On a Wednesday morning in early September, Allison Ellsworth is in a state of transition. The Poppi founder’s makeup is flawless, and her bobbed hair—chopped late last year and documented in an Instagram video with the caption “New alter ego unlocked”—is flipped artfully out at the ends.
Ahead of a scheduled photo shoot, the entrepreneur is sporting a striped button-up and hasn’t yet changed into a sculptural power blazer that she’ll wear for a few shots later in the day. Allison is still barefoot, though soon she’ll slip into a pair of towering Christian Louboutins. Upstairs, her husband and co-founder, Stephen, is taking calls from the landing, and buzzy business jargon occasionally drifts down from overhead. The house is a swirl of activity. Allison and her family are, she reveals, about to move into a new and bigger home.
Amid the dizzying tumult, excitement is palpable. “I’m in my new era,” Allison says.
Moving lightly through the house, she laughs easily while making small talk. After all, this is an Allison who, a decade since launching her own prebiotic soda company, is enjoying the fruits of her labor. Last year, PepsiCo acquired Poppi for $1.95 billion, one of the fastest and largest success stories in the modern beverage industry, and Allison and Stephen have stepped back into advisory roles. Now, after years of hustle, the founder is reclaiming time with family and friends. She’s catching up on self-care. She’s learning to golf. And, in a twist that is at once surprising and totally predictable, she’s about to launch a brand-new business.
Getty Images/Vivien Killilea
Enter: Jetty. The new venture is intended to disrupt hydration beverages in much the same way Poppi disrupted soda. Unlike conventional electrolyte drinks targeted at athletes, with aggressive, futuristic flavors like “Glacier Freeze” or “Mountain Berry Blast,” Jetty drinks and powders are designed to feel like a trend-setting wellness product.
In her living room that day, just a few weeks away from the launch, it’s clear that the breakout business star is feeling the electric energy of the rollout.
By her own account, Allison has always loved the grind. There’s entrepreneurial spirit in her blood, she says, recalling her childhood in Wichita Falls. “My dad was an entrepreneur. My sister was an entrepreneur,” she says. “I turned 18 and went right to work.” But it was a trait born of necessity, too. Her parents divorced when she was young, and Allison grew up with a single mother, which meant a lot of pressure to provide for herself.
In recent weeks, as she boxed up the contents of the house where she and Stephen lived while nurturing their homegrown soda brand into a globally recognized phenomenon, she rediscovered design sketches from one of her early projects. FPack was a fanny pack company she launched to help pay her way as a dance major at the University of North Texas in Denton. “They were trending at the time,” she explains. “I sourced them, I designed them, and then sold them, and it paid for my rent.”
After college, Allison got a job in oil and gas research. The money was good, and she was working a lot. “What kid at 23 is making $500 a day? And you could work seven days a week,” she explains. “I would just hustle, hustle, hustle; make money; and then travel.”
Then she fell in love. “I met Stephen, and he was like, ‘Do you have a savings account?’” she says with a laugh. “He taught me a little bit more about finances.” It was an early preview of the same complementary personalities that would make Allison and Stephen into a formidable business team, as well as good romantic partners.
“That’s the balance between the two of us,” she says. “I’m a dreamer, the thinker, the visionary, and he’s like, ‘Wait, we need a business plan.’”
In many ways, to call Allison a dreamer undersells her talents. After all, she brewed the Poppi recipe. She rewrote the social media marketing playbook, turning the brand into a TikTok powerhouse. She knows how to assemble a team and empower them to do their best work. In 2026, when she appeared as a guest panelist on Shark Tank—the first contestant to secure a deal, then return as a potential investor—she demonstrated how well she’s learned to make high-stakes decisions under pressure and how to blend directness with warmth.
Still, her most important and defining skill might be the most ephemeral, the hardest to measure, and the hardest to replicate.
Taste is a word that, like “vibe” or “chic,” feels so ubiquitous that it’s verging on meaningless, especially in recent years. Everyone is obsessed with taste: getting it, honing it, flexing it.
Allison actually has it. Her taste in product, packaging, marketing, and even putting the right team members in a room together can be measured by how quickly Poppi grew into a global multibillion-dollar brand.
She’s not flawless; in 2025, she admitted she advocated against the colorful Poppi cans, though she’s glad her vote for all-white packaging was overruled. But the ultimate proof is in the Super Bowl ads, which Poppi has run every year since 2024. Since Allison was new to television advertising’s biggest night of the year, she knew she needed someone with experience to help make it happen. The founder had a vision for the ad’s creative, but she approached the board about hiring a chief marketing officer.
