HOUSTON — During Women's History Month, KHOU 11 News is highlighting female entrepreneurs in Texas, who are changing the way business is done.
KHOU 11’s Rekha Muddaraj sat down with Allison Ellsworth, the co-founder of Poppi, to talk about her journey from farmers markets to the Super Bowl.
Perhaps you’ve seen the brightly-colored cans at the grocery store.
“I want to start with, one of the biggest accomplishments that probably any company could have, which is Poppi had a Super Bowl commercial!” Muddaraj said.
“It’s one of those moments you don’t even realize could happen,” Ellsworth said. “We were one minute before halftime and we were the most viewed Super Bowl ad as well.”
Ellsworth is still wrapping her head around the meteoric rise of Poppi, the sparkling, prebiotic soda she and her husband Stephen first created in 2017 in the kitchen of their Dallas home.
Ellsworth had been experiencing gut issues, and while she found a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar helped, the taste was hard to stomach.
“I wanted to create something that was healthy and tasted good. And those two things don’t typically go together,” she said.
They took their product, originally called “Mother,” to Dallas farmers markets where they were discovered by Whole Foods.
Their next big break turned out to be the hit TV show, “Shark Tank.”
“It was the first time I got a babysitter with our firstborn,” she said. “It was six more months of tryouts, paperwork to get onto the show and it’s so secretive the whole process, but it changed my life.”
Guest Shark Rohan Oza, the beverage whiz behind brands like Vitamin Water and Bai, invested $400,000 in exchange for a 25% percent stake.
“Pulling back distribution for about nine months, and we did a rebrand – do we do colored cans… and what is the name? And we landed on Poppi,” she said. “Poppi is a play off soda pop. It pops off the shelf.”
Despite the major investment, there were still hiccups.
“We launched Poppi March 2020, right when COVID (hit), we were a canned beverage during an aluminum shortage, it was so capital intensive and having to constantly be raising money, at some point we were like are we going to make it or not,” she said.
So Ellsworth, who is the chief of brand for the company, turned to social media.
TikTok has played a big role in the company’s success, partly because of a particular video Ellsworth made sharing the brand’s journey.
“I just hit post and I went to bed. And the next day we did over $100,000 on Amazon while we were sleeping, and that video now has over 90 million views,” she said.
First came the fans then the celebrities followed by the celebrity investors like Olivia Munn and Russell Westbrook.
A whirlwind for Ellsworth, who said she will always remember what it took to achieve this level of success.
“When we first started out, we live here in Texas, I’ll never forget, we had our own manufacturing facility that had no A/C, our car broke (no) A/C, it was hot during the farmer’s markets, there were times we were working second jobs,” she said. “It really does feel like the American dream.”
She and her husband still come up with new flavors themselves in their kitchen which is now in Austin where Poppi is headquartered.
“Our cherry limeade, I grew up going to Sonic, made it in two days over the weekend because it was something I was craving,” she said.
From Texas to your taste buds with love. For more on their story, visit their website.