Bloomberg Talks: Allison Ellsworth

**Tim Stenovec** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. A pool behind us, lots of people around us, there's a lot going on.

**Carol Massar** (0:10)
Yeah, a lot of people drinking poppi too. Did you see that?

**Tim Stenovec** (0:12)
I did see that.

**Carol Massar** (0:13)
Yeah, lots of people are drinking poppi. You know, find a problem and fix it. That's the context of talking about this company.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:19)
How many times have we talked to venture capitalists, like they say, that's what people have to do, that's how you have to think about starting a company. And that's exactly what our next guest has done.
And sometimes it's a personal problem or situation that leads you to creating an amazing company, one that actually gets bought out by PepsiCo for $1.95 billion, and that happened last year. We're talking about Poppi. Allison Ellsworth is co-founder of the company and she joins us here at Uncharted. Welcome, welcome, nice to have you here with us.

**Allison Ellsworth** (0:46)
Thank you, and hey, let's call it two billion, right?

**Tim Stenovec** (0:49)
Oh, okay, okay, we'll round up. We're good, we're good.

**Allison Ellsworth** (0:51)
We're gonna round up.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:52)
It's a lot of money. Tell us though, I love the backstories. I watch these guys know Shark Tank a lot. That was certainly something that played in. But tell us about how you came to create this company.

**Allison Ellsworth** (1:03)
I think like most great things, I created it because I had a personal problem. I had some gut health problems. I started drinking apple cider vinegar, hated the taste, and I wanted to create something that tasted better. Have you guys ever taken a shot of apple cider vinegar?

**Carol Massar** (1:17)
No, I have not.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:18)
I know lots of people who have though.

**Allison Ellsworth** (1:20)
It's disgusting. So I went to my kitchen and I created the first version of Poppi, went on to get a deal on Shark Tank, and now we're in every grocery store in the nation. It's wild.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:30)
It is pretty wild.

**Carol Massar** (1:31)
It's a really crowded space and it's hard. I mean, you could walk in into any sort of convenience store or grocery store, and those are the companies that have succeeded in getting the shelf space. Just getting the shelf space is difficult. How did you do that in the beginning?

**Allison Ellsworth** (1:46)
We hired really smart people. So after getting a deal on Shark Tank, our network was opened up.

**Carol Massar** (1:52)
So that's where everything changed.

**Allison Ellsworth** (1:53)
Bring in people that know the industry. Beverage is really hard. Someone downstairs just asked me, they wanted to do a beverage, and I said, one, it's capital intensive. You have to have a lot of money. You're shipping liquid across the US. Manufacturing, shelf life, there's so many things that go into it, and you really want to surround yourself with smart people, and the beverage industry is small. So network, network, network.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:15)
It's really about who you know in the beverage industry. Because you're fighting for shelf space, essentially, right?

**Allison Ellsworth** (2:19)
Yeah, and then you're working with the retailers, and we were before the time. We were calling ourselves Soda. We were revolutionizing Soda for the next generation, and they were like, that's hilarious. You know, and so they didn't know where to put us on the shelf space. Like basically, we were in the sparkling water set. We were, you know, in enhanced water. They didn't know what we were. It was hard.

**Carol Massar** (2:38)
Well, now the idea of a functional beverage, like everybody kind of knows about that. You guys were early to that, of course. I'm curious what you see out of the landscape right now that is missing. Like if you were to develop something right now, what would it be?

**Allison Ellsworth** (2:49)
Well, I am developing something right now, and we're launching in the fall to fit that gap. But what it is, is it has to be better for you. And not so better for you that it's just like people don't understand that there's a lot of adaptogens and all of these things. Protein is really big right now. But I don't know, would you like to drink a carbonated protein drink?

**Carol Massar** (3:08)
I've tried a carbonated protein drink. It wasn't easy to drink.

**Allison Ellsworth** (3:11)
It's tough. I'm telling you, I wouldn't do that. But I will say something that's just a little bit better, and that's what we did at Poppi.

**Carol Massar** (3:17)
So have you figured it out?