How Poppi’s founders built a new soda brand worth $2 billion

STEPHEN ELLSWORTH: I’m standing there on the edge of the bridge. I’m like, “Should I jump?” I know I should jump, but there’s going to be all of these things that I have to do to figure it out. There’s so much risk in all of this stuff.

ALLISON ELLSWORTH: And I donkey-kick him—

STEPHEN: Yeah, and she just kicks me right off.

ALLISON: Off the cliff so hard.

JEFF BERMAN: That’s Stephen Ellsworth. His co-founder, Allison, is the one who gave him that donkey kick. The married couple took the entrepreneurial leap together to create a healthier version of soda, one that you’ve probably seen, if you haven’t picked it up yet, at your local convenience store or grocery store: Poppi. Pepsi bought the brand in 2025 for roughly $2 billion, but the road to getting there was not so easy.

STEPHEN: While you’re in the dark building and grinding, your friends are at great corporate jobs, taking trips to the Bahamas and Europe, and we’re just grinding.

ALLISON: But also loving the grind.

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show: Allison and Stephen Ellsworth. They’re the married duo who started by selling homemade soda at their farmers market. They hyperscaled Poppi to a truly gigantic exit and changed an entire category along the way. We talked about what it takes to juggle a growing company and family at the same time, how savvy social media strategy helped them stand out, and what happens when you decide to run a Super Bowl ad four days before the big game. Allison, Stephen, welcome to Masters of Scale.

ALLISON: Thanks for having us.

STEPHEN: Thanks for having us.

BERMAN: I’m thrilled for you guys to be here. I want to start with a confession, which is that I had my first Poppi just a few weeks ago. I had the lemon-lime version, and as someone who was addicted to Coca-Cola for many years, and is now 16 years off Coca-Cola, this was such a delight to discover.

ALLISON: I love that.

Copy LinkThe origin story of Poppi

BERMAN: So thank you. Allison, it wasn’t like you were dying to go into beverages, right? How did Poppi come about? What’s the origin story?

ALLISON: The fact that you just had your first Poppi is very iconic. What you said is the reason Poppi exists: to give people the freedom to love soda again. That’s our purpose. But to go back to the origin story, we didn’t set out to be beverage connoisseurs. We just wanted to create something really incredible, and it came from a personal problem of mine. I had tummy issues. I was about 50 pounds heavier than I am now. My skin was a mess. I spent maybe seven years trying to go to doctors, trying to figure out what was going on. They kept telling me it was girl problems. I couldn’t really figure it out. Going through that process, honestly, it was really amazing for me to discover what worked for me. Apple cider vinegar was a key ingredient. It was almost like a reset, detox-type vibe, but I hated the taste. So off to the kitchen I went. I created a bunch of our first versions of it. It was called Mother Beverage. It was in these little Mason jars.

BERMAN: And so, Stephen, when Allison is a mad scientist in the kitchen trying to figure this out, are you like, “I love you, but what are we doing here?” Or did you see the vision?

STEPHEN: Yes, I definitely thought she was a little crazy. I would say that for the first little bit, I begrudgingly went along with this idea as a supportive husband. I was really into health and fitness, but the things I did surrounding health and fitness, and the food that I ate, largely tasted pretty good. This was too far out in left field for me. I think, as Allison said, when she started making it taste a little bit better, that’s when I started to get more excited about it. I was like, “Taking a shot of apple cider vinegar? Not for me. But if it’s something that I can drink and enjoy that’s also healthy, then I’m down.”

BERMAN: What was the inflection point at which you said, “Maybe I’ve got a product here that’s worth taking out to market”?

ALLISON: I was still just so obsessed with this idea, almost to the point that I just wanted people to try it. So we signed up for the local farmers market to do it as a hobby on the weekends. I think a lot of people start at the farmers market. We just started selling it. Week after week after week, we kept selling out. Then we would spend the week bottling it and making it in our kitchen, and then selling it on the weekends while he was working a job to support the mortgage of the house — we had just bought. Really quickly, a Whole Foods buyer came by our booth. Her name was Kelly. She’s still at Whole Foods to this day, and she gave us her card. That moment was really reassuring, like, “You guys need to be in Whole Foods.” I think that was the first time we realized we maybe had a business and not a hobby. And I told Stephen, “We’re going to do this. We’re going all in. We’re going to put our life savings into this.”

