The Allison Ellsworth Story | Poppi
Allison Ellsworth is the co-founder of Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand acquired by PepsiCo in May 2025 for $1.95 billion. In this episode of Fifteenish, I talk about how she spent ten years on the road in the oil and gas industry, developed serious health problems nobody could diagnose, fixed it herself with apple cider vinegar, and then spent three months in her kitchen trying to make it taste good enough to share. From mason jars to her neighbors, to a Whole Foods buyer showing up at her farmers market booth three weeks in, to pitching on Shark Tank nine months pregnant, to going viral on TikTok during a global pandemic with zero makeup and one honest video — Allison's story is about what happens when you stop waiting for someone else to solve your problem and just go figure it out yourself.
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Welcome back to Fifteenish. This is Leah. Hey, friends.
Have you ever been dealing with something, whether it's a health thing, a problem or frustration? And you've gone to every expert, tried everything, you spent real money, and still nobody can figure it out.
But then one day you just figure it out yourself? Well, that's exactly how one of the most recognizable drinks in America got started. It didn't start in a lab or with a business plan or a food science degree.
It started in a kitchen by a woman who was just trying to feel better. Her name is Allison Ellsworth. And you almost certainly have seen Poppi in your grocery store, or maybe you even have one in your fridge right now.
It's everywhere. It's one of the fastest growing beverage brands in America. And in May 2025, PepsiCo acquired it for $1.95 billion.
And it all started because Allison's eyes just kept swelling shut, and nobody could tell her why. This is the Allison Ellsworth story. Let's get into it.
So Allison grew up in Colorado, but then she was raised in Texas. She studied sociology at the University of North Texas. Sociology, which I love because it means none of what she built was supposed to happen the way it did.
After college, she went into the oil and gas industry as a land man, which is basically someone who negotiates land rights for drilling.
And the reality was 10 years of going town to town, traveling across the US, staying in small town hotels, grocery stores being 30 minutes away, gyms even further. She was just grinding away. She was building a career and doing the thing.
During all of that, she was eating on the road and living out of hotels for a decade. And let me tell you, that will catch up to you. And somewhere in all of that travel and that pace, her body started falling apart.
She'd have eczema flaring up. Her eyes were swelling shut, bumps all over her arms. She had horrible stomach problems.
She went to doctors. She went through a full three month elimination diet. She spent over $15,000 over a five year span, just trying to figure out what was wrong.
$15,000, and nobody could give her a real answer. But then she figured it out herself. She went gluten free and started drinking apple cider vinegar.
Two weeks later, she said it changed her life. Her digestion improved. She was sleeping better.
The symptoms that had plagued her for years started actually clearing up. And she had this realization. She said, if you read labels and actually look at what you're putting into your body, you can affect the way that you feel.
That's it. That's simple. She had been letting other people manage her health for years, and the answer was right in her own hands the whole time.
But the only problem, well, if you've ever tried it, you'll know that apple cider vinegar tastes absolutely disgusting, like really bad.
And Allison loved to cook, so she did what any reasonable person does when they find something that works well but tastes bad, while she went to her kitchen and started trying to fix it.
3:15
Kitchen to Market
She had spent three months in her kitchen experimenting, mixing apple cider vinegar with fruit juices, sparkling water, different flavors, trying to find something that actually tasted good but still delivered the benefits that she'd been feeling.
Her first batches were rough. She had called the early ones rocket fuel. Way too much vinegar, just way too intense.
But she kept tweaking and she kept giving mason jars to her neighbors to try. And her neighbors kept coming back. They were feeling good and they wanted more.
At this point, Allison wasn't thinking that this was a business. She was just cooking and sharing something that had helped her. Her dad, who she calls her biggest fan and biggest inspiration, was the only one that pushed her to start selling it.
He told her to take it to the farmers market. So she did. In December 2015, she and her husband moved to Dallas to be closer to family.
She was pregnant with their first child. And on the weekend, she started showing up at the local farmers market with her drink, selling it under the name Mother Beverage, which was a nod to the raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar it was made with.
She was working outside in the Texas summer heat. She was pregnant, she was filling bottles by hand. And three weeks in, a buyer from Whole Foods walked up to her booth, tried the drink and said, we don't have anything like this in Whole Foods.
