Inside Poppi founders’ bid for another billion-dollar beverage brand with Jetty

Last year, after nearly a decade building Poppi from a farmers’ market small business to a beverage behemoth, founders Allison and Stephen Ellsworth sold their better-for-you soda brand to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion.

They took about six months off to relax. But then they got restless.

“I was like, ‘I’m just too young to retire, not built for this,’” Allison Ellsworth told Retail Brew.

Soon she got to work on the couple’s next venture, igniting buzz in the CPG world when she teased it this summer. Today—after a few decoy social posts to throw sleuths off their trail—the two are officially back into beverage with their new brand: Jetty, what Ellsworth called an “anti-hydration hydration company.” The Ellsworths are self-funding Jetty with $2.5 million, and the new brand is hitting shelves today at many of the same retailers where Poppi is sold.

While she says building the new business is “just as hard this time,” it’s also a lot different. (For starters, she’s got a camera crew following her “build the next billion-dollar brand.”) As Ellsworth looks to disrupt another beverage shelf, she’s learned from mistakes many first-time entrepreneurs make and is charting a more structured course in her second act.

Back to business: Like Poppi’s effort to shake up the soda space with a lower sugar option, Jetty is taking aim at the sports drink category, historically “made for men and extremes,” she said. The product is a women-centric, lower-sodium-and-sugar answer to products like Gatorade and Liquid IV. (While Poppi was largely a “go with our gut” operation, Ellsworth said AI bots like Claude helped them quickly research the competitive set and nutritional profiles.)

The product comes in both stick pack and ready-to-drink formats, offered in five flavors, sold for $2.49 per 15.2-oz bottle. It launches today on Target.com, Amazon, and nationwide at Whole Foods Markets, hitting Target, Sprouts, and Walmart stores next year.

The product fills a space on Target’s shelves reportedly left vacant by Alex Cooper’s Unwell Beverage Co., which had a similar brand ethos, though Ellsworth believes Jetty’s simpler approach, without extra ingredients like caffeine and protein, will land better with shoppers.

The company has a “clear vision on what we want to do with this, and so the retailers are just really excited because they’ve been waiting for it,” she said. At Target, it’ll be merchandised in the sports drink section alongside Gatorade, while it’ll be with the functional beverages at Whole Foods, which doesn’t carry Gatorade, she said.

Dream team: Through the many ups and downs after her decade building Poppi, she said the biggest difference between building Jetty and Poppi is building its team correctly this time. Its teaser and prompt for email sign-ups for curious consumers centered on building community particularly with Gen Z and millennial consumers, but it also served as a recruitment video, and led to the hiring of her head of HR and influencer manager.

The first move they made when starting Jetty was building an org chart, avoiding the first-time entrepreneur tendency to “shoot from their hips,” and let “egos get in the way of growth,” Ellsworth said.

“It’s actually good if you can do really disruptive thinking with a really strong, robust platform of process in the background,” she said. “Professionalizing your business early, getting a great team in can be make or break.”

Similar to Poppi, Ellsworth serves as chief brand officer, while her husband Stephen is CEO. The company already had 14 full-time employees prior to launching, some hailing from brands like Rare Beauty and Waterloo Sparkling Water.

“A lot of entrepreneurs don’t think that way,” she said. “They think, ‘Oh, I can do it all,’ and they kill themselves. They work 80 hours a week and they’re doing this job 20%, this job 20%, this job 20%. Versus, ‘Why not hire someone to do that job 100%, 100%, 100%?’”

Ellsworth hopes the camera crew following them—which captured moments like meeting with Walmart buyers—will help illustrate lessons like these (and answer the endless inbound questions she gets from hopeful entrepreneurs).

Jetty and willing: By immediately launching in retailers nationwide, Jetty is essentially skipping over the first few years of Poppi’s business, she said. With an obvious leg up and a lot more eyes on them, Ellsworth said she feels more pressure to make a product consumers love than to secure a second blockbuster exit.

“If this isn’t successful in the way people don’t love it as much as we have…that’s gonna be the hard part,” she said.