BEN GOODWIN: We’ve been growing triple digits every single year. 2020, we grew 960% in one year. It’s like when, you know the videos, somebody’s riding a rocket and their cheeks are flapping, and that is what it is. That is what it has felt like “Oh my god.” Our leaders have to grow at a pace that is inhuman. You can’t just do all your work, which is already inhuman, you have to grow as a person and as a leader. I will either be one of the bigger unlocks for this company, or I will be the biggest bottleneck.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Ben Goodwin, co-founder and CEO of OLIPOP, the super successful probiotic soda brand with a mission to make soda that’s actually healthy for you, and flavors that have captured the taste buds of Gen Z and Millennials. OLIPOP is challenging the $60 billion soda industry. PepsiCo recently shelled out $2 billion to buy OLIPOP rival Poppi, while Coke launched its own competitor, Simply Pop.

I wanted to talk to Ben to hear how he and his company are navigating the turbulence of rapid growth and rising competition, what leadership lessons he’s had to embrace along the way, and whether healthy soda is actually healthy or just a TikTok-fueled fad. Ben doesn’t disappoint, so let’s get into it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Ben Goodwin, co-Founder, CEO, and formulator of OLIPOP. Ben, thanks for being here.

GOODWIN: Thanks for having me, Bob.

The journey of a formulator turned CEO

SAFIAN: So I have to start by asking you, your title includes formulator. What does that mean? What’s a formulator?

GOODWIN: Yeah it’s kind of funny because I’m technically, kind of, a bit of a formulator first, CEO second in terms of the arc of my history.

SAFIAN: Formulator first?

GOODWIN: Yeah, so I mean—

SAFIAN: That’s the top of your resume. That’s the first thing on the LinkedIn page is formulator.

GOODWIN: It’s the craft I have the deepest relationship with in terms of the amount of time. Obviously, OLIPOP has grown a lot. We’ve had triple-digit growth every year out the gate, so I’ve had to learn how to be a decent CEO under really intense conditions, but I’ve been a formulator since I was effectively 20. The product science, flavor chemistry, all that kind of stuff. I essentially, I do all of the formulation for all of the OLIPOP flavors. I’m fortunate enough now to have an in-house lab that supports my efforts and supports various kind of R&D stuff for OLIPOP, but I still lead all of the flavor development.

SAFIAN: I mean, is being so hands-on, is it important for the business or just something that you love personally?

GOODWIN: Yeah.

SAFIAN: I mean, I know I heard you started in your laundry room. Is that still your preferred laboratory? Like, what—

GOODWIN: Well, no, my laundry room was my upgrade.

SAFIAN: Ah.

GOODWIN: I started just in the kitchen. Then in my last place, I actually managed to get it in the laundry room. And in terms of your question, look, it is fun for me, it’s an art form for me, and it’s actually my most direct, unfiltered, personal expression to our customers. And then I just, I guess, I’m also fortunate enough to be adequately skillful that it’s that product quality has contributed to our success. And look, at this point, it’s really, it’s not convenient at all. It’s really a huge pain in the ass to try to run the business and formulate, but yeah, I have—

SAFIAN: But you’re not giving up the formulating?

GOODWIN: I don’t know. Maybe it’ll happen one day, maybe it won’t.

Understanding the ‘functional soda’ landscape

SAFIAN: Yeah. So for folks who are less familiar, OLIPOP’s known as a functional soda. What does that mean? What is a prebiotic soda versus a probiotic soda? Give us the landscape.

GOODWIN: Soda itself has a really, really interesting, very deep history. It goes back a couple hundred years. There’s Middle East roots, there’s European roots.

So in the U.S., obviously full-sugar soda in a myriad of forms existed for many, many decades, especially starting in the late 1800s. It actually wasn’t until 1943 that the federal government stepped in and told Coke and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper that they could no longer call soda “healthy.” That’s how long it was they were saying that it was healthy, even though, by that time, it was loaded with caffeine and sugar. And then in the ’60s and ’70s, and then really peaking in the ’80s, you had diet soda come in, and that was this awareness that, “Hey, all the sugar’s not great for you. Let’s go with these kind of artificial sweeteners.” And it’s been that two-horse race for a really long time.

Functional soda, which I am fortunate enough to effectively have been the one that created the category and I’ve been working on it since about 2010, is basically this idea that soda can actually be health-contributing. I was looking at the evolution of the science around digestive and microbiome health and decided that this kind of nutritional intervention was, I thought, actually a superior strategy. The base of our nutritional pillars are fiber, prebiotics, and nutritional diversity.

