Poppi is everywhere.
The bright cans are lined up at Target and Costco, sitting in Starbucks fridges, appearing in Love Island UK, and showing up between celebrity cameos during the Super Bowl. In May 2025, PepsiCo bought the brand for $1.95 billion. By the end of that year, PepsiCo estimated Poppi had generated nearly $745 million in retail sales.
That is a remarkable outcome for a drink that started in a kitchen and broke out through one founder-led TikTok.
The video opened the door, but Poppi still had to give people a reason to remember the can, ask for it by name, and pick it up when they saw it in a store. That meant keeping the founder story visible, making the packaging instantly recognizable, and staying close to the creators who showed where the drink fit.
Poppi made soda feel socially relevant again and then marketed that difference with unusual discipline.
So, let’s decode it.
🥤 Nearly $745 million in estimated retail sales. PepsiCo said Poppi’s 2025 retail sales grew by more than (estimated) 45% year over year.
💰 A $1.95 billion acquisition. PepsiCo completed the deal in May 2025, citing $300 million in anticipated tax benefits and a net purchase price of $1.65 billion, plus a performance-based earnout.
📱 More than 26 million views on one founder video. Allison Ellsworth’s 2021 TikTok about Poppi’s origin story became the brand’s breakout moment. She later said it drove $100,000 in sales overnight.
📈 A category that grew from $33 million to $777 million. NielsenIQ data shared with Axios tracked U.S. prebiotic soft-drink sales from January 2022 to January 2025.
🏈 Three consecutive Super Bowls. Poppi advertised in the game from 2024 through 2026, graduating from internet breakout to mass-market brand.
Before Poppi, there was Mother Beverage: the apple-cider-vinegar drink Allison and Stephen Ellsworth developed in their kitchen in 2015–2016. They appeared on Shark Tank in 2018, struck a deal with investor Rohan Oza, and relaunched the product as Poppi in 2020.
The rebrand moved the product out of the functional-drink corner: Mother Beverage led with apple cider vinegar, while Poppi led with colour, flavour, and fun.
Its bright colours and oversized logo made every can easy to recognize on a shelf, in a refrigerator restock, or in a creator’s hand. The current U.S. pitch is equally simple: a “modern soda” with five grams of sugar and prebiotic fiber.
Poppi gave shoppers an easy way back into soda. Familiar flavours kept the occasion intact; less sugar and an aesthetic design made the choice feel compatible with the rest of their routine.
In 2021, Ellsworth posted the company’s origin story on her personal TikTok. The video passed 26 million views. By January 2022, Poppi said TikTok visibility was helping generate roughly 1,000 email and SMS sign-ups a day, building an owned list of more than 200,000 people.
Poppi put about 20% of its marketing budget into TikTok, mostly creator work, and had an in-house community manager posting several times a day. That investment kept the brand showing up after the viral spike, while email and SMS gave it a direct way to stay close to the new audience.
By explaining how Poppi came to exist, Ellsworth gave the brand a face, a conflict, and a story that a product demo could never supply.
In the wake of the breakout, Poppi used that momentum to build something it owned: an email and SMS audience it could reach after people left the app.
Creators helped Poppi learn the language of its audience while showing the product in context, making them part of the brand-building work well beyond a single sponsored post.
Creators showed where the drink belonged, how it could be served, which flavour was worth trying, and what kind of person kept it in the fridge. Their content also gave Poppi a stream of language, reactions, and recognizable faces that could travel beyond social.
The brand made that logic visible in its 2023 “Soda’s Back” campaign. Poppi integrated creator content, customer reviews, and social commentary into its streaming, out-of-home, and experiential media across several U.S. cities. It was the company’s first 360-degree campaign, but the creative source remained the community that had already formed online.
Poppi built the larger campaign from the content people had already responded to: creator posts, customer reviews, and comments. Streaming, billboards, and experiential work amplified those signals instead of starting from a separate creative idea.
There is some evidence that the connection reached the shelf. A vendor case study from Crisp reported an 80% increase in in-store purchase rates in selected markets exposed to TikTok ads, while areas targeted with Amazon online video showed a 15% higher likelihood of in-store purchase.
Still, the mechanism makes sense: a creator makes the can familiar, paid media reinforces the recognition, and retail availability closes the gap.
Virality cannot build a beverage company on its own if consumers cannot find the drink easily.
