Key Takeaways
- Allison Ellsworth sold her soda company, Poppi, to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion last year.
- She started formulating the soda brand in her kitchen six years ago, and made an appearance on Shark Tank where she secured a $400,000 investment from guest Shark Rohan Oza.
- Ellsworth believes “embarrassment is the most under-explored emotion to success” and credits repeated public discomfort with building her confidence.
Poppi soda founder Allison Ellsworth didn’t set out to try to disrupt the soda market; she was just trying to feel better.
“I was going to doctors for seven years trying to figure out what’s going on with me,” she tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “I had tummy problems. My skin was a mess. I was tired all the time.”
When traditional medicine fell short, she turned to the Internet, discovered apple cider vinegar and realized, “If you read labels and you actually look at what you’re putting in your body, you can affect the way you feel.”
There was just one problem: straight apple cider vinegar was hard to choke down. Ellsworth decided she had to figure out a way to make it taste good without loading it with sugar or additives. She started experimenting with different recipes in her kitchen, mixing fruit juices with prebiotics and sparkling water, and asking people to try her concoctions at local farmers’ markets.
Allison Ellsworth. Credit: Ellsworth Crew
Within three weeks of selling sodas at farmers’ markets, a Whole Foods buyer came to her booth and asked to set up a meeting. By 2017, Ellsworth was selling her apple cider vinegar prebiotic soda, then called Mother Beverage, at Whole Foods. By 2018, the company had made about $500,000 in revenue.
In 2018, Ellsworth appeared on Shark Tank and secured a $400,000 investment for 25% equity from guest Shark Rohan Oza, who is known for his work with major beverage brands, including Vita Coco and Vitaminwater. The company rebranded to Poppi in 2020, swapping its glass bottles for colorful cans, and grew to $500 million in annual revenue by 2025. PepsiCo acquired Poppi for $1.95 billion in May 2025.
Launching in the worst week — and making it an advantage
Poppi’s national launch landed on March 3, 2020 — the first week of Covid lockdowns. Ellsworth says that “every traditional marketing play was off the table.” The team couldn’t do in-person events or sampling in stores. Grocery stores were more concerned about toilet paper shortages than they were about selling new products.
Instead of freezing, Ellsworth went all-in on TikTok and a digital-first approach from day one.
“I was one of the first entrepreneurs to go online and tell my story on TikTok,” she says, sharing everything from her health problems to being “nine months pregnant on Shark Tank.”
That authenticity paid off: “I hit post, and that video went absolutely viral, to the point now where I have over three billion views on my face, and one-third of the platform has seen my face over seven times,” she says.
The pandemic forced Poppi to “think differently from the beginning,” and that constraint became an engine for outsized growth.
Cans of Poppi soda. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The Three Cs
Ellsworth says her secrets to scaling to $500 million in five years are the three Cs: culture, community and creative.
Being digital-first helped Poppi “move at the speed of culture,” she says. The company capitalized on TikTok trends and ran Super Bowl ads for three years straight to stay relevant.
Community wasn’t a buzzword; it was a moat around the brand. Poppi fans were “diehard,” Ellsworth says, pointing to sold-out clothing line drops and Target collaborations that became cultural moments of their own.
Creative stitched everything together — from the rebrand from Mother Beverage to Poppi to reframing the product itself. “We went from apple cider vinegar drink to revolutionizing soda for the next generation,” Ellsworth says.
Professionalize faster than feels comfortable
Ellsworth is blunt that you can’t scale like Poppi and still behave like a scrappy side hustle. “We were the fastest growing beverage in the history of beverage,” she says. “We went from $0 to $500 million in five years.”
To support that, she focused on “process, platform and people.” That meant putting in serious processes, professionalizing early and refusing to hire like a typical startup. For example, she hired HR professionals and a CFO early on.
One of the biggest traps she sees founders fall into is waiting too long to level up and hire enough people. “A lot of entrepreneurs don’t do [this]… they don’t professionalize and hire fast enough,” she says.
Ellsworth also stresses the importance of finding partners who can keep up with growth, from manufacturing to capital.
“We had good manufacturing partners to be able to scale with us that quickly,” she says. “We had good investors to be able to back us the entire time.”
Mindset shift for success
If there’s a single mindset shift Ellsworth wants founders to embrace, it’s this: “embarrassment is the most under-explored emotion for success.” She believes you have to “go out there and make a fool of yourself” — posting videos, pitching your idea and standing behind a folding table asking strangers to try your drink.
Her framework is simple: “Confidence comes from failing over and over again, and then you finally become confident. So really, it starts with embarrassment, then refinement, then clarity, then confidence,” she says.
One example is those early farmers’ market days. Ellsworth was standing at a booth for hours, asking people to try her apple cider vinegar beverage. “I was like, well, this is embarrassing,” she says.
That moment forced her to refine the message to “try this better-for-you soda,” which resonated with more people. She grew more confident in her product over time.
Ellsworth is frustrated by founders who only dream. Some founders will stop her and ask for a moment of her time with just an idea and no execution behind it. “You’re dreaming, you’re not doing,” she says. “You have to take some risk to start before people will take you seriously.”
She is just as adamant about investing in the brand early. To build a product with Poppi-level impact, she advises hiring a branding agency. Too many founders, in her view, get obsessed with returns instead of building a solid brand.
A result of her branding-focused approach? A product that didn’t even exist on shelves six years ago now sits in a dedicated “modern soda” set next to legacy names.
“There was no such thing as the modern soda set,” she says. “Now they have a five-foot set in every grocery store next to the big boys. That’s something I created in my kitchen six years ago. I made real change in grocery stores for the American diet.”
Key Takeaways
- Allison Ellsworth sold her soda company, Poppi, to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion last year.
- She started formulating the soda brand in her kitchen six years ago, and made an appearance on Shark Tank where she secured a $400,000 investment from guest Shark Rohan Oza.
- Ellsworth believes “embarrassment is the most under-explored emotion to success” and credits repeated public discomfort with building her confidence.
Poppi soda founder Allison Ellsworth didn’t set out to try to disrupt the soda market; she was just trying to feel better.
“I was going to doctors for seven years trying to figure out what’s going on with me,” she tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “I had tummy problems. My skin was a mess. I was tired all the time.”
When traditional medicine fell short, she turned to the Internet, discovered apple cider vinegar and realized, “If you read labels and you actually look at what you’re putting in your body, you can affect the way you feel.”
