Grüns pioneered DTC supplement subscriptions. Then Unilever bought it for $1.2B.

Grüns didn't just sell gummies. Founded in 2023, the company took a crowded market, greens powders and multivitamins, and simplified it into a single daily gummy. Their growth engine was a subscribe-and-save model built for recurring revenue. Three years later, Unilever acquired Grüns for $1.2 billion, one of the fastest exits in consumer packaged goods in recent memory.

Despite that success, Grüns became a defendant in a California Automatic Renewal Law lawsuit during the current litigation wave. The complaint centers on something we don't usually see: a customer who tried to cancel multiple times and simply couldn't.

The lawsuit

Sanchez & Tackett v. Gruns Nutrition started as a California state-court filing in November 2025. Grüns moved the entire case to federal court, a tactic available once a class exceeds $5 million, and one that tends to favor defendants at the pleading stage.

Seven weeks after the amended complaint, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the case, before Grüns ever answered or moved to dismiss. The public docket doesn't say why. Voluntary dismissal usually means either a private resolution, or plaintiffs' counsel deciding the case wasn't strong enough to keep funding.

“The underlying allegations were never tested in court, and the checkout flow described in the complaint was never ruled compliant or non-compliant by a judge.”

Grüns still paid for legal counsel to prepare a defense and move the case federally. For a company their size, that's a rounding error. For a smaller brand facing the same exposure, legal fees alone typically land at $15,000–$20,000, enough to make even the threat of a suit painful.

The cancellation attempt: the core of the case

Rather than arguing in the abstract about what "easy cancellation" should look like, the complaint is built around a real, alleged attempt to cancel that failed, exactly the scenario California's 2025 amendments were written to close off. Since July 1, 2025, §17602(d)(1) requires an exclusively online, at-will cancellation path for anything purchased online.

“In fact, for weeks, Ms. Tackett has been attempting to cancel her Grüns's subscription — and specifically, to stop any future charges — but Grüns has made it impossible to do so.”

First Amended Complaint

A second named plaintiff, Monica Sanchez, adds another wrinkle: she paid $64.64 for her first order, then was charged $72.64 on renewal, more than she'd originally agreed to. It's the kind of gap that's hard to defend once a customer is already asking why no one told them the price would change.

What the complaint alleges under the ARL

• Non-conspicuous disclosure of the renewal terms
• No clear affirmative consent step
• A cancellation mechanism that didn't function as the law requires

Together, that's a checkout that looks compliant at a glance: clean design, recognizable brand, but fails at the two moments that matter most: what the customer agreed to, and what happens when they try to leave.

If this were your checkout: a 4-point teardown

• 1Is the recurring charge clearly disclosed next to the subscribe button, not buried in a footer or behind an info icon?
• 2Are you explicitly communicating the recurring nature of the subscription right next to the final checkout button?
• 3Are cancellation terms presented clearly in your post-purchase email flow?
• 4Did you actually make cancellation easy, a one-click path, not an "are you sure?" loop?

Most brands lean on built-in Shopify, Klaviyo, or subscription-tool defaults. Those platforms do the bare minimum to comply, and the bare minimum often leaves you exposed.

No brand is too big or too small to be a target

Grüns went from startup to $1.2 billion acquisition faster than almost any brand in its category, and this checkout flow existed unchanged long enough to draw a class action with a real, documented failed cancellation behind it. A brand that size can absorb the cost of defending a suit like this. A brand two years into the same growth curve usually can't, which is exactly why it's worth checking now, not after the growth happens.