“People don’t ask for enough help in business and leadership,” Allison says. “They have to just kind of do it themselves. I think that’s wrong.”
The first year, Poppi tripled brand awareness with its Super Bowl spot introducing “the future of soda.” In 2025, its fast-paced, bright-colored video spot featuring influencer Alix Earle and Love Island USA star Rob Rausch was the top-performing Super Bowl ad, according to YouGov. After Poppi’s Super Bowl 2026 spot, featuring pop star Charli XCX and comedian Rachel Sennott repeating the word “vibes,” went viral, the verdict was in. Allison might not be a director, and she might be new to the ins and outs of ad placements, but more than anything, she understands how to connect her brand to the cultural conversation. She has an instinct for what people want, often before they know it themselves.
“I love being vulnerable and telling other entrepreneurs, ‘If you can learn the power to ask for help, it will allow your superpowers to shine,’” she says. “Build a team around what you’re good at versus trying to tell everyone you’re good at everything. Because, look, no one’s good at everything.”
Brewing Success
Across the country, in major retailers from Whole Foods to 7-Eleven, walls of Poppi cans now shine like oversized jewel boxes. Shelves of glossy cans in shades of tangerine orange and raspberry pink catch the light and gleam. But the early days of the soda brand looked very different.
Allison struggled for years with her gut health, and she found that shots of apple cider vinegar reduced her bloating and left her feeling more energized. The earliest glimmers of what would eventually become an international soda brand began in her kitchen, as Allison experimented with blends of sparkling water and fruit juice to make the apple cider more palatable.
Alongside Stephen, she launched her “better soda” company in 2016 as Mother Beverage, an homage to the gelatinous yeast and bacteria in raw vinegar. The drinks, with their minimal glass bottles and cursive script logo, looked designed for the health food store. The flavors included Blueberry Sage and Grapefruit Mint. Allison and Stephen sold their new take on soda at farmers’ markets, funding the company themselves with credit cards. At one point, Stephen sold his car to buy bottles.
It was light-years away from the sensation Allison’s creation would eventually become. Still, the duo was quickly gaining traction. By 2017, Mother Beverage had landed a distribution deal with Whole Foods and was available in several of the health-conscious grocer’s stores.
The following year, the couple appeared on Shark Tank. By then, Mother had amassed a lifetime income around $500,000. In clips from the 2018 episode, Allison is nine months pregnant; she’s dressed in soft earth tones, and her long hair is loosely curled. As she and Stephen pitch the soda to the panel of investors, their feedback is blunt. After all, Shark Tank has neatly fused two cutthroat industries, business and reality television, and even the Sharks’ praise has an edge to it.
“Tell me why these two are not beverage cockroaches and are going to get crushed by big guys who want to get that shelf space back,” Kevin O’Leary muses aloud. But neither Allison nor Stephen backs down. Her jaw is set; she’s self-assured, but she’s also listening. In hindsight, it’s an early hint of what the company—and who Allison as its founder—would become.
In the end, in exchange for a 25% equity stake, they walked away with $400,000 in financing from Rohan Oza, the same businessman and marketer who elevated Vitaminwater and Smartwater into household names.
“We wanted capital. We were eager for a partner,” explained Stephen when the couple appeared on the “Masters of Scale” business podcast in April 2026. “We were hungry to win, and we wanted to learn.
At that moment, the stakes changed dramatically. In addition to financing, they suddenly had a board and a new level of accountability. But they also had a new advisor in Oza, who quickly had feedback on the company’s branding.
“The most successful people in life aren’t scared to embarrass themselves and put themselves out there in uncomfortable moments,” says Allison.
In 2025, Oza revealed that he loved Allison’s creation from the jump but knew almost immediately that the presentation would have to change. “This is the product I’ve been looking for,” he told Forbes of his initial thoughts. “Package, wrong. Brand, wrong. Everything is wrong, basically. But this liquid, that’s it.”
With Oza’s input, the company relaunched in March 2020 as Poppi. They switched from bottles to vibrantly colored cans in eye-catching pinks, purples, and reds. New flavors like Doc Pop and Classic Cola, intended to appeal to soda drinkers, replaced the wellness-coded Blueberry Sage.
But underneath it all, Allison’s original recipe was virtually unchanged.
The branding glow-up was exactly what was needed, and in almost no time, Poppi was transformed into a power player on social media. The distinctive colors and font are arresting enough to turn heads—or halt scrolling thumbs. When the relaunch coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, digital competition was suddenly more important than ever.
“We had to figure out how to talk to our consumer differently,” Allison remembers. With the real world closed off, the swirling short-form video world of TikTok was quickly emerging as a de facto alternative, and Allison threw herself into it headfirst. “I was like, ‘I have to get on this platform and figure out what’s going on. This is the Wild West. Everyone’s on there.’”
