Inside the creator-fueled beverage boom

Influencers aren’t just selling drinks anymore—they’re owning them. A growing number of social media stars are taking equity stakes in beverage brands, reshaping how drinks are marketed and who controls the narrative. It’s a shift that blurs the line between content creator and brand owner, signaling a new era of celebrity entrepreneurship in the beverage industry. TikTok superstar Alix Earle is one of the latest to make that leap. Since canned margarita brand SipMargs relaunched last month, Earle has been a near-constant presence in its social media posts—not as an influencer, but as the company’s largest single investor. She’s also helping overhaul the brand’s marketing strategy, bringing her built-in audience and personal brand into every facet of the business. In January, Alex Cooper—the founder of The Unwell Network, a growing podcast network that includes her popular show “Call Her Daddy”—expanded her business empire into the beverage industry with an electrolyte drink brand, Unwell Hydration. Within two months of its Jan. 1 launch, Unwell Hydration became an official sponsor of the National Women’s Soccer League’s 2025 season and broadened its retail presence from the shelves of Target (which had an initial one-month exclusivity period) to Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Wegmans and a slew of other retailers. “If you think about the way that consumers have evolved in the way that they spend their time, energy and attention, social media and creators [now] take up so much of our mindspace,” Kristin Lentz, commercial lead for Unwell Hydration, told Ad Age. “And there’s a level of authenticity, realness and trust with creators—and especially with Alex and the platform that she’s built—that can’t always be replicated by traditional CPG brands.” Nestlé, which makes Unwell Hydration, recognized that power influencers such as Cooper hold over coveted Gen Z and younger millennial consumers when Cooper and her team pitched her drink brand to the company, Lentz said. “It was certainly never a tough sell on ‘Why Alex?’ or ‘Why this space?‘” she added. Today, 65% of consumers across the U.S. and U.K. purchase products from creator-founded brands, according to recent independent research from global creator marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. Unsurprisingly, younger consumers are more likely to buy from creator brands, with 91% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 84% of 25- to 34-year-olds having paid for a product or service from a creator brand, according to the agency’s report. “Power is increasingly transferring from mainstream brands that have enjoyed a monopoly on industries for years to individuals who are powered by growing online fanbases,” said Becky Owen, Billion Dollar Boy’s chief marketing officer, in the report. “Brands simply cannot capture what creators have: the ability to build trust and connect with communities on a human level.” Food and beverage brands were the most popular among the more than 4,000 consumers surveyed for the report. Just over one in five respondents (21%) said they’ve purchased products from a creator-founded food or beverage brand. When Unwell Hydration, Cooper’s first-ever consumer product, launched a presale on Target’s website ahead of its launch in stores, the limited stock of beverages sold out in under four hours, Lentz said. “It really just speaks to the power that Alex has with her audience … and that she knew that this [brand] was what her audience was looking for.” Breaking into the beverage space The popularity of creator brands in the food and beverage space aligns with market trends that Daniel Landver, head of the Creator Products Group division of United Talent Agency, is seeing. Although beverage brands such as Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee and Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime have been around since 2019 and 2022, respectively, creators have had an easier time breaking into the beverage space in the past two years as consumer goods conglomerates and vendors have become more willing to bet on creator brands, he said. “Historically, food and beverage was the hardest to get into, and the furthest behind on this trend,” due to the higher costs involved in manufacturing and distributing those products compared to other categories such as beauty, he said. “Now, it’s the one that you see trending the most. And it’s a much more meaningful part of every conversation—for every conglomerate to figure out what their creator-led brand strategy is.” Duane Stanford, editor and publisher of beverage industry trade publication Beverage Digest, agrees that beverage giants are increasingly looking to creators to help them connect with Gen Z consumers, whether by purchasing existing creator brands or identifying potential partners to launch a new beverage brand with. “I would say there is not a major, established beverage company that is not in their boardrooms and marketing meetings looking at what influencer could be a viable candidate to create a brand around … or trying to figure out who has an audience that would be primed