Here's my card. And Allison said that that was the moment she thought, oh, I have a business. She called Stephen, she said, we're putting our life savings into this.
They went all in with $90,000. Stephen thought she was a little crazy, but they never looked back. So they opened their own production facility.
They were spending 10-hour days filling bottles by hand, working second jobs on the side just to keep things going. There was no AC in the facility. Their car also had no AC.
It was hot and it was hard, but they kept going. And in 2018, Allison and Stephen applied for Shark Tank. The process took six months.
It's secretive the whole way through, round after round of tryouts and paperwork, and you never quite know if you're actually gonna make it on.
And while they were waiting, Allison watched every single episode of Shark Tank to prepare, every single one. That is how she operates. She figures things out herself.
She does the work and then she shows up ready. And guess what? They made it on the show.
And Allison was nine months pregnant with their second child when they flew to LA to film. Nine months pregnant, on camera, in the tank, pitching their business. And then they got a deal.
Rohan, a brand investor known for building vitamin water and other massive consumer brands, offered them $400,000 for a 25% stake. He has been called the brand father. And he saw something in Poppi before Poppi was even Poppi.
And Allison had the baby just 10 days after they filmed. But he also told them something they didn't want to hear. Their branding was terrible.
The name Mother Beverage, the glass bottles, the health food look. He said that if they really wanted to grow, they had to stop looking like a niche health product and start looking like a soda.
And that was a big decision because renaming your company, Allison said, is like renaming your child. But they did it.
They spent the next nine months on a full rebrand, debating whether to go with clean white cans, the classic better for you aesthetic, or bright, bold, colorful cans that screamed soda. And they chose color. They chose joy.
They said if we're gonna go after soda drinkers, we have to look like soda, feel like soda, and scream flavor. They renamed the company Poppi, a play on soda pop.
And they scheduled their big relaunch for March 2020, which, as you remember, is when the entire world shut down. Most brands would have crumbled.
You've spent months on a rebrand, you've invested everything into a relaunch, and you have this big moment planned, and then a global pandemic cancels it. But Allison didn't crumble, so instead she went to TikTok.
This was 2020, when most brands were still ignoring TikTok, writing it off as an app for teenagers doing dances. Allison ignored the people telling her to ignore it. She just started posting.
Talk recipes, dances, random videos. For three months she had posted consistently and nothing really happened. And then she sat down and just told the story.
No script, no makeup, just her and the camera and the whole messy real origin of how Poppi came to be. The health problems, the kitchen, the farmer's market, the pregnancy, the whole thing. And she hit post and went to bed.
She woke up the next morning to 100,000 in sales on Amazon. That video now has over 90 million views.
And I think about why that specific video was the one that broke through, because she had been posting for three months and nothing really was working. The taco recipes weren't really hitting. The dance moves didn't work.
That polished stuff didn't work. But the moment she sat down and told the truth, no agenda, no sales pitch, just here's what happened to me and here's what I made, well, that's when everything changed. People don't re-share products.
They share stories that they recognize themselves in. And a woman who felt terrible for years finally figured it out herself? Well, that's a story a lot of people were waiting to hear.
And Poppi went all in. They leaned into TikTok harder than almost any consumer brand had at that point. They didn't take themselves too seriously either.
They showed up consistently and authentically and let the product speak for itself. Their content now has been viewed over 3 billion times on TikTok. A third of the platform has seen Allison's face at least seven times.
8:47
Billion-Dollar Success
From there, things accelerated fast. Poppi became the number one selling soda on Amazon. They ran Super Bowl ads.
They partnered with Post Malone, Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner. They hit $500 million in sales in their fourth year as Poppi. And in May of 2025, PepsiCo acquired them for $1.95 billion.
And now Allison is back on Shark Tank, but this time as a shark herself. What a full circle moment for her.
Okay, so there is so much I could say about Allison's story, whether it's the Shark Tank moment or the TikTok video, or even the $1.95 billion sale. All of it is incredible. But the thing I keep coming back to is the beginning.
Allison is somewhere in a small town, Texas. She's on the road for work. Her eyes were swelling shut and she doesn't know why.
And she'd already spent $15,000 trying to figure it out. And every other doctor she'd seen has come up short. And at this point, she is done waiting for someone else to solve it.
