Brands on the Rise is a regular Ad Age feature spotlighting the marketing and business tactics of successful challenger brands. Read other installments here.

What began as home kitchen experiments in making apple cider vinegar taste better has evolved into a brand with a sophisticated plan to take on Coke and Pepsi in the soda wars.

Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand, is just over three years old, but already ranks as the top-selling soda on Amazon, according to Amazon’s “best-sellers” list, and is available in more than 20,000 retail stores. Boasting what it sees as a winning mix of flavor and function, the gut-friendly soda sees itself as a successor to less-healthy mainstream alternatives, as it markets itself in part through the testimony of its fans on social media. 

How it started

Allison Ellsworth was a Dallas-based mom and oil and gas researcher who didn’t feel right physically. “My tummy didn’t feel good, and my skin was a mess,” she said.

Googling her symptoms about eight years ago, Ellsworth discovered apple cider vinegar as a potential home remedy. She tried it, and felt better—at least when she wasn’t drinking it straight. That led to home kitchen experiments as she searched for a tasty beverage with apple cider vinegar as an ingredient.

Ellsworth shared her beverage with friends, and then took it to a local farmer’s market. There, she met a representative of Whole Foods Market, who took the young brand—then known as Mother Beverage, for the living proteins in apple cider vinegar known as the mother—to regional Whole Foods stores.

That was a whirlwind of success for a home-brewed product. Still, Ellsworth had more in mind. She and her husband Stephen left their jobs to dedicate themselves to Mother Beverage full-time. To find funding and exposure, they appealed to “Shark Tank,” in an episode airing in December of 2018, where guest shark Rohan Oza proposed to invest $400,000 in exchange for 25% of the company. The Ellsworths, despite having sought to sell just 10% of the company for the same price, agreed right away.

Oza, a one-time Coca-Cola Co. marketer who later made a fortune guiding Glaceau to a sale to Coca-Cola Co. in 2007, has been a key figure in Poppi’s growth, bringing investment and experience to the brand. Oza’s venture capital firm, Cavu Consumer Partners, has been the lead investor in Poppi’s three funding rounds, during which the company has raised $52.3 million overall, according to Crunchbase. Oza has said he envisions Poppi as a $1 billion brand.

“As a brand starting out, you can waste a lot of time and money trying to find the right people to put in place like talent and resources, but what was amazing about Ro is, it was like, ‘Hey I’ve done this before. I have a playbook,’” said Ellsworth. “You avoid a lot of those mistakes, and it jumps you forward a few years.”

Immediately following the “Shark Tank” investment, Mother undertook an eight-month rebranding, assisted by Uncommon, an agency within Cavu.

“We changed the name to Poppi. We did positioning work, we did focus groups. We asked, do we do white cans or do we want color cans? What is the hierarchy of our messaging? What is our tone of voice? How are we to show up visually? Who is our consumer?” Ellsworth recounted. “A lot of brands don’t do that; they kind of figure it out as they go.”

Tipping point

Poppi’s rebrand was ready to reveal in March of 2020—and the pandemic was not going to stop it.

“We were like, this COVID thing it will last three weeks, we all thought that back then,” Ellsworth said. “And so we went full-force and continued to relaunch the brand, we didn’t hold back, because we’d been working on it so long and we were ready to go.”

As it turned out, the pandemic has lasted far longer than Ellsworth imagined but, in a way, the early lockdown was good for Poppi. “Shark Tank” aired an update on the Mother beverage episode in April 2020. With hundreds of millions of Americans staying home that Friday night, the episode drew 5.2 million viewers, and Poppi knew so right away.

“Our website broke,” Ellsworth said of the reaction. “We went from doing basically nothing on Amazon to $9,000, to over $250,000 just a few weeks later. What that did was right out of the gate, gave us the knowledge to be a digital-first brand. We had to find ways to communicate digitally because demos and real-life events were off the table. Nobody was going to the grocery store and doing sampling.”

The brand had another pivotal moment in January 2021, when Ellsworth made a TikTok video discussing her Poppi origin story. The post drew thousands of likes and comments and helped Poppi find another way to communicate with consumers.

Ellsworth said the decision to post on TikTok was not intended to be strategic but rather to satisfy her own “obsession” with the young medium. But she learned from it.

Of TikTok, Ellsworth said, “what we’ve learned is there’s no zip codes in there. There’s not a lot of age bias. Yes, we kill it with Gen Z but there’s the soccer mom who also wants to buy it for her kids. I think it’s kind of broken a lot of the traditional marketing roles.”

