From a platform vendor’s point of view, those pressures—more SKUs, faster refreshes, more tailored assortments—raise the value of better search, faster supplier qualification, and centralized vendor intelligence. From the brand/retailer’s point of view, they raise the cost of fragmented tools and manual vendor workflows.

What Keychain says it automates (and what it says it doesn’t)

In his interview with Packaging World, Hanrahan was explicit that Keychain is not trying to make sourcing decisions for users. “We’re providers of information, we’re providers of workflow tooling. We’re not in the business of saying you should or shouldn’t use this particular manufacturer,” he said, while emphasizing filters around certification and facility details, and noting the company is “releasing some ratings as well” to show how “other brands and retailers” have rated suppliers.

He described a common pain point: “you just become inundated with forms” during sourcing, and said Keychain aims to summarize supplier responses—flagging issues like “a recall history in the last three years,” and enabling “compare suppliers” views that compress “30 or 40 pages of forms” into a “very simple summary.”

He also said Keychain cross-checks some data “directly from the auditor… like SQF and USDA” against what suppliers submit, “so we highlight discrepancies,” and then flags where the external supply chain team should focus time. “It’s not like taking away their job,” he said. “It is helping them figure out where to focus with a very crisp, actionable suggestion.”

What brand users say they get (when they’re willing to say it)

One challenge Hanrahan acknowledged: private label and sourcing teams can be “tightlipped.” “It is private label world, eh? It’s full of people that don’t want to tell the story,” he joked.

Still, Keychain has collected on-the-record testimonials from brand and retailer users. Ferrero’s North America operations manager said, “Keychain helps us quickly access a wide variety of manufacturers -- faster than we ever did with web search or at trade shows -- providing great options to develop our external co-man network in North America.”

Lidl US’s chief buying officer said, “With Keychain, we’ve been able to accelerate our search for new suppliers while ensuring they meet our high standards for quality and cost-efficiency.”

Those statements echo the central bet: that faster discovery and better vendor intelligence can reduce the friction that slows private label (and brand) product development—especially when packaging requirements, audit expectations, and capacity realities can derail a project late in the process.

Why this matters even if you never log in

Keychain’s story is about the growing share of CPG value creation that happens outside the four walls of the brand owner, and inside co-man and co-pack networks where packaging formats, line capabilities, and compliance documentation can determine whether a product concept is manufacturable at scale.

Hanrahan’s blunt assessment, that “the packaging format is not right” is one of the two most common reasons matches fail, will sound familiar to the packaging engineers, operations leaders, and quality teams who have lived through last-minute spec changes, line trials, film sourcing constraints, or format incompatibilities.

For brands and retailers, the question becomes whether systems like Keychain360 can move those realities earlier in the process—before the RFP stack grows to dozens of forms, before a packaging constraint collapses a shortlist, and before timelines stretch from weeks into quarters.

Or as Wier put it, facing a portfolio that may be expanding even as it becomes more tailored with location-specific products and packaging, “I need help."

Growth narrative and funding rounds

Keychain’s press releases sketch a rapid expansion from a platform concept into a suite of products, with funding milestones along the way. In November 2023, Keychain announced “$18 million in seed funding,” describing a U.S. landscape where “$500 billion worth of packaged products are produced by more than 20,000 manufacturers” and calling it a “deeply fragmented” ecosystem dominated by “trade shows, brokers, and manual, time-intensive vetting.” 

By February 2025, Keychain said it had raised $38 million since November 2023 and that its platform had grown to a “network of 30,000+ manufacturers and 20,000+ brands and retailers,” and was “facilitating over $1 billion in projects each month.” 

In August 2025, Keychain announced a “$30 million Series B” and the launch of KeychainOS, positioning it as an AI operating system for manufacturers and contrasting it with traditional ERP implementations. The release also said Keychain had reached “$68 million” in total funding and claimed adoption by “8 of the top 10 retailers… and 7 of the top 10 CPG brands, including General Mills.” 

And finally, last month on stage, Keychain announced an additional “$10 million investment” in 2025, including funding from W23 Global (Tesco, Woolworth's), described as “backed by five leading grocery retailers,” including Ahold Delhaize.