Early on, no one understood her determination to figure out the short-form video app, including the Poppi board. “I remember our board being like, ‘This is dumb. It’s just a bunch of dancing kids,’” she says. “And back then, it kind of was. No brands were on there.”
There was no proof of concept; no evidence that TikTok views could be converted into dollars. Still, Allison trusted her instinct that the platform was worth mastering. “I danced, I did taco recipe videos,” she says, joking that she had no shame during those early days on TikTok. “I was doing transition videos. I was savage. I did it all. I did not care.”
She wasn’t necessarily trying to become an influencer; instead, it was the same scrappy energy that she brought to Shark Tank. She believed in the product. She was ready to learn and try new ideas, but she wasn’t backing down. The couple had already made so many sacrifices that getting goofy on video seemed like nothing. Best of all, for a new company still trying to find its feet, TikTok was free marketing.
Amidst the gimmicks, the video that finally broke through was surprisingly simple. Allison is bare faced, her hair still wet from the shower. In the clip, she earnestly describes Poppi’s origin story. In that moment, Poppi wasn’t just a brand; it was a person. The video racked up 300 million views and $100,000 in Amazon sales overnight. Allison’s willingness to be honest—to risk being cringe—became an essential lesson in the Poppi story.
“The most successful people in life aren’t scared to embarrass themselves and put themselves out there in uncomfortable moments,” says Allison. “So, I did it, and one day, I just went really viral, and it changed the whole trajectory of the business. It took me making a fool of myself, but now it’s like the blueprint of how businesses are run. You have to be on TikTok. You almost have to be founder-led.”
Quickly, Poppi cans seemed to proliferate across TikTok, appearing in RushTok clips and GRWM (“Get Ready With Me”) videos. Poppi launched high-volume gifting campaigns, sending free cans to influencers without expectation, hoping they would want to include the aesthetic packaging in their videos. What Allison understood was that by creating beautiful cans and putting them into the hands of the right creators, she could manifest a soda that went beyond beverage and became a lifestyle symbol.
Now, as she re-enters the beverage market with Jetty, Allison is eager to prove she can do it again. For weeks, she teased the launch on social media with cryptic videos. Influencers received gift packages of Jetty-branded beauty products and colorful electrolyte-packed jello cubes all tailor-made for Internet virality. When a few brightly colored bottles appeared on Whole Foods shelves early, some online sleuths thought it might be a clever move to generate buzz. Though the team ultimately confessed that the slip-up was a total accident, assuming Allison was flexing her preternatural media skills makes sense.
Even more than the brand itself, people are tuning in to this new episode of its creator’s evolution. On social media, she has shed her scrappy startup founder persona for something new: powerful, confident businesswoman. There are edits of baddie icons, think Miranda Priestley and Beth Dutton, and videos of Allison set to Beyonce singing, “A diva is a female version of a hustler.” The Internet expects her to have something compelling up her sleeve. This, after all, is Allison’s superpower: she knows how to get people talking.
Gut Feeling
The day Allison and Stephen got paid for the sale of Poppi, they got into a fight. “One of the biggest fights ever,” she joked during a 2026 panel appearance at SXSW. “The next day we woke up and were like, ‘That was dumb.’”
When they had signed paperwork to finalize the deal, they had done so surrounded by their children and larger family. The mood had been celebratory. After all, they’d spent nearly a year and a half unofficially courting potential buyers, not to mention the years invested in building the brand. But the magic quickly gave way to something almost anticlimactic. Allison recalls refreshing her bank account, just waiting for the numbers to change.
When the money did arrive, 60 days later, the couple made an off-the-cuff decision to go to lunch and found themselves arguing. Looking back, Allison sees this as a symbol of how little her life has actually changed post-exit. “You get all this money, but then you still have all the real-life stuff.” She and Stephen still have their spats. With three young sons in the house, she still gets hit in the head occasionally by a basketball.
Their daily life is the same in other ways, too. Allison says her boys like to fish in a creek nearby. She has had the same best friend, David, for 20 years; he moved with her from Dallas and styles her hair for appearances and shoots. She goes to church every Sunday.
But there are some obvious upgrades. At the time of the exit, the couple retained a 12 percent ownership stake in the company, which translated to roughly $150 million. In some ways, even Allison herself is staggered by the enormity of her success. She was always ambitious, but she was also, she says, a C student, tripped up by what she now believes is undiagnosed dyslexia. “I always knew I’d be successful, but this is uber next level. This is the American dream,” she says. “It’s hard to wrap my head around sometimes.”