STEPHEN: I think it was our third week at the farmers market.

BERMAN: Wow. So it’s fast.

STEPHEN: This was really fast. Friends and family had really liked the product, but how often can you trust friends and family to give you real feedback? They say, “Oh, we love it. It’s so good. Oh my gosh.”

BERMAN: We love you.

ALLISON: My mom was like, “You’re crazy.”

STEPHEN: That’s exactly right. Like Allison said, the forager from Whole Foods loved what we were doing. There was a big crowd around our booth. We were the talk of the farmers market. She tried the product, loved it, loved our story, and was like, “You’ve got to be in Whole Foods.”

Copy LinkInside Poppi’s first retail experience at Whole Foods

BERMAN: It’s one thing to be bottling during the week in your home and showing up at the farmers market, but when Kelly shows up from Whole Foods and says, “You should be in Whole Foods,” is it like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Now we’ve got compliance. We’ve got supply chain. We’ve got a whole set of questions we haven’t begun to address”? What happens in that moment?

STEPHEN: The nice thing about this local forager program that Whole Foods has is they’re there side by side with you to help these young and emerging products and brands get up off the ground and get to retail. So that was just a really great relationship that we developed over time with Kelly at Whole Foods. Getting compliant and starting our own manufacturing facility — not the wisest choice — and getting all of that stuff dialed in, they were really helpful with it.

ALLISON: At one point, the bottles had this metallic shine on them, and she was like, “That’s not going to look good in grocery stores.” So we ended up going with bright colors instead that we knew would pop off the shelf. I think, too, on top of it, it takes time. From the time we got the card to the time we were on shelves was 10 or 11 months. I love that we were naive enough to think it would happen quickly, because we did take our life savings, we did open a manufacturing facility, and we did start to grow even more locally. The craziest thing, though: We went through all that, and then we finally got approval. They were like, “You guys have 14 stores in Dallas, Texas, and now you have to go sell each store individually.” We strapped our babies on our backs and sold into those 14 Whole Foods, and we were really successful at it. They started to believe in us, and we just started the flywheel. I think we did like $500,000 in revenue. And then that’s when Shark Tank came up.

BERMAN: Before we get to Shark Tank, neither of you had a background specifically in manufacturing and supply chain and compliance and all the things that you have to deal with. How did you do it?

ALLISON: Google’s a beautiful thing. Right now there’s ChatGPT, but there are templates online. There are resources. You ask people, you network, you call, you beg. Other people are doing it, so how did you guys do it? I think as entrepreneurs, we were just so desperate to be successful and to share this product that we just did whatever it takes. Everyone wants that secret formula. It’s just that you have to do the work.

Copy LinkThe benefit of having a co-founder

STEPHEN: I think the reason we work so well is because I’m standing there on the edge of the bridge, like, “Should I jump?” I know I should jump, but there are going to be all of these things that I have to figure out. There’s so much risk in all of this stuff.

ALLISON: And I donkey-kick him off the cliff so hard.

STEPHEN: She kicks me right off the ledge. But the good thing is that once I’m in, I’m all in. There’s no turning back. It’s just extreme focus and extreme intensity, without looking back, just doing whatever you have to do to literally get the job done. I feel like for the first two or three years growing the business, we just muscled through. It was pure grit at that point. While you’re in the dark building and grinding, your friends are at great corporate jobs, taking trips to the Bahamas and Europe, and we’re just grinding. It’s tough, for sure.

ALLISON: But also loving the grind.

STEPHEN: Yeah.

ALLISON: I always say I love that I had a co-founder. I think it would be really hard to do it as a solo entrepreneur. The highs are so much higher, but with the lows, you actually have support. So if you don’t have a co-founder, find someone. Your first hire is probably basically your co-founder, because you can feel really alone as an entrepreneur.

BERMAN: Yeah. And there’s a growing number of stories of partners — husband and wife or otherwise — who found companies together and go on to have the success you all have. It’s also a decision that’s fraught. Was there a moment where you just said, “I’m not sure this is worth it,” or, “I’m not sure we’re going to make it as a couple through this”?

