Poppi went from kitchen experiment to $2 billion deal with PepsiCo

In 2015, Allison Ellsworth was in her kitchen experimenting with different gut-healthy drink recipes, trying to make apple cider vinegar taste good. Little did she know that the concoctions she was mixing would eventually become a billion dollar business.

Today, the 38-year-old is the co-founder of prebiotic soda brand Poppi, which she started alongside her husband Stephen Ellsworth. Almost a decade after her kitchen experiments, in May 2025, Ellsworth sold the business to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion.

The deal includes $300 million in anticipated cash tax benefits for a net purchase price of $1.65 billion.

Ellsworth has always been a hustler.

“I just knew I never wanted to work for anyone … I was good at, like, hacking systems and … I always had this really great gift to be visionary [and] see through cracks,” Ellsworth told CNBC Make It.

While in college, she took a full year off to travel and still managed to graduate in four years. During her studies, she also worked several jobs where she figured out how to execute more efficiently than expected.

“I worked at a call center, and I learned really early working there, that if I did certain things, I could [double], triple … 5x the sales of everybody else,” Ellsworth said.

After college, Ellsworth spent years on the road working in oil and gas research. She would travel all around the United States by herself, which eventually began to weigh on her health.

“I did that for seven years … working all over the U.S. I’ve driven through every single state by myself, stayed in teeny, little towns and motels and ran huge, multi-million dollar projects in my 20s. It was crazy.” she said.

But since she was always on the road, she had trouble accessing nutritious food. “I felt ill. So my face started breaking out, my stomach was hurting. I was allergic to all sorts of different things … and I couldn’t figure out what’s going on,” she said.

When doctors couldn’t help, she began to Google all of her symptoms and decided to try taking apple cider vinegar, which is known to have many health benefits, but is unpalatable when taken on its own.

“I just fell in love with apple cider vinegar, and the way it made me feel, but I wanted to make it taste better,” said Ellsworth.

In her kitchen, Ellsworth began experimenting — infusing the apple cider vinegar with different fruits and natural ingredients and mixing it with soda water. Over the span of about three months, she came up with the first version of her recipe which would become the foundation of her brand.

By 2016, she and her husband were preparing for their first child when she decided to take a break from her job and all of the travel. With more free time, she decided to bottle up her gut-healthy drinks and sell them at her local farmers market under the name “Mother Beverage.”

Within three weeks of selling at the farmers market, they were discovered by Whole Foods, she said. “When the Whole Foods buyer came to our booth and was like: ‘We don’t have anything like this in Whole Foods. Here’s my card.’ That was that moment I was like: ‘Oh, I have a business,'” she added.

“I remember, my husband was still working. I was three months pregnant. We just bought a house, and I was like: ‘We’re gonna do this. We’re going all in.’ He thought I was crazy, but … we just never looked back,” she said.

The couple quit their jobs to focus on Poppi.

By 2017, Mother Beverage was selling in Whole Foods and by 2018, Ellsworth said the company made about $500,000 in revenue. In the same year, they went on the television show “Shark Tank” where they pitched Mother Beverage to a lineup of business moguls.

During the filming of the show, Ellsworth was nine months pregnant. “I had the baby 10 days later,” she told CNBC Make It. Ultimately, the couple landed a deal with businessman and investor Rohan Oza — who offered $400,000 for a 25% stake of the business.

After the deal took place, the company went through a nine-month rebrand. They added a touch of sugar and swapped their glass bottles for colorful cans, and “Mother Beverage” became “Poppi.”

“We decided to go with colored cans because it screams soda … If you think about it, soda is the biggest TAM (Total Addressable Market). Everyone drinks soda,” said Ellsworth. “We knew who we were. We’re revolutionizing soda for the next generation, and that is our North Star.”

Poppi launched in March 2020, right around when the pandemic hit and consumers were looking for healthier products, she added. From there, Ellsworth and her team poured into their branding.

“We were a digital-first brand. We were one of the first brands to get on Tiktok and go viral and really build … a social first community,” she said. “We did omnichannel, so we went Amazon and retail at the same time … and then we just brought in an incredible senior team with a lot of experience pretty early on.”

“We had a good partner who kept us funded, and [so] we weren’t always starved for cash,” she said. “We just had the right people, right time, right product, and any time we saw momentum, we invested in it.” All of these decisions created the perfect recipe for Poppi’s success and for the company’s $1.95 billion acquisition by PepsiCo.

When asked why she decided to sell her company, Ellsworth said: “We [wanted] to continue to get Poppi to as many people as possible, the only thing to really secure that is to bring in a distribution partner like Pepsi.”

She added: “It was just a gut feeling, I guess.”

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