Allison Ellsworth is the co-founder of Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand that grew from a kitchen experiment into a company PepsiCo acquired for nearly two billion dollars. Allison joins Adam to share her unique journey – from struggling with her own stomach problems to building one of the fastest-growing beverage brands in history – and her best lessons and advice. Allison and Adam discuss a wide range of topics: entrepreneurship, branding, community, resilience, leadership, and much more.
Join Adam and the best network of mentors – Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders – for intimate half-hour conversations each week.
Thirty Minute Mentors is available wherever you listen to podcasts. If you enjoy the episode, visit your favorite podcasting app and subscribe, rate, and leave a review, and spread the word by sharing on your social media channels and sharing directly with your friends and colleagues.
Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with Allison Ellsworth.
Episode Summary
Allison Ellsworth started Poppi because of her own stomach problems, not because she spotted a gap in the beverage market. She had been drinking apple cider vinegar for her health, hated the taste, and began experimenting in her kitchen to make something she could actually enjoy drinking every day. She sold it from a folding table at a farmer’s market, then pitched it on Shark Tank, where Kevin O’Leary dismissed it as an “apple cider vinegar roach.” From that unglamorous start, Poppi grew from zero to 500 million dollars in revenue in four and a half years, a stretch that required hiring 250 people and eventually selling to PepsiCo for close to two billion dollars.
Allison credits much of that growth to launching Poppi in March 2020, right as COVID hit, and turning to TikTok with no team, no plan, and no media training, dancing and posting taco recipe videos as herself rather than as a polished brand. Most of it was awkward. The moment that changed the company’s trajectory was a single unfiltered video, hair still wet, no makeup, telling the real story of starting Poppi in her kitchen while nine months pregnant on Shark Tank. It went viral and generated 100,000 dollars in sales overnight. She built the company’s whole growth strategy afterward around what she calls the three Cs: moving at the speed of culture, protecting creative risk-taking over rigid KPIs, and treating the audience as a community rather than a customer list.
That same instinct to lean into discomfort shaped how Poppi handled a failing root beer flavor. Rather than quietly reformulating it, Allison had the team publish the community’s harshest complaints about the flavor and packaging directly on social media, then relaunched it based on that feedback. The relaunched version became one of the brand’s best sellers, proof to her that customers trust a company more once they’ve watched it actually respond to criticism instead of hiding from it.
Allison is candid that ego was her biggest obstacle as a leader. Scaling to hundreds of employees in a few years meant running marketing budgets far larger than anything she had managed before, and she eventually had to admit she needed a partner who could operate at that scale. She calls the moment she asked for that help more valuable than almost anything else she did, since it let her focus on the parts of the business she was actually best at.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Allison says the strongest emotion she felt right after her nearly two billion dollar exit was freedom, not the purpose she now says actually matters far more.
- Why Allison hired someone whose own team nickname became “ROI Killer,” and what that person’s real job was inside Poppi’s growth strategy.
- Why Allison rejects the idea that confidence comes first, describing her own path as starting with embarrassment, moving through refinement, and only then arriving at confidence.
- Why Allison closes her advice by reversing a common assumption: fun is not a distraction from serious work, she argues, it is the thing that actually fuels it.
- Why Allison kept Poppi’s community management entirely in-house rather than outsourcing it, even as the company scaled into hundreds of employees.
- Why Allison refused to add CBD, energy, or gummy products despite repeated requests from her own community, even after proving she would act on tough feedback about a failing flavor.
About Allison Ellsworth
Allison Ellsworth is the co-founder of Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand she started at her kitchen table after struggling to find an apple cider vinegar drink she actually liked. She grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and studied dance and sociology at the University of North Texas before taking a year to live in Spain. After pitching Poppi on Shark Tank while nine months pregnant, Allison grew the company from zero to 500 million dollars in revenue in four and a half years, culminating in PepsiCo’s acquisition of Poppi for nearly two billion dollars. She continues to speak and write about founder-led branding and community-driven growth.
Related Episodes
- Episode 217: Thrive Market Co-Founder and CEO Nick Green
Nick built a mission-driven consumer brand around a specific health problem he saw in his own community, the same personal origin story Allison describes behind Poppi. - Episode 349: California Pizza Kitchen Co-Founder Rick Rosenfield
Rick describes building CPK’s culture around kindness and consistent shared values rather than slogans, the same community-first instinct Allison credits for Poppi’s earliest growth and fan loyalty. - Episode 346: Techstars Co-Founder and CEO David Cohen
David argues that asking for help is a strength, not a weakness, the same lesson Allison says she learned when she brought in a marketing leader to scale past her own experience. - Episode 343: Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Neil Giraldo
Neil deliberately avoids repeating his own sound from record to record, the same instinct behind Allison’s push to keep Poppi moving at the speed of culture rather than repeating a formula. - Episode 213: PEAK6 Co-Founder Jenny Just
Jenny built a trading firm around treating calculated risk as the price of real opportunity, the same willingness to look foolish that Allison credits for Poppi’s earliest viral moments.