Poppi expanded nationally through Target, Kroger, Whole Foods, Costco, and Amazon. It then kept adding new consumption moments: three Super Bowls, U.S. Starbucks locations in spring 2026, a U.K. launch through Carlsberg Britvic, and an official partnership with Love Island UK.
On social, Poppi made the can familiar, while wider distribution made it easy to buy. Poppi needed both for “everywhere” to feel true.
Poppi’s public results cannot isolate how much growth came from TikTok or creators. Distribution, shelf placement, repeat purchase, pricing, and category growth all mattered. Social made the brand familiar before a larger system multiplied the places where that familiarity could convert.
By 2026, Poppi had moved from founder-led TikTok content to a Super Bowl spot starring Charli xcx and Rachel Sennott, and its message had evolved with it. Rather than leading with a detailed functional benefit, Poppi was selling mood, taste, and fun.
The shift showed how far the brand had grown beyond its origin claim.
Poppi’s smartest move was treating soda as a category worth rebuilding around the parts people already liked.
It kept flavour, fizz, and convenience, then changed how the choice felt. Poppi’s current product page lists five grams of sugar and prebiotic fiber; the bright packaging and “modern soda” label did the rest of the repositioning.
That repositioning changed the question at the shelf. Poppi gave shoppers a soda that looked compatible with how they already bought, shared, and displayed other wellness-adjacent products.
The can’s design carried much of that repositioning, looking at home in a fridge restock, a creator video, or a dinner-table shot while giving the product the same identity across social media and the store.
The market followed. NielsenIQ data shared with Axios showed U.S. prebiotic soft-drink sales rose from $33 million in January 2022 to $777 million three years later. In response, Coca-Cola launched Simply Pop in 2025. PepsiCo acquired Poppi, then announced a prebiotic version of its flagship cola.
Olipop and other challengers also helped build the modern soda category. Poppi’s particular strength was making modern soda travel through culture: easy to spot, easy to post, and easy to ask for in store.
The vending-machine backlash became Poppi’s clearest reminder that audiences judge social-first brands’ mistakes in public, too.
Ahead of the 2025 Super Bowl, Poppi sent 32 large pink vending machines to creators and fans. People criticized the gifting as excessive and too concentrated among those who already had access and influence. Poppi explained the machines were temporary campaign assets that would be retrieved and reused.
The criticism was fair because a brand built through community had made the benefits of the campaign feel exclusive.
In response, Poppi retrieved the machines and later placed them in community locations, including a fire station, school, sports centre, and community centre.
That response changed the tone of the story. Poppi acknowledged the misread, reused the assets, and widened who benefited rather than trying to argue its way out of the criticism.
The episode showed why creator marketing depends on listening after the post goes live: Poppi changed course when its audience told the brand it had missed.
PepsiCo already knew how to manufacture drinks, secure shelf space, and run mass media. Poppi brought something harder to build quickly: a younger cultural position and permission to compete in a fast-growing version of soda.
The $1.95 billion acquisition put a price on that front end of growth. PepsiCo could apply its distribution system after Poppi had already created recognition, desire, and a distinct point of view.
Scale has not been frictionless. PepsiCo said Poppi’s 2026 transition into its distribution network temporarily affected the business early in the year. By July, the company confirmed that most of the disruption had been resolved, more customers and consumption points had been added, and Poppi was growing again at a “good pace.”
That transition is Poppi’s next test: the brand now has to keep the founder-led, culturally fluent behaviour that made its wider reach valuable.
Poppi’s rise is easy to flatten into a TikTok fairy tale. One founder posted. Millions watched. PepsiCo arrived with a cheque.
That framing makes the story look cleaner than it was, skipping over the system Poppi built after its breakout.
Poppi built a product people could recognize in half a second and used its founder to make the origin memorable. It treated creators as sources of context and creative intelligence, then moved what worked into paid media, stores, entertainment, foodservice, and new markets.
For marketers, the useful takeaways are straightforward:
Scale brought exactly what Poppi wanted (more stores, bigger media, and new markets) but it also made every misread louder. The vending-machine moment tested whether the brand could listen just as closely after getting big.
Poppi made a soda people could recognize, talk about, and find almost everywhere. By the time PepsiCo came calling, the brand had already done the difficult part: it had made the product mean something.
PepsiCo bought a brand people were already looking for, which is the kind of value social-first businesses can spend years trying to create.