Following the deal, the family took a celebratory trip to Europe and the U.K. It was their first true family vacation in 10 years and a throwback to Allison’s “hustle then travel” mentality. They bought land in Jackson, Wyoming, where they plan to build a vacation home.
In some ways, the biggest shift may be that Allison, after years of hard work, has won back the luxury of her own time. She’s catching up on the moments with her friends and family that she missed out on during the years she was growing the business. All of which is to say, having successfully grown and sold Poppi, Allison could have chosen to do just about anything.
Despite that freedom, she’s ready to go back to work.
“I’ll be 40 in January,” Allison says. “It would feel really weird to retire now with all of this knowledge. Why not do it again with a little bit less pressure this time? It’s almost like we can have even more fun, which is wild, because it was so much fun before.” It’s clear that, for Allison, after the thrill of watching her company grow, there’s little that’s quite as exhilarating.
“My whole voice has been built on being unfiltered and in-it in real time, so sitting on something this exciting for months instead of sharing with the internet and family and friends has been its own kind of workout,” she says.
Still, she shared that Jetty’s origin looks remarkably similar to the early days of Poppi.
“I started Poppi because I had horrible tummy issues,” she says. “The same with this [venture]. It came from a personal problem.” Plenty of businesses start with data and analytics, but Allison says she wasn’t looking for a market gap. She was dealing with chronic dehydration and wanted a drink that wasn’t loaded with sodium or dyes, but didn’t see herself reflected in the available hydration products. She wanted something that felt approachable and healthy. “I was looking for this, and couldn’t find it, so my husband was like, ‘I’ll make it for you.’”
Photo by Annie Ray
While Allison had cooked up the original Poppi formulation in her kitchen with the help of Google, she and Stephen eventually brought food scientists onto the Poppi team, too. Starting in 2022, ahead of the exit, he served as Poppi’s chief product officer. Armed with new knowledge and experience, Stephen went back to the drawing board. The couple was so excited about the result that they quickly knew they wanted to bring it to market.
But while there might be similarities to Poppi’s inception, there’s so much that’s different this time. Allison and Stephen have more resources, more connections, and more confidence. They’re going into the launch more prepared, and will be learning on the fly less than before. “Most entrepreneurs, starting out, don’t have the number to text the buyer at Target,” Allison notes. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that she was there herself. “So, that stuff is going to be easier and different this time. But that’s a lot of risk, to go so big so quick.”
Because, after a success story like Poppi’s, there were always going to be lots of eyes on whatever the couple decided to tackle next. The first time around, they had the support of Oza’s partnership; now, they are out to prove they can do it on their own.
“As entrepreneurs, you start companies to not have people telling you what to do,” explains Allison. “This time, we’re self-funded. We’ll get to bring the people to the table that we want to work with, who will allow us to stay in control of the company, and allow us to really put our imprint on it… It’s fun to say, ‘Let’s do it ourselves.’ That’s a really exciting challenge.’”
This time, Allison isn’t planning to run the Poppi playbook back again. Instead, she trusts herself to recognize the right moves, even if they’re new ones. “I had that breakthrough moment on TikTok,” Allison says. “How do I have that next breakthrough moment? I don’t even know what it is yet, but I’m willing to test and try and do things differently.” In the coming weeks, she has a documentary team slated to follow her and capture the rarely seen side of product launch. “YouTube is still just a huge untapped platform that brands haven’t figured out how to do,” she explains. “So, I want to really heavily invest there and figure out that channel, which is long-form content.” She’s betting big on her ability to anticipate what others will want.
Perhaps most notably, Allison doesn’t plan to be the face of Jetty in the same way that she became the face of Poppi. She’s more interested in finding out exactly what will make this new venture resonate. Post-exit, she has confidence in her ability to lead and faith in the talent she’s assembled. “This next era is really about building and empowering the team,” she explains. This time, the first step Allison and Stephen took toward their new business was creating an org chart. It’s her biggest advice to new founders: find the people you trust and admire, then get them onboard.
Back in that West Austin house she’ll soon leave behind, the photo shoot is winding down. For the final shots of the afternoon, Allison wears a richly textured blazer, posing on the modern staircase near her front entryway. The candy-colored suits she wore during her Poppi days have given way to a new wardrobe. Muted colors and rich textures might offer a hint at what’s to come. Serious but still cool. Between shots, she laughs and chats with the crew about the whirlwind of the past decade.
Paused on the steps, caught for a moment between where she came from and where she’s going, it’s clear that she genuinely enjoys this familiar feeling of being in motion again—of building something from the ground up. Now, she has the luxury of doing it on her own terms. And that tastes pretty great.