So, she figures it out herself. And then she makes it taste good enough to share. I think about how many people would have just kept going to more doctors.
I know I've been there. You know, keep waiting for an expert to hand them the answer. Or keep assuming that the solution had to come from somewhere outside of themselves.
Now, I'm not saying doctors aren't important. Please go to your doctors. But there is something really powerful about what Allison did, which is she paid attention to her own body and she trusted what she was noticing and then she acted on it.
And then she did the same thing in business over and over again. She ignored the people who said TikTok wasn't worth it. She ignored the safe choice of white cans.
She ignored the voice that probably said, you don't have a food science background, you don't have an MBA, you worked in oil and gas. Who are you to build a beverage company? But she kept trusting herself.
And that's not nothing. That is actually really hard to do, especially when smart people around you are giving you different advice. And yes, she has also made mistakes, really big ones.
She kept expensive sleeved cans on the product for a year longer than she should have. And she said that single decision cost them over $15 million. And she's talked about it publicly.
She said that embarrassment is the most underexplored emotion to success. Let's say that again. Embarrassment is the most underexplored emotion to success.
She said that every time she pushed through something embarrassing, pitching while pregnant or posting on TikTok before anyone was watching or even admitting mistakes publicly, she came out on the other side more confident and more capable.
Man, I think that mindset is so needed because most of us are so afraid of looking stupid that we don't try things. We don't post the video. We don't go to the farmer's market.
We don't say yes before we're ready. And Allison basically built a $2 billion company by doing all of those things anyway. She also said something that I think about for my own work.
And honestly, for anyone building something, she said the beauty of being a first time entrepreneur is that you don't know what a market gap is. She had no idea she was inventing a category.
She just thought she was making a drink that tasted good and made her feel good. And she didn't do it alone either. I wanna say that because I think it matters.
Her mom moved closer to help with the kids while Allison was building Poppi from the ground up. Steven ran operations and finances while she ran the brand and the story. She said she doesn't know how she would have done it without him.
Real support, real partnership, that is a part of her story too. Sometimes not knowing the rules is the exact advantage you need. Sometimes a person who disrupts an industry is the one who never learned they weren't supposed to.
Allison spent 15,005 years trying to fix her health and got nowhere. And then she fixed it herself in just two weeks with apple cider vinegar and a willingness to try something different.
That same instinct, I'll figure this out myself, I'll make it work, I'll trust what I'm seeing even when other people don't. That is what built a nearly $2 billion company. And honestly, I think about this for myself too.
How many times have I waited for someone to give me permission or tell me I was ready or confirm that the idea was good enough before I'd commit to it?
And how many times has that thing I was waiting for just been me, trusting myself, doing the next thing and figuring it out as I go?
So whatever problem you're sitting with, whatever thing you've been waiting for someone else to solve, well, what would happen if you just went to your kitchen and started mixing?
Allison was a woman on the road with a health problem that no one else could fix. She had a love of cooking and a husband who just supported her along the way. She went to a farmer's market.
She pitched on Shark Tank nine months pregnant. She launched her rebrand during a global pandemic. And then she sold to PepsiCo for $1.9 billion.
She didn't have a food science degree. She didn't have industry connections. She didn't have a clear plan.
She just had a problem, a kitchen, and a belief that she could figure it out. And she did. Thanks for being here.
I'll see you next week.
Sources & Disclaimer
Texas Monthly — How Poppi Founder Allison Ellsworth Went From Shark Tank to Shark (September 2025)
CNBC Make It — Poppi Went From Kitchen Experiment to $2 Billion Deal With PepsiCo (October 2025)
Entrepreneur — She Went From Being Ignored at a Farmer's Market to Selling to PepsiCo for $1.95 Billion (2025)
Tribeza — How Austin-Based Founders Journeyed From the Farmers Market to a $1.95 Billion-Dollar Brand (June 2025)
DFW Child — Poppi's Allison Ellsworth on Trusting Her Gut
Austin Woman — Allison Ellsworth: Poppi Power
Wikipedia — Poppi entry
All facts shared in this episode are based on information available at the time of recording. Any personal reflections, interpretations, or opinions are my own. If anything is found to be inaccurate, I'm happy to issue a correction.
