News broke last Friday that PepsiCo plans to acquire poppi for a cool $1.5 billion—not bad for a brand that started as a niche apple cider vinegar beverage named #Mother.
I first met Mother (aka Poppi) in 2016 as a judge on BevNET’s New Beverage Showdown. First time founders Allison Ellsworth and Stephen Ellsworth were pitching their glass-bottled, sparkling probiotic beverage as the next big thing. The product tasted great and ACV was trending at the time. We saw their raw potential and named them New Beverage Showdown winner but it wasn't until 2018, when Mother appeared on Shark Tank ABC and took an investment from Rohan Oza & CAVU Consumer Partners that they'd transform from a wellness beverage to a soda star.
🔄 Repositioning the Opportunity
Mother Beverage was positioned as a functional health drink, leading with probiotics, gut health, and apple cider vinegar—messaging that worked in natural foods but had limited mainstream appeal. Meanwhile, despite soda's decline for two decades, the category was still massive and ripe for disruption. So Mother repoisitioned their entire story, occasion and audience around soda and embraced a bold, flavor forward message supported by pre/pro-biotic claims (which they've since walked further away from). This flavor over function strategy reframed the product as a permissible indulgence, speaking more directly to mass consumer desires.
And what about apple cider vinegar? It's still in the ingredients, but now it's in the fine print and not the headline.
🏷️ Rename to Reframe
Mother had a clever name alluding to fermentation aka the “mother” culture in ACV but it was misaligned with their new positioning. So like many brands before them—Siete Family Foods was formerly Must B Nutty Tortillas and Koia was RawNature5—they wisely wiped the slate clean and came up with Poppi. Short, playful and fun, this new name nodded to soda and excitement and reshaped consumers perceptions and expectations.
🎨 Designing for A New Era
For decades, diet soda had been devoid of color—silver, white, or gray—which signaled less sugar in comparison to their full sugar (and color) counterparts. Think Diet Coke vs Coke.
But despite being low sugar, Poppi opted for a new visual language that would redefine the rules of the category; vibrant, playful and full-color branding that made less-sugar feel like a benefit and not a compromise.
What's important to remember is that great branding doesn’t guarantee success—brands live or die by their execution, and Poppi executed. They tapped into TikTok, turning the brand into a viral sensation (as well as a controversial one). They landed prime Target shelf space, breaking out of the natural channel. They became more than just a better-for-you soda—they made soda fun again and created a brand people wanted to be part of...
And to think it all started with two founders, a great product and the right pivot.
#rebrand #repositioning #rename #packaging #soda