STEPHEN: There was never a moment when I thought we wouldn’t make it as a couple. I think maybe the reason you start to see more married couples do this together is because, in theory, a married couple has already committed 100 percent. Whereas with other co-founders or partners, I feel like that conviction and partnership can sometimes waver in the face of animosity or any sort of challenge. So I never thought our relationship was challenged through the growth of Poppi. There were definitely moments where I didn’t think we were going to make it as a business. I remember it was a slow month, and we had all of this overhead and really no revenue to back it up, and our mortgage was due. We had our first kid at this point, and I was like, “Man, what are we going to do?” I was standing in the kitchen. I opened up this letter. I didn’t know where it was from, but it was a tax return from the government. Because we had had our first kid and we didn’t claim a dependent on our tax return, we got a refund back, and it was almost the exact dollar amount of our mortgage.

BERMAN: Oh, wow.

STEPHEN: That was probably the time I was wavering the most. It was early on.

ALLISON: You never told me that story until post-exit either, which I think is really interesting.

BERMAN: Why didn’t you share that with Allison?

STEPHEN: I don’t know. For whatever silly reason, there were a lot of things going through my head, saying, “OK, exit door A, exit door B. What’s the move here?”

BERMAN: Yeah. I’m going to ask that question in part because, to your point about being a married couple and already, at least theoretically — and in your case, really — being all in on it, you don’t have one foot out. But when you’re in it together, you’re experiencing those highs and lows largely together. So I’m just curious: Is there an element of almost protecting each other when the energy demands that?

ALLISON: We really like to win. Both of us have that drive, but we also wanted to have a family. We didn’t want to pick, and we decided very intentionally to do it at the same time. So at that point, we decided there were three things — marriage, kids, and business — and we were like, “Hey, we’re good. Let’s not focus on the marriage so much. I don’t care if I get flowers for Valentine’s Day, or if you forget the anniversary, or we don’t have a birthday dinner.” Those things that I think a lot of people would probably need in a marriage to build that trust — we were building trust in so many other avenues that, for the longest time, we didn’t really need it. But I will say what’s been interesting was post-exit, when we had this same goal for nine years: Poppi. Then we exit, and now he’s doing stuff, I’m doing stuff, and we don’t have the same goal anymore. There was a little bit of a learning period to be like, “Oh, wait. We’re not doing everything together. We have to almost go on those dates now. I want those flowers. Don’t forget my birthday.” With everything in life, there are waves and there are challenges and change, but I think we’re pretty good at addressing it and having those conversations.

Copy LinkHow Poppi won an investment on Shark Tank

BERMAN: What happens that makes you decide, “It’s worth it for us to go do Shark Tank,” rather than continuing to build step by step in a more traditional manner?

ALLISON: I think we were finally ready to have help. I think we had maybe gotten it to a really good business for us, but it wasn’t $500,000. It’s good, but it’s not going to change our lives. We had someone reach out who wanted to invest in us. I think they were going to give us $200,000, but they had zero connections. They had zero knowledge in beverage. We’ve always heard the old saying, “Don’t take dumb money.” Any entrepreneur knows that. As we were discussing whether we needed it, because we did need the money, I literally opened Instagram, and Mark Cuban had posted that Shark Tank was coming to town that weekend, and there were tryouts to be on the show. I was three months pregnant. So it was 2017, and we went and stood in line for eight hours. I think it was the first time we got a real babysitter for our first. We just pitched our hearts out, and they were like, “This is going to make it all the way.”

ALLISON: They loved us. They loved our story. But it still took six months from that moment to actually get on the show, which meant I was nine months pregnant on the show.

BERMAN: I’m not great at math, but I was going to say that puts you right there.

ALLISON: Yeah, I was nine months pregnant, but I was like, “I don’t care. I will have this baby on TV.” That’s how much we wanted it. Shark Tank absolutely changed our lives.

BERMAN: How?

ALLISON: We had resources. We had knowledge. We had network. We had access to more capital. I will say the recognition of the American dream, of being seen on Shark Tank, that stamp of approval, does so many things for a business when it’s used in the right way.