So sometimes when I hear people say, “The prebiotic soda category,” I’m like, “Well, that’s true, but that’s just part of the story,” because a lot of the other competitors that have come into the space are just looking to capitalize for the most part on a trend, but it only is actually technically a part of what we offer.

Is OLIPOP actually healthy, or just better than traditional soda?

SAFIAN: The health benefits, not everyone’s on board about them. There have been some class-action lawsuits, not about your claims, but about claims from others. Is OLIPOP actually healthy for me, or is it just better for me than traditional soda?

GOODWIN: I’m actually so grateful that you asked that question. I don’t want to wade into trash-talking territory here, but I do think a lot of the other entrants, they’ve either got a really small amount of total fiber or they’re putting some of that fiber in and it’s not even stable in their product. You really want a blend of different high-quality prebiotics. It’s how you get to the best outcome. That’s at least my formulation philosophy.

OLIPOP is actually healthy. We have done multiple in vitro clinical trials now at Purdue. We’ve a partnership with their stability lab, we’ve a partnership with their complex carbohydrates laboratory, and we’ve looked at microbiome and digestive health outputs. We saw incredible bifidogenesis. We saw the fermentation of multiple forms of short-chain fatty acids. And then we just finished our first pilot human clinical trial, and we were looking at blood sugar stability and blood sugar response. And basically, of the folks that we studied, it kept their blood sugar stable for a full three hours.

So if you start stabilizing people’s blood sugar response, you start benefiting their digestive health microbiome outputs. I don’t know exactly what level of data most people need to classify something as healthy, but I’d say that certainly meets my criteria. My goal is to say, “Health and wellness should be actually contributing to your health and wellness,” and you should have some empirical data to validate that. If you’re going to ask consumers to spend a premium, you want to know that you’re actually giving them real outcomes for what they’re spending.

Competing with soda giants

SAFIAN: You mentioned how fast your business has been growing, and it’s one of the fastest-growing U.S. beverage brands ever. You recently raised funds that, I don’t know, around a $2 billion valuation, but you do have this intense competition, right?

Poppi, which is known for these Super Bowl ads, that was recently acquired by PepsiCo for just under $2 billion. Coca-Cola’s launched Simply Pop. How much does that change the game when the big players step in?

GOODWIN: I really want to see this category live up to its full potential. You’ve got soda, which is a $60 billion, 98% household penetration market in the United States. If we can do good in that category and use that as a kind of a Trojan horse to drive healthy outcomes for people, it’s really powerful.

In terms of big players entering the space, to be honest with you, I think it’s fantastic. Some of the largest brands and the largest players in the soda and beverage space in the world getting into your category goes a long way to massively validate what you’re doing. And so hats off to Poppi. I know that getting out, selling their business was really important to them. Coke as well getting involved. It’s like, to be honest with you, it’s a bit of an honor.

SAFIAN: One of your investors is Indra Nooyi, the former PepsiCo CEO. I imagine that PepsiCo may have approached you at the same time as they did Poppi. I don’t know. Do you consider tying up with a bigger place?

GOODWIN: Look, I mean, I can’t really speak to that with a lot of detail. I don’t want to be overly coy in terms of OLIPOP does need to create a liquidity event, right? The reality is we’ve taken on investor capital, you just pointed to that, that was our final round into the business. We’re very, very fully profitable and really liquid, pun intended, but we have raised investor capital, which means you need to generate a liquidity event. There’s multiple ways that you can go through M&A, there’s obviously IPO going public, and so that is where right now — we’re just preserving optionality.

SAFIAN: I mentioned Poppi’s Super Bowl ad earlier. They spent, I don’t know, $16 million on a one-minute spot.

GOODWIN: Oh, more than that, yeah.

SAFIAN: You didn’t make that investment, and, instead, you teased them for their spending on social media, which they then called online bullying. Is that kind of back-and-forth with them, is that strategic? Is that what customers want from brands? You’re laughing.

GOODWIN: Yeah, I have no idea. The online bullying thing is really good. It’s really good.

First of all, there’s a difference between the stuff that I personally authorize, and sometimes the stuff that the social media team decides that they want to get up to. And that was a moment where, to be honest with you, there was a little bit of a gap. I was actually at a friend’s wedding in Puerto Rico. I was not the one hitting send on the whatever platform it is that we were commenting on.

But at the same time, I understand where the consumers were coming from, which is we do live in a time with an enormous amount of income inequality. Whatever it was about how Poppi showed up, that hit a nerve for a lot of people. They made their own voices heard. I don’t need to add to that conversation. Our team did say a couple things, but then they stopped, and that’s good because they probably would’ve been fired if they hadn’t, and we just went on with their lives.

