Allison Ellsworth, Co-Founder, Poppi

Allison Ellsworth’s journey over the past decade is a perfect arc for that near-mythic “heroic founder” and the fact that it culminated in this year’s sale to PepsiCo makes it seem too easy. It hasn’t been, of course: there have been pivots, competition, investments, social media intrigue and a massive Super Bowl coming out party. Through it all, though, Ellsworth has been the face and voice of the brand on Social Media, one that’s so closely identified with her that even as company leadership transitioned away from her and her husband, Stephen, it was clear that she was its most important asset.

All the parts are there at the start: driven by personal need for a product that could improve her life, Ellsworth discovered apple cider vinegar; developed a recipe and took her product to the farmer’s market; used feedback to start a brand with her husband; went on Shark Tank while very, very, pregnant and attracted a star investor in Rohan Oza; took the product – then Mother Beverage – and rebranded it completely as Poppi, a gut-friendly, better-for-you soda and launched a category alongside a dogged competitor in Olipop. 

But it wasn’t until the pandemic that Ellsworth went beyond innovative founder and into the realm of marketing pioneer. Someone who said she has lived most of her life online, she discovered TikTok as the channel that clicked for Poppi, generating video after video and flooding the space with Poppi content, developing low-cost, heavy-impact topspin for the brand as the app also went to warp speed. As such, there are some staggering statistics out there: 3 billion views on TikTok, a face that has been seen at least seven times by one-third of the platform’s users, and that eventually added up to Pepsi’s $1.95 billion check for the company.

Beverage entrepreneurs take on many personas, but Ellsworth, through her innovative work that allowed millions of consumers to see themselves in her, to take the advice of the unfiltered cool mom from Texas, has created a new founder archetype. Even at close to a half-billion dollars in sales this year, she’s the brand and the brand is her. Beverage brands rarely, if ever, retain that strong a tie to the founder at that size, and with PepsiCo now calling the shots it’s hard to tell what the future brings for Poppi, but in 2025, for so clearly being the driving force behind the success of brand Poppi, Allison Ellsworth is BevNET’s person of the year.