BERMAN: Some people go on Shark Tank, I’m told, knowing they’re not going to do a deal. It is purely a marketing play. Other people go on with a real clear idea of what they want to walk out with. Where were you on that?

STEPHEN: We needed a deal. As Allison said, we really wanted that strategic partner who could help guide us and take us to the next level. I think we’re relatively coachable. We wanted capital. We were eager for a partner. We were hungry to win, and we wanted to learn.

BERMAN: Tell us what happened on the show.

ALLISON: Spoiler alert: We got a deal.

BERMAN: OK.

ALLISON: We got a deal with Rohan Oza, and he has vast knowledge in beverage, multiple exits in his history, and had really worked his whole career in the space. So it was a perfect shark for us. After getting a deal, we did a full rebrand. We were Mother Beverage, and we became Poppi.

BERMAN: What did Rohan tell you about the branding?

ALLISON: He was basically like, “Your liquid’s amazing, but your branding is shit.” And we as founders were not upset about it. We were like, “Well, what are we going to do?”

BERMAN: It wasn’t like someone telling you your baby’s ugly. That’s not how it landed.

STEPHEN: I think we knew our baby was ugly, but the inside is what matters.

BERMAN: The inside is absolutely what matters. Whether you can sell the inside without the outside is a different story.

STEPHEN: Exactly.

BERMAN: It almost feels like Rohan is the perfect shark to invest, not one who’s a regular on the show. Did you get lucky? Was it providence? Or was this part of the programming, that they wanted you in front of him?

ALLISON: Contrary to what people believe, the show wants you to get a deal, and they do a lot of work on the back end to actually try to match you up. I know this because I was a guest shark this season, so it was fun to see both sides of it. I kept thinking, “You guys, I am pregnant. I know you’re filming for three weeks.” I think we were one of the last two episodes filmed of the pod, and it was because they were trying to match us up with Rohan. We had no idea. You don’t find out your sharks until, literally, I think, midnight the night before.

BERMAN: Oh, wow.

ALLISON: So we had no clue. We find out, we go to bed, and we’re up at 4 a.m. for glam and to get to set. So you don’t really even have time to process it or dig deep or look into them. You just have to go in there with an open mind. I think Bethenny Frankel was also on there, and she had some experience in beverage, so we were excited to see her. And then Mark Cuban — Dallas, we were Dallas-based. But I think we would’ve done a deal with any shark, honestly, if it was a good deal and they weren’t being too sharky. We definitely needed it.

BERMAN: If there’s an entrepreneur who’s listening, who is either trying out for Shark Tank or is going to be recording an episode soon, what’s the advice you would each give that person?

ALLISON: Know your numbers. Don’t go on the show if you can’t answer basic questions about your business. Go on with the intent to actually get a deal, because they can see right through that. And I think nerves get a lot of people. I saw that, where it was a great product, they knew their numbers, but the nerves took over. So know that you are actually going on TV, and you have to be able to do that, which I think a lot of people probably struggle with.

STEPHEN: For the people who want to go on there for marketing, I think it’s great marketing short term. I think there’s a little lift, but I don’t think it’s going to change their business the way they think it will.

BERMAN: Still ahead, Allison and Stephen on how they built one of the most effective TikTok playbooks in CPG history.

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Copy LinkRebranding — and relaunching — Poppi

So tell us about the rebranding journey.

ALLISON: When we decided to do the whole rebrand, we did try to keep a little nostalgic touch of Mother Beverage. At one point, we were like, “Do we call it Mom and Pop?” Because we knew we wanted to be a soda.

BERMAN: Pop being … that’s funny. It’s like a dad joke.

ALLISON: But then we’re like, “Is it a dad joke? Will people take us seriously?” We really wanted to be a cool brand, so we didn’t rush it. We hired different designers to come up with different designs. Do we stay in bottles? Do we go to cans? Do we do both? What is the brand? What is the vision? Really, where we landed is we knew Poppi was revolutionizing soda for the next generation. We wanted to give people the freedom to love soda again. At one point, Stephen wanted color. I wanted white cans. I will say I was wrong. I’m so glad we did color. Once we figured out our north star and our mission, everything else just landed in place in terms of what we were trying to do.