But yeah, I think that we don’t spend the same amount of money on marketing that Poppi does. I’m okay with that because a lot of what has driven our business has been organic demand and organic word-of-mouth. That is real, sustainable growth that we’re experiencing, and I’m really proud of that. And as long as you can continue to grow the business like that, you should. I think that we will probably have increase in spend in marketing as we go, but it’s okay for us as brands to have different strategies in terms of how we approach growth.

Balancing product quality and marketing

SAFIAN: I asked about the social media in part because you guys have been very successful, popular on TikTok. Your videos are praised for not being highly produced, for feeling authentic, which is easier said than done for a lot of brands.

GOODWIN: Well, you know 70% of our content creators in social media, they’re not professional influencers. They’re first-time creators, they’re not professionals at all. And we really love that because they’re real customers, they’re real fans of the product. That’s a big part of how you get to that authenticity.

The other thing that I love about it is we have this really high level of brand affinity from our customers. Even the celebrities that we’ve ended up partnering with, they’re big brand advocates.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because you’ve got a slew of celebrities as investors, right? The Jonas Brothers and Gwyneth Paltrow, Mindy Kaling. Does that help your brand?

GOODWIN: The celebrity that we have the highest level of relationship with is actually Camila Cabello. We got connected to her because she was out photographed drinking a bunch of Strawberry Vanilla a bunch of times, and eventually, we’re like, “Hey, are you a fan?” And it just kind of worked out with an investment and then an actual talent deal between us.

We shot an ad with her. It was kind of an anti-celebrity celebrity ad, and that’s her real family in the ad. She brought her real family in to shoot that. So the authenticity of the relationship we’ve been able to have for her, the way that she really gets what we’re doing is the thing that’s made it really thrive.

And I mean, I think celebrities can be very useful, but I think they’re the most useful when the relationship is authentic. And I just think if a consumer sees that and feels like, “Oh, that’s transactional,” I don’t think it carries the same weight.

SAFIAN: I mean, how much of your success do you feel like is from the marketing versus from the product? You know, some certain people are like, “Oh, the product has to speak for itself,” and other people are like, “Hey, I can sell anything.”

GOODWIN: To my chagrin, actually, as a product guy, you can cut corners on your product, and if you’re really effective in marketing, again, to my chagrin, I think this is a bummer, but there are people who’ve built perfectly successful companies that way. I don’t love it. It goes against everything I stand for as an entrepreneur, and again, as a formulator, but that is still technically an option.

I think you’re in much better territory though if you up-load, you spent your upfront energy really getting your product in a great spot. I think we live in a world where, let’s just be honest, a lot of life is a scam. Everything’s kind of trying to rip you off all the time, especially in the United States. And I think one of the things that really builds real brand affinity is when a consumer, a customer has an interaction with a brand and then goes like, “Oh, whoa. This actually delivered on what it said. This actually really gave me that satisfaction.” That’s so satisfying to me that I just couldn’t bring myself to build a company that was all marketing-driven and all style, no substance.

SAFIAN: It’s one thing to market a product well, but as Ben points out, delivering on that promise is where brands earn lasting trust. So, how did OLIPOP survive what Ben calls “the death hurdle of growth,” and how are he and his leadership team dealing with rising pressure and expectations? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, OLIPOP’s Ben Goodwin explained why healthy soda is soaring in the marketplace. Now we talk about the leadership challenges and lessons in managing breakneck growth, including his own personal, mental, and emotional journey. Let’s dive back in.

Leadership challenges when experiencing rapid growth

You alluded earlier to the things you’ve had to learn moving from being a formulator to being a CEO, and obviously you’ve had a ton of growth. Growth has its own challenges. Are there lessons in that transition? I mean, I was looking, your revenue jumped from $200 million to $500 million in a year. I mean, crazy, crazy kind of growth.

GOODWIN: Yeah. Man, it’s like when, you know the videos, somebody’s riding a rocket and their cheeks are flapping, and that is what it has felt like. You’re just trying to keep your physical and emotional sanity as a leader in all of that.

The first death hurdle is $10 million, getting from zero to $10 million. Your chances of death from zero to $1 million are just astronomically high. Your chances of death from one to 10 are still pretty high. You get to that 10, and you’re kind of on more stable ground, but really, you got to then get up to 100 if you want to then be breathing well. And then from there, it’s okay, it’s 200, 500, and then you’re at a billion, and you’re just in very, very rarefied territory.