for a specific beverage, especially in the health and wellness space,” Stanford said. Several beverage companies have been taking the acquisition route lately. In February, Celsius Holdings, which produces the energy drink Celsius, purchased creator-founded energy drink brand Alani Nu for $1.8 billion. And last month, PepsiCo announced it had entered into a $1.95 billion agreement to acquire prebiotic soda brand Poppi—whose co-founder and chief brand officer, Allison Ellsworth, has effectively “turned herself into an influencer to market the brand,” Stanford said. Also read: What the Celsius-Alani Nu deal means for beverage marketing Indeed, Ellsworth regularly appears on Poppi’s social media channels. She even uploaded an influencer-style apology video amid the online backlash the brand faced for shipping vending machines to influencers for their Super Bowl watch parties. Incidentally, in addition to investing in SipMargs, Earle is also an investor in Poppi—though she isn’t involved in directing Poppi’s marketing strategy as she is with SipMargs. The Coca-Cola Company is also dabbling in creator product collaborations. Earlier this week, its BodyArmor sports drink brand unveiled a new beverage in collaboration with YouTube group Dude Perfect. The sour apple sports drink is the second product BodyArmor has launched in partnership with the group of YouTubers. Last summer, Dude Perfect teamed up with BodyArmor to launch a “Perfect Pop” drink, and sold over 3 million units of the limited-edition beverage during the three months it was in stores, said Chad Coleman, Dude Perfect’s chief brand officer. It also became BodyArmor’s best-selling flavor at Walmart “from the moment it hit shelves,” he said. “It got to a point where we actually created a second round of shipments,” said BodyArmor CMO Tom Gargiulo. “Usually, in these types of [limited-edition] launches, we do a one-and-done. But because of the feedback we got both from consumers and our bottling partners, we were able to put together more production to get more bottles in hands.” While BodyArmor has launched limited-edition flavors with its athlete partners before, Perfect Pop marked the brand’s first product collaboration with a creator, Gargiulo said. The high consumer demand for Perfect Pop last year drove BodyArmor to extend its partnership with Dude Perfect into 2025 and launch a second sports drink with the group as part of BodyArmor’s efforts to “start to recruit that next generation of drinkers,” he said. Dude Perfect, after all, has amassed over 100 million followers across social media, and the group “gets millions of millions of viewers every single week,” while traditional media “is becoming less and less relevant for younger consumers in the world of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube,” Gargiulo added. And partnering with a massive YouTube group such as Dude Perfect allows BodyArmor to both introduce new sports drinks with the group and leverage their built-in audience and wide range of content to promote those limited-edition flavors. Over the next few weeks, Dude Perfect will be integrating the sour apple sports drink across their social channels, from a YouTube video unveiling the new product to short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts highlighting the beverage, Coleman said. Dude Perfect is also taking its partnership with BodyArmor beyond the shelf life of the sour apple drink, he said. The brand will show up at each location of Dude Perfect’s live tour this summer, which will include 21 cities and audiences of more than 10,000 per show, he said. BodyArmor’s branding also pops up throughout Dude Perfect’s new headquarters in Frisco, Texas, and multiple fridges in that 80,000-square-foot building are stocked with the sports drink—so the brand often appears in Dude Perfect’s video content even when it isn’t sponsored, Coleman added. The collaboration with BodyArmor is a win for Dude Perfect, too, he said, as the group had wanted to enter the sports drink space but didn’t feel equipped to build an entire beverage brand themselves, he said. “We felt like this was the answer, because we could …x utilize BodyArmor’s team of people who work on the flavors, the manufacturing, the distribution and all of that stuff that they already had baked in, and we could bring our perspective on what a Dude Perfect hydration drink would be.” Indeed, “the asset creators bring to the [business] relationship is not warehouse logistics,” Landver said. Creators with millions of social media followers have proven their ability to establish and market a successful brand—their personal brand, he said. That isn’t to say every beverage brand launched by a creator is guaranteed to be a success. Sales of Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime tumbled nearly 50% year over year in the first quarter of 2024, for instance. But often, “if you plug that [creator] into someone who’s really good at the back-end and the operation side, and can capitalize the business, that just leads to a powerful combination,” Landver said.

Inside the creator-fueled beverage boom

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