BERMAN: Help me with the timeline. So the Shark Tank episode actually airs …

STEPHEN: December of 2018.

BERMAN: December of ’18.

STEPHEN: We take off. 2019 is the rebranding phase. We keep things in a steady state.

ALLISON: We launch Poppi the first week of COVID, March 3, 2020.

BERMAN: Wow. So what happens when you’re launching, or relaunching, a consumer brand with retail partners? I imagine you had pretty ambitious launch plans, and then the world shuts down.

ALLISON: Yes. At the time, it was devastating, but I actually think it did us well for a few reasons. We had loaded into Amazon. What is everybody doing during COVID? They’re pantry-loading shelf-stable products that, quote-unquote, can boost immunity. Everyone’s shopping on Amazon. So that business blew up. On top of it, we had filmed an update on Shark Tank with the new brand. It aired the second week of lockdown. I think it was April 4. So we had a national commercial with Poppi in the second month of business, and we hit Amazon’s hot new product list literally overnight. It was wild what we saw from that episode versus our original episode.

STEPHEN: That’s when we broke the internet, trending higher than Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. It was a wild night.

BERMAN: Order of magnitude, what does that mean from a revenue perspective in that window?

STEPHEN: In March, we did about $9,000 on Amazon, and I think the next month we did $250,000 on Amazon.

BERMAN: Wow.

STEPHEN: Yeah.

BERMAN: Were you able to keep up with the demand?

ALLISON: We were able to shift inventory into Amazon because we were ready for launches in grocery stores. Another huge piece that I say was a blessing in disguise is that it made us think differently from the beginning about the way we marketed. Everything had to be digital-first. I do believe that us being one of the first brands to really lean into TikTok to build that community base helped our brand awareness. Because a lot in beverage — and really in a lot of better-for-you products — grow really big in New York and LA, and those are your hubs and your big markets, and you really focus on them. Because we were a digital-first brand, I think our largest retailers were Fargo, North Dakota, and Cincinnati, Ohio, these really Middle America soda-drinking places. It just allowed us to blow up really quickly because of how digital-first we were.

Copy LinkHow Poppi built a TikTok playbook

BERMAN: Was the investment in TikTok content as marketing driven by inspiration or desperation? What drove that in those early days of COVID for you?

ALLISON: I think all of the above. I always say the most underexplored emotion for an entrepreneur is embarrassment. Get online and make a fool of yourself. So I danced. I made taco videos. I put our kids in it. I was doing transition stuff. Stephen was making TikToks. Honestly, what worked is that one night I sat down — it was a Friday night, I had just gotten out of the shower, my hair’s wet — and I just told my story. It connected on such a deep level that it went viral, did a million views while we were sleeping. We did $100,000 while we were sleeping that night on Amazon. That video now has like 300 million views. It’s just wild. It was just like, “Hi, I’m Allison. Poppi has five grams of sugar, and I was on Shark Tank nine months pregnant.” It was so simple. It also opened our eyes to the power of it. Then we shifted a lot of our paid spend over to the platform and really focused on that as our community-building, brand-awareness channel, which I think was really smart for us at that time. Our No. 1 KPI for the first four years of business was brand awareness. I think until we did a Super Bowl ad, we just were never really looking at the data. We used an interesting approach: Because we were on Amazon, we didn’t own our customers’ data. So we would run all of our TikTok ads to our website, get their email and phone number, and then when you’d go to add to cart, it would check out on Amazon right from our website.

BERMAN: So you’re capturing the customer, you’re getting their data so you can remarket to them, but you’re leveraging all of Amazon’s infrastructure.

ALLISON: Correct.

STEPHEN: Another little crazy hack — this is like a pro tip — because we were directing traffic from our website to Amazon, we actually made it an affiliate link. So Amazon was actually paying us…

BERMAN: Oh, that’s so smart.

STEPHEN: …to direct traffic from our website to Amazon, while also collecting the customers’ data. That’s an ultra-hack.

Copy LinkBetting big on a last-minute Super Bowl ad

BERMAN: I love that. You referenced the Super Bowl ad. When did you do the Super Bowl ad, and why?