But one of the things that I really saw, so we have something in the company called OLIPOP Leadership University, and for me, it was just based on the premise — it was exactly what we’re talking about now — “Holy sh!t, we’ve been growing triple digits every single year.” 2020, we grew 960% in one year, which irritated me a little bit because I’m like, “We’re 40% away from quadruple-digit growth. We’re so close, but I’ll take it.” And I really realized, “Oh my God, our leaders have to grow at a pace that is inhuman.” Between the ‘you can’t just do all your work,’ which is already inhuman, you have to grow as a person and as a leader. It’s like it takes every ounce of everything you’ve got. And a lot of people still aren’t going to make it.

Well, guess where that was more true than anywhere else? Me, because I recognized I will either be one of the bigger unlocks for this company or I will be the biggest bottleneck. And you learn, as you go through that process, that leadership is a really conscious effort. The best leaders are very, very conscious about how they’re showing up. They’re very conscious about what they’re saying, what they’re not saying, when they’re saying it, what tone they’re using.

The other thing that you’re learning about being a leader at a larger company is that you’re a systems engineer because you still got to be able to sniff out and see around corners and pivot, but you also have to become a systems engineer because you can’t sit down with everybody in the business anymore. So now you have to think about how whole departments work and how they interrelate and how the sub-departments work, and do I have the right leaders sitting over the right verticals, and all that kind of stuff. And you have to hire people who are better than you in every single area of the business.

A lot of founders who become the senior leaders basically, what happens to them is they can’t let go of control, and now you’ve got to be able to say, “Step away from that.” A lot of leaders start to struggle with, “Well, what’s my relevance? What am I good at anymore?” And you got to realize your job is now to become, A, that systems engineer, but it’s also you need to become an excellent leader of people. You need to understand people. You need to be a more emotionally mature than you are today. And so that means maybe you need to go to therapy, maybe you need to start dealing with some of your sh!t. That’s a hard thing for a lot of people to absorb.

Transitioning from underdog to leader

SAFIAN: You spent years sort of toiling away on an idea that other people kept saying was a crappy idea, and you’ve kind of gone from being a renegade who was going against the grain — which was motivating — to now riding this wave of accolades and momentum. How much of an adjustment is that for you?

GOODWIN: Man, that’s a great question, Bob. No one’s ever asked me that before. That’s a really interesting question because I actually, I do have this pretty defiant personality in a lot of ways, which a lot of entrepreneurs do. And that’s one, that creates the grit, right? That’s like a big part of our makeup oftentimes.

Both my co-founder and I experienced this lag where all of a sudden we both were like, “Oh, sh!t. We have all this power now? And it’s really weird.” We were just so used to being that underdog, and now all of a sudden you’ve got some momentum under your belt, 200 million, 400-plus, blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden you’re the final boss in the interview of VPs and up, and people are nervous to talk to you, and you’re an idea for people now. And it’s this whole weird thing.

And for a while, it wasn’t the right strategy. I just didn’t know how to deal with it. I kind of stuck my head in the sand a little bit. Basically, I understood that, “Okay, I know I need to start acting differently now. I know I need to be responsible with my power, but I don’t want to deal with this whole being a thing for people thing.”

And then I eventually came to the point, I was like, “Actually, they need me to be a thing. They kind of need it.” And it’s going back to being conscious about your style, like what is that right line where you’re still authentic, but you are becoming more skillful, hopefully, and you are recognizing that it is part of your role? And then how do you lean into that well, as much as you can? Then it all of a sudden starts to become about making sure that you don’t lose touch with yourself in that as well. I went through a period of that where, okay, I finally flipped over, but then I lost touch with myself a bit. I didn’t know why I had lost that.

SAFIAN: Right. You’re playing a role instead of being yourself.

GOODWIN: And it’s painful. It’s physically and emotionally painful, and it happens gradually, and you’re overwhelmed so you don’t see it happening. And actually, somewhat recently, I’ve started to reclaim that center of gravity with myself, and I was like, “Oh, thank God. That was what was missing.” You know?

So look, I think you just notice how I’ve spent a lot of time in this whole arc talking about interpersonal mechanics, emotional mechanics, maturity. I think that people really do not talk about that. People go and get their MBAs and people talk about all this stuff. “Here’s the three steps of strategy of how you do this and that.” If you get the right people around you and you’re not so foolish as to not listen to them, a lot of those skills are going to come by necessity and by learning if you’re good at learning. It’s the emotional interpersonal development stuff where there’s the most value, and it’s the most underrepresented in terms of what we discuss, and I think that’s a shame.

SAFIAN: No, and it’s part of the reason I asked at the beginning about why you keep doing the formulating because it’s like sometimes you just got to do the stuff that feeds your soul, that keeps your energy up.

