After a $2 Billion Exit, Poppi’s Founders Take Aim at Hydration Drinks

As an active mother of three boys, 39-year-old Allison Ellsworth struggled to stay hydrated. Usually, she would rip open electrolyte powders and mix them with water, making a mess on the kitchen counter. So her husband Stephen began concocting his own hydrating beverages for her. One day, Ellsworth looked at him and said: “Oh my god, we’re doing this again, aren’t we?” Indeed they were. The Ellsworths are the creators of Poppi, the probiotic soda they started in their kitchen and sold last year to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion. The Ellsworths’ sophomore effort, a hydration drink called Jetty, is making its public debut. Much like Poppi’s positioning as a better-for-you soft drink, Jetty is aiming at the hydration category with a product that tastes better, boasts a cleaner ingredient list, and isn’t aimed at jocks. “There's nobody that's created hydration outside of sports extremes and men, really,” Ellsworth told ADWEEK. “No one's created everyday hydration for the normal human.” How Jetty plans to differentiate The sports beverage category dates back to 1965, when University of Florida medical school professor Dr. Robert Cade mixed up a potion of glucose, potassium, and sodium and gave it to the school’s football team, the Florida Gators, to drink after practice. “It was just salt and sugar to get through the two-a-days,” Ellsworth said. In the years after Gatorade’s 1967 retail debut, hydration beverages “moved on to the masses [with] artificial ingredients, artificial sweeteners.” And that’s where the category has mostly remained. As Ellsworth sees it, “there is still room to disrupt in this space." Billed as “hydration for everyday,” Jetty features the essentials—B vitamins, potassium, magnesium—but contains only six grams of sugar and comes in at 45 calories. Fruit juices deliver flavors like orange mango and white cherry, and there are no artificial colors or sweetening agents. Ready-to-drink products account for 52.46% of the category, according to data from Mordor Intelligence, so Jetty’s rollout includes a powder-mix line, too, despite the countertop messes they may make. Same game plan, bigger game In some ways, Ellsworth’s strategy for Jetty takes a page from Poppi’s. Both beverages are homespun inventions to address a personal health concern. Poppi’s key ingredient, apple cider vinegar, helped ease Ellsworth’s gut-health ailment. “Poppi was very personal,” she said, “and this was kind of similar.” Even so, Ellsworth is in a bigger game this time. The electrolyte drinks sector is worth $40 billion globally, according to Fortune Business Insights, and dominated not just by Gatorade (owned by PepsiCo), but also by Coca-Cola’s Powerade. (Coke doubled down on the category by buying BodyArmor in 2021.) Meanwhile, Guadalajara, Mexico-based Electrolit is nearing completion on a $400 million plant in Waco, Texas. And Unilever just lured Jenny Danzi from Poppi to be CMO of Liquid I.V., which it bought in 2020 for a reported $525 million. “It’s been fun to build again, but wow, it's still stressful,” Ellsworth said. “No one has really hit this positioning with the right packaging, with the right branding, and the right product, and to do all those things flawlessly are really difficult." Beyond the farmer's market At least Ellsworth won’t have to promote Jetty by selling it at her local farmer’s market, which is how Poppi (originally named Mother Beverage) first drew the attention of a buyer from Whole Foods Market. She also probably won’t be returning to Shark Tank, where the Ellsworths first pitched their creation in 2018. Ex-Coke CMO Rohan Oza—famed for building Vitaminwater and Smartwater—invested $400,000 for a 25% stake. Ellsworth has a solid track record with marketing. She singlehandedly built Poppi’s TikTok following to 900,000 in the early days, and she’s already started teasing Jetty on her social media accounts. Ellsworth has also lined up a small army of creators to start talking about Jetty this week and “we’re putting together a celeb round," too. But with the PepsiCo sale having made a nice deposit in her savings account, Ellsworth is not rushing things. “It takes a second to build a brand, and that’s okay,” she said. “Awareness is not going to be there overnight.”

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After a $2 Billion Exit, Poppi’s Founders Take Aim at Hydration Drinks

Allison and Stephen Ellsworth’s new brand, Jetty, pitches low-sugar hydration for non-athletes

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