ALLISON: We just did things very differently at Poppi. To lay the groundwork, for us to do a Super Bowl ad in year three or four isn’t crazy for the size of business we were. What we’d done the year before was a huge brand rework, really hammering in what our vision was. We created an incredible anthem ad called “The Future of Soda.” We got it, we started testing it, and it was just such a beautiful piece of content that we were like, “This is a Super Bowl ad.”

BERMAN: You had the ad before you decided you were going to do the Super Bowl.

ALLISON: Right.

BERMAN: The ad is what triggered this.

ALLISON: We fell in love with this creative.

BERMAN: Wow.

ALLISON: So we didn’t ever make this to be a Super Bowl ad. I think that’s also really amazing, because people get into this cycle of making celebrity Super Bowl ads where everybody’s in it, and it’s like, “What did they just say?” But we really wanted to come out and just say who we were. In the ad, I think we said we were soda 17 times. So we go, “We want to do the Super Bowl.” We go to buy the Super Bowl, and there’s nothing for sale.

BERMAN: What year is this?

ALLISON: That was ’23 going into ’24. I remember I was part of this TikTok collective. We were at dinner with a bunch of really incredible people, from Wendy’s to the NBA to Thrive Market to Wieden+Kennedy, just awesome people at this dinner. I remember asking — I had no idea who this guy was — “Anybody have a Super Bowl ad?” And he’s like, “I think I do.” It was The M Group. At the time, I called our CMO and was like, “I think I found us a Super Bowl ad.” This is the Wednesday before the Sunday game, four days before …

BERMAN: Four days before the Super Bowl.

ALLISON: Four days before the Super Bowl. What was crazy about it too is that it was a floater ad. So we had no idea when it was going to air. It was dependent on timeouts and injuries.

BERMAN: Because you can buy the first quarter, you can buy halftime, you can buy postgame, but some of the ads are sold on a nonspecific basis. They’re going to plug it in where they can.

ALLISON: All it had to do was air before “Thank you for watching the NFL.” That’s how risky it is.

STEPHEN: Could’ve been a blowout. Everybody turns off the game.

BERMAN: Right.

ALLISON: And it could’ve been the last ad before that. But I will say we just rolled the dice. It ended up airing one minute before Usher went on, right before halftime, which is the most premium spot that anyone could ever ask for at the Super Bowl. We tripled our awareness overnight. That was the year that Travis Kelce and Taylor … It was one of the most viewed Super Bowls, and we were one of the most viewed Super Bowl ads at that Super Bowl. So you could say our first Super Bowl was very successful.

BERMAN: Coming out of the Super Bowl, were you able to see beyond the awareness? Were you able to see in the revenue numbers the effect?

STEPHEN: Yes, I think is the short answer. We were forecasting $200 million to $350 million for 2024. We hit over $500 million, north of $500 million, that year. So I would say yes, it paid off. Our CMO actually signed the contract to buy the Super Bowl ad before we had the money to pay for the ad.

BERMAN: Wow.

ALLISON: Because we knew they would believe in this moment. It was such a partnership the whole time.

BERMAN: So wait, you’re calling Rohan and saying, “Look, we’re going to need some cash infusion here to cover the cost of a Super Bowl ad that we just bought four days ahead of the Super Bowl.”

ALLISON: Yeah, because it wasn’t in the plan for the year.

BERMAN: Sure. An $11 million expense showing up overnight is not a trivial thing, even on a business at the scale you were at. Wow. It’s also just a great callback to your point about not taking dumb money. You took smart money. You got someone who could help you with the branding, really think through the business. He’s got deep experience in beverage. And when you say, “This is the opportunity. We believe. We’ve already signed the contract to do this,” they’re like, “I’m in. I’m with you on this.”

ALLISON: Right.

Copy LinkInside Poppi’s acquisition to Pepsi

BERMAN: OK. So jumping ahead, you’ve made a decision to sell the company. You’ve now sold the company as we sit here. What’s the process that leads to a decision to sell this company?

STEPHEN: Allison and I also knew that in order for us to truly revolutionize soda and give people across the globe the freedom to love soda again, we were going to need a partner. We are the official soda of the LA Lakers. We can’t be sold there at the stadium because of existing contracts. So we had made that decision, and we really built this company so that we could pass the torch to a larger business that was going to be able to carry it forward and continue that mission.