GOODWIN: You’re so right. Self-aggrandizingly, I am also pretty freaking good at formulating, and you’re sorry, which it’s like, that’s embarrassing to say that out loud, but I am pretty good. And also, you’re right. It is a, for me, it’s almost like an act of service a little bit for our customers. You need all those skills. You need to know how acid works, how mouthfeel works, how sweetness works, how bitter. Well, you’ve got to know how all this stuff works. What’s your pH to stabilize? What are your bricks and titratable acids?

But you try to learn those things enough so that the art form can flow through, which that does, there is something really special and grounding to me about that. And you have all the butterflies. You’d have almost like, “I made a song. Are people going to like it as much as they liked the last song?” When it works, it’s a great feeling.

SAFIAN: So there’s this stat that I saw that OLIPOP received half a million job applications last year, people wanting to work at the company. Is that right? That’s kind of crazy.

GOODWIN: Yeah, so it’s about 400,000, and yeah, that’s a mind-blower.

SAFIAN: I mean, how many people work at the company now?

GOODWIN: We have like 210. So first of all, massive hats off to the people team and the talent acquisition team. The year prior, I forget, I think we had some 84,000 applications, and it was like, “It’s officially harder to get into OLIPOP than Harvard.” And then this last year, we had almost 400,000 and they were like, “It’s officially harder to get into OLIPOP than to become a professional NBA player in the United States.” Wild sh!t, dude. Wild sh!t. Obviously, I’m really grateful for that.

By the way, if you have applied for OLIPOP and you didn’t get a job, now you know this stat, please don’t take it personally.

What’s at stake for OLIPOP?

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for OLIPOP now? I mean, you’re in 52,000 retail locations, over, I don’t know, 12,000 Starbucks outlets. You’ve also got your hardcore fans that buy from you directly. You’re in one out of five households. This is the dream for a lot of brands.

GOODWIN: Yeah, I know. I’ve got a bunch of different feelings about it. There’s a part of me that, from the beginning, set off with a very audacious vision, which is like, “Hey, let’s go be this third wave of soda. Let’s go be as big as diet soda, and let’s go take it on.” And in order to do that, you’ve got to be huge, and you’ve got to be really, really lucky, and really, really successful. So there’s a part of me that’s tracking all of this that’s just going, “Awesome. We’re on track” in a very just matter-of-fact way.

There’s a part of me that’s just mind-blown, and it’s like you’re totally right. This is absolutely the dream, and I’m beyond lucky, and I’m so thrilled. And mostly, I’m just, and I don’t know if this sounds cliche or not or whatever, but I’m really genuinely, seriously, I’m just so grateful for our customers. When we were in a major retailer, a major national retailer, we overtook Pepsi in size, and I was just like, “What? What?” So, I’m really grateful for that.

There are moments that I experience, and I always just try to bounce back from them, but there have been plenty of times when you are just so burned to the ground. I remember this event that… there was some really cool pop-up and they were featuring OLIPOP, and I think that was right around the time that we were launching the Minions Banana Cream flavor, and that was something I did not think was going to work, but I challenged myself with it, and it was this weird cult hit, and I was just like “It was all coming together at once.” And I remember being so burned out that I couldn’t even go to the event.

Sometimes you have those experiences, and you’re a little sad because you’re like, “Wow, I worked so hard. This is such a cool thing. I’d get to interact with the community.” But then you go a couple months and you surge back and then you go get to do something like that.

So there’s definitely these moments where you feel like, “Damn, I’m so busy and I’m so taxed. I’m not really getting to enjoy this moment, and I’m not really getting to enjoy that feeling of success.” And then you have other times when you do, right? It’s a little bit of a mix. I’m sure there’s going to be so much in reflection that’s going to be deeply nostalgic, and some of it will just stay in that lane, and some of it might be like, “Damn, I wish I was a little more able to really saturate in those moments,” because the life I’m living is technically really, really rare, and that’s a really rare experience to get to have. So I’m going to enjoy as many of them as I can, and we’ll go from there.

SAFIAN: Well, Ben, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it.

GOODWIN: Yeah, you bet, Bob. It’s been a really great conversation. Thanks for having me on.

SAFIAN: Ben’s openness about the emotional highs and lows of building a business and his effort to stay present through it is a reminder that scale isn’t just about numbers, it’s about navigating rare experiences with rare clarity. Too often leaders get so focused on growth, they lose sight of what they’re growing into or what they’re growing past. I think it’s so crucial that Ben continues to do some formulating to keep himself grounded. I know that for me, doing this podcast, talking to people like Ben helps me stay connected and present.

So, what keeps you grounded? What gives you the joy and energy that helps you get through the tough times? That’s the fuel for resilience, and these days we need as much of that fuel as we can muster, even if it comes from a bubbly can.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.