Monogram Gives Mountaintop Beverage a Refill

Monogram Capital has closed a single-asset continuation fund for Mountaintop Beverage, a contract manufacturer of shelf-stable and refrigerated beverages.

The new fund and transaction, led by Apollo S3, Apollo Global Management’s platform for sponsor and secondary transactions, moves Mountaintop out of Monogram Capital Partners II, the firm’s second fund. Other investors in the fund include Partners Capital, TIFF and H7 Capital and other institutional investors.

Mountaintop Beverage makes beverages under contract for other brands — a co-manufacturer, or “co-man,” that owns the plants and production lines so that beverage companies do not have to.

The company’s specialty is low-acid aseptic processing, a method of sterilizing a drink and its packaging separately and combining them in a sterile environment so the product stays safe at room temperature without preservatives — the technology behind shelf-stable protein shakes, ready-to-drink coffees and dairy and plant-based milks. The company also produces extended-shelf-life (ESL) lines for chilled products that need a longer refrigerated life.

Mountaintop runs multiple high-speed low-acid aseptic and ESL lines and is building toward filling low-acid products in PET plastic bottles, a format in growing demand for protein and functional drinks. The company’s customers are functional and “better-for-you” beverage brands across protein, coffee, dairy, plant-based milk and tea, many of them fast-growing names that lack their own manufacturing.

Monogram first invested in Mountaintop in August 2021, backing the company’s founding team to build a low-acid aseptic manufacturing platform in Morgantown and, over the following five years, funding the buildout of multiple high-speed aseptic and ESL lines.

The new continuation fund returns a majority of Monogram’s second fund’s capital to its investors while Monogram and Mountaintop’s management roll a substantial stake into the new vehicle, and it commits fresh capital for a 250,000-square-foot capacity addition and future acquisitions.

Mountaintop, led by Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Sokal, is headquartered about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh in Morgantown, West Virginia.

“Monogram has been our foundational partner from inception, and this transaction gives us amplified resources and time to execute the next stage of Mountaintop’s growth. In doing so, we are preserving the continuity that has been central to our success – the same management team, board, and operating strategy – while adding Apollo S3 as a highly experienced capital partner. With our current expansion underway and additional capital available, we believe we are well positioned to serve the high-growth needs of our customers and further extend the robust capabilities of the platform to become the largest low-acid PET bottle contract manufacturer in the country,” said Mr. Sokal.

“Mountaintop represents precisely the kind of business we seek to back – a technically complex, capacity constrained supply chain partner providing essential services to some of the fastest-growing brands in the consumer space. We believe the flywheel between category-leading consumer brands and the supply chain and service businesses that power them is where the most differentiated, proprietary opportunities are found, and Mountaintop is a powerful embodiment of that thesis,” said Jared Stein, a co-founder and partner at Monogram Capital Partners.

Beverage co-manufacturing — outsourced bottling, filling and packaging for brands that do not own their own plants — is a growing slice of the US beverage supply chain. The domestic contract bottling and filling market was valued at roughly $4.1 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach about $6 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate near 7.7 percent, according to Mordor Intelligence. Growth is led by aseptic filling, the fastest-expanding segment, as brands chase shelf-stable formats, and by functional ready-to-drink beverages, where unit volumes jumped about 26 percent in 2025. The economics favor specialists: aseptic and high-pressure processing lines are expensive and technically demanding, so co-manufacturers that can spread those assets across many customers hold an edge, and capacity for low-acid aseptic work in particular remains scarce relative to demand.

“Mountaintop is a category leader with hard-to-replicate assets in a highly specialized segment of beverage manufacturing where capacity is genuinely scarce, and where patient, flexible capital can enable the company to fulfill the extensive pipeline of growth its strong operating history has catalyzed. We’re excited to partner with Monogram and management to support their efforts in building the premier low-acid aseptic contract manufacturing platform in North America,” said Veena Isaac, a partner and co-head of Apollo S3.

“Demand for PET bottles and high-protein, functional beverages continues to outpace the industry’s constrained ability to produce them given the highly technical training required to do so, and low-acid aseptic processing is one of the hardest processes in beverage manufacturing to scale. Mountaintop has developed the technical capabilities, customer relationships, and operating foundation required to address that gap. Apollo S3’s investment provides strong institutional validation of the platform and positions the company to continue to execute on its ambitious expansion plan,” concluded Mr. Stein.

Beverly Hills-headquartered Monogram invests up to $75 million of equity in companies with revenues of $5 million to $250 million. Sectors of interest include food and beverage, beauty and personal care, pet products, consumer healthcare, manufacturing, and multi-location businesses.

In November 2025, Monogram held an oversubscribed and hard cap close of its third fund, Monogram Capital Partners Fund III LP, with $350 million of capital.

Apollo S3 is Apollo Global Management’s platform for sponsor and secondary transactions. Since launching in August 2022, the platform has raised approximately $14 billion in total capital.

Houlihan Lokey was the financial advisor to Monogram on this transaction.