BERMAN: You’re in a category where there are two 800-pound gorillas, right? There’s Pepsi and there’s Coca-Cola. Did you start conversations with both of them early, so that you knew they were familiar with not just Poppi, but with YouTube, et cetera?

ALLISON: Well, it’s actually three — KDP when it comes to these things. And then, yes, there’s the option to go IPO, but then you don’t have a distribution partner. So it’s just a really tough situation to be in in beverage. I think we did start dating. We started having conversations. We didn’t actually do an official process where we were for sale. It was like, “Hey, let’s take some calls.” I think we had been talking to Pepsi for almost a year and a half before the actual final offer came in. I think the reason they bought Poppi is for our marketing and our team. So when they finally gave us the offer, I think we did a little bit of negotiation, but we said yes in like three days. It was really quick. It was February, and then we closed at the end of March.

BERMAN: Pepsi bought Poppi for …

ALLISON: $1.95 billion. It’s so hard not to say two, so let’s just say almost $2 billion.

BERMAN: Let’s round it up. Which is a monster exit. It’s a monster exit. And you said Pepsi wanted Poppi in part for the team, obviously the product and the branding, et cetera. Did that include the two of you?

ALLISON: It did not. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that we sold 100 percent of the company. A lot of times, you’ll do a two-step deal where … I would say if it was that situation, we would’ve stayed in our roles and kept going, but you don’t sell your company for $2 billion and then say, “Hey, here’s your Pepsi employee badge.” It’s just not the way those things work. We were very aware of that going in and had lots of conversations. Now, the thing that I will say is they’ve kept us on in advisory roles. I’m still the face of the company. I still do a lot of ads. I was in the office two weeks ago. We were filming a Super Bowl commercial with Charli XCX. But I can’t have a team reporting to me, and I can’t meddle like I used to. You have to have boundaries, and you have to have respect. There was mourning that came with that, I would say, and I think that’s very normal. I’m so happy. Everybody at Poppi got jobs if they wanted to stay. They hired 100 percent of anybody who wanted to stay. Some people did leave because they saw what happened to Poppi and thought, “I’m going to go get another job and get equity and hopefully do it again.”

STEPHEN: As Allison said, there’s definitely this mourning period. I don’t think a lot of people talk about it. It was a really, really challenging time. And it’s like, “Oh, poor you. You sold your company for $2 billion. Life must suck for you,” type of thing. But it really is, I think, not knowing what I was going to do that day, not having that purpose and extreme focus on something to wake up and go after. It was really, really challenging. I think we made the right decision. You rip the Band-Aid off, you separate, and so I think where we are now, things are great. We’re getting creative.

BERMAN: A lot of folks in your situation would say, “You know what? We climbed the mountain. We’re going to spend time making investments, guest judging on Shark Tank, philanthropy,” whatever else is meaningful for you. Is there an itch to start another company and do this again?

STEPHEN: Absolutely. One hundred percent. As Allison said, I think we allowed ourselves that time to really sit and be with ourselves and process. One of the things I missed the most was being with a team, building a team, and having this really great outlet to be creative and solve problems and challenge yourself. I also want my kids to see me work hard at something and accomplish things. I don’t want to just be passive on the sidelines playing golf.

BERMAN: So can you tell us about what’s next?

ALLISON: We can’t say what’s next, but we will say the opportunity just happened. Basically, if we don’t do it, someone else will, because it’s so simple. We’re shaking ourselves, like, “How has this not been done?” But it is another beverage.

STEPHEN: It is.

ALLISON: We’re going to do what we know.

STEPHEN: Double down.

ALLISON: Double down. And we’re excited. We’re working on naming and branding and packaging and just that early-day grind.

STEPHEN: Maybe not all the way back to early stage.

ALLISON: We’re not going to manufacture ourselves anymore.

BERMAN: Skip the farmers market.

STEPHEN: We’ll skip those first three years.

BERMAN: I hope you’ll come back when you launch the new thing to tell us about it. Thank you so much for being on Masters of Scale.

ALLISON: Thanks for having us.

STEPHEN: Thanks for having us.