More recently, Poppi became an early adopter of Threads, gaining 20,000 followers within three days of its initial post there—“couldn’t sleep without getting one of these things. c u all in the AM & don’t forget #sodasback,” it read.

“Anytime there’s a new social platform … if you’re the first to the space, and you do it well, it’s almost like a hack,” Ellsworth said.

Brand love as marketing

Poppi’s online audience is so loyal that the brand has made it a star in its broader marketing efforts. A new “Soda’s Back” ad campaign features testimonials from Poppi drinkers in the form of actual comments and social media posts on billboards and on streaming TV. The brand handled the ads in-house.

“Our community is obsessed,” Ellsworth said. “Rather than us writing copy about soda’s back, our communities were already saying it. So we decided to take that a step further and put them on a billboard. It’s so much more powerful to hear what they’re saying than what we’re saying about our brand.”

The message from Poppi is primarily about taste, with a gut health message becoming a kind of halo that sets it apart from big soda competitors.

“If you really think about soda, it was created by a pharmacist to make people feel good. If you go back to when I was a child, soda was the memories of movies, sleepover parties or root beer floats—all those things that made you feel good emotionally,” Ellsworth said. “Now it’s like, soda struggled to keep up. People are over the artificial calories. They’re over the sugar. They’re over this [is] bad for you. But they want that feel-good feeling of like soda that made me feel good. And that’s what Poppi delivers.”

What others are saying

John Craven, CEO of the beverage industry publication BevNet, said the runaway success of Poppi—and its functional counterpart Olipop—could eventually draw acquisition offers from major players in the soda industry. Oza’s involvement indicates Poppi could be looking at “a multi-billion exit—most likely from Coke or Pepsi,” Craven said.

“There’s a pretty interesting race going on between Poppi and Olipop, and whoever sells first will obviously eliminate a key suitor for the other, and perhaps set the high watermark for what the price tag will be for these brands,” he said.

While Poppi used influencers in its first TV spot, Olipop went the celebrity route with investor/singer Camila Cabello. 

Although they take different approaches to gut health (Olipop utilizes a blend of botanicals and plant fibers whereas Poppi uses apple cider vinegar) both brands are on a similar growth trajectory and both claim devoted followings on TikTok. (Despite the boom in functional sodas, there is some debate as to their actual health benefits.)

Craven counts Poppi’s flavors, its better-for-you and low-calorie halo, and approachability among its strengths. “It’s like a diet soda for the millennial and younger audience,” he said. However, the brand still has work to do on wider awareness and availability to shift its status from a beverage industry darling to a mainstream brand, he said.

The functional benefits help Poppi command a higher price than regular sodas. For example, a 12-pack of Poppi Classic Cola flavor was listed for $23.88 on Amazon (or $1.99 per can). A 12-pack of Coca-Cola was listed for $9.99, or slightly more than 83 cents a can.

What’s next

Poppi’s goals in 2023 include expanding to 30,000 retail locations, up from 20,000, solidifying its leadership in social, and expanding its product line. It’s sold at major retailers including Kroger, Walmart and Target, where Ellsworth said Poppi is the No. 3 selling brand.

Ellsworth said Poppi would continue hitting the “Soda’s Back” message hard as it expands to advertising channels such as linear TV where more consumers can be reached. It is also taking to the skies as it will be carried on JetBlue flights beginning this fall.

Concurrent with Cavu’s $25 million Series B financing announced late last year, the company appointed Lana Buchanan, a former Anheuser-Busch InBev and Campari executive, as chief marketing officer. She has since departed and has not yet been replaced. Chris Hall, formerly of Talking Rain Beverage Co., arrived as CEO last year. Chuck Czerkawski, who as chief financial officer of Essentia Water helped to arrange that brand’s sale to Nestlé, is Poppi’s CFO. Allison Ellsworth is chief brand officer today; Stephen Ellsworth is chief product officer.

Poppi’s revenue increased by 148% last year and online sales grew by 250%, Poppi said. Exact figures were not disclosed.

“We’ve done a really good job with our community, having a billion views on TikTok, a million followers across our social platforms and our email list, but now, how do we get even more mass America? And that’s truly through traditional marketing activities like linear TV,” she said. “You’re going to continue to see from Poppi this message of ‘Soda’s Back.’ We’re coming after you, big soda, and we’re not slowing down.”