OLIPOP's Biggest Fan

0:28Every great brand has them. success. I'm Nate Rosen. And I'm Jenna Moffsvitz. And we're Express Checkout, the startup media company covering the newest stories and trends behind the food, drinks, and wellness products that we buy. This is Brand's Biggest Fan, where we view brands through two lenses, from the people who built them and the consumers who love them. Let's get into it. Here with us, we have Ben Goodwin, who is the co-founder and CEO and formulator of Olipop. Welcome, Ben. Hey, guys. Excited to be here for this milestone. This is our first episode of a new series we're doing called The Brand's Biggest Fans.

1:05And we're really excited to be starting with Olipop and with you. For the audience, in case you're living under a rock and don't know what Olipop is, Ben, in just a few words, what is Olipop? Yeah, so we are a healthy, functional soda. We taste very similar to what we all grew up loving, drinking, but instead of the kind of super sugar load or the phosphoric acid or the whole kind of kit and caboodle that comes with traditional soda, we're low in sugar, so two to five grams per can. And then we're high in soluble fiber, which does all sorts of amazing things for you. And we've also been doing a decent amount of research to substantiate our claims and explore what the product does.

1:47But fiber is useful for digestive and microbiome health. But it also has a lot of positive implications for blood sugar stability. And people, 90 % of Americans don't get enough of it. 90 % of Americans don't get the USDA's recommended 28 grams per day. We would assume, though, that most of our audience knows what Olipop is because you can get it pretty much anywhere now at any major retailer. So actually finding the biggest fan of Olipop is certainly a challenge because there are so many big fans now, but we were connected with a very special fan. My name's Amy from the Chicago suburbs. I am a wife and mom of three very rambunctious fun boys.

2:36I'm shopping normally for five humans and two dogs. I homeschool one of my kids at home so try to be home during the day as much as I can. So I'll do a lot of shopping from big box stores online like Walmart, Meijer, sometimes from Target. But then I'll generally go to Juul, Juul Osco. I go there once or twice a week to kind of fill in here and there as well. And then I also like to shop. We have a local health and wellness store called Nature's Cornucopia. and so I like to shop there as well for I'm supposed to eat gluten-free I have some food allergies and other friends do as well so that's like a safe place for me to go and shop where they're pretty knowledgeable and can help me find things there as well I order a lot of like Siete brand just because they're gluten-free so I try to at least have snacks that are gluten-free So that's our go-to brand that we always get.

3:45I'm getting the Oko Zero yogurt because it's got, I can't remember if it's Stevia that they use. I like Stevia a lot. It doesn't have aftertaste like some other sweeteners for me. So I'll get that. And then I tend to lean towards like the Amy's Organic brand for either frozen meals for myself or soups. How are you finding new brands? Are you someone who reads nutrition labels? Are you motivated by a sale or promotion? Well, brands like Siete, that's when I actually discovered a health and wellness store. And I think I had also, I might have picked up something from them at like TJ Maxx or something like that because they always have a wide variety of different brands there and spices and snacks.

4:34Besides gluten-free, are there certain nutritional call-outs or things on a nutrition label? that you're typically looking for? For myself and for my kids, I try to find things that are lower sugar or sweet in the stevia. I have diabetes and I noticed that stevia does not really affect my glucose spikes. That's the first thing is trying to have low sugar. But another thing that I try to find is things that have more fiber in them. Kids tend to not get as much fiber as they should and myself included. So I always try to check the fiber content as well. Let's get into the olipop of it all. How did you discover the brand at first and what made you want to pick it up?

5:17Back to that nature store here in town. I went in with my kids. I told them all, because I knew there were like more healthier options. I told them all that they could find something sweet there and they all wanted soda. And I'm like, okay, well, pick out something and let me look at it. And one of the ladies there overheard me and said, Oh, we have a new soda in and introduced us to Olipop. So the boys had picked up root beer. And then I tried the crisp apple because it just sounded appealing. It was, I'd never heard of a prebiotic soda before. I saw that the sugar was a lot less. So I'm like, okay, let's give it a try.

6:04The brand found you because you are a big fan. So you're not just someone who occasionally buys Olipop. Can you tell us what makes you what we're calling the biggest fan? So I grew up on a farm. My grandma had an orchard there. And so when I like first had the crisp apple, it just really, it was just like stepping back into my grandma's orchard and taking that first bite of the apple. And this drink in a weird way has provided so much comfort for me just in this past year alone. Last year, my mother-in-law passed away and went into hospice beforehand. And I had actually contacted Olipop because I brought my crisp apple with me every single day that we went to see her.

6:56So it felt like Olipop was providing me comfort while we were trying to provide comfort for my mother-in-law. So that hooked me on it. And after I had first tried it at that major store, I couldn't find it anywhere. I was looking everywhere for it. The crisp apple at the time was just like a holiday one. And I found it on Olipop's website. So I actually started having it shipped to me directly. And so that was my staple. I always knew I had my crisp apple at home. And then I would go to like Target or Jewel or hop in to the nature store and try different flavors. I'm still getting the monthly subscription from them for my crisp apple and just kind of filling in, trying different flavors when I go out to stores.

7:48It's so cool how products can have some kind of emotional tie to them. I'm interested too, because there are a lot of other Olipop competitors now. There are even some store brands are going to start doing their, have already started doing their own version of a low sugar prebiotic soda. Will you always stay loyal to Olipop? And if so, why? You know, I did get hooked with that emotion. And I think that really plays a big part in it. But they've been very consistent with coming out with new flavors, coming out with different things to try. and so I will buy it as long as they have it. If you could tell when the Olipop founders one thing what would it be?

8:30I would say thank you of course for just making making something that just kind of brings me home and I know it's probably maybe not something that you considered when you were coming up with the ideas for different flavors but just knowing how much your product can really impact somebody. Just want to encourage you when you come up with new flavors, things like that, that you think back maybe to your own childhood and, you know, what can bring you back to those memories. But thank you for making a great product and thank you for keeping it out there and just keep doing what you're doing. I look forward to trying new products as they come available as well.

9:12This overall discovery story, I'm curious what that, what does that sound like to you. Does it sound like how you envisioned people would be discovering Olipop? First of all, awesome, awesome story. And also shout out to the anonymous natural foods in Chicago. Keep doing the good work. But I do think that there's a couple layers of story that's interesting, right? Because first of all, of all of the functional sodas out in the market now, obviously, like we created the category in we incorporated in 2017. I, this is an even longer story. Like I really came up with this in 2010 and then had a first iteration and then perfect, air quotes, perfected with Ollipop.

9:54But of all the functional set of players, we over-index the most with families, like households with kids. And I think it's from this, like if you are trying to make a slightly more discerning decision around what you feel good about giving your children, you might be scanning the label a little more deeply. And then you can see that there's a differential in terms of what Olipop delivers for the same amount of money. And obviously, the obvious disclaimer has to go up. I am not a doctor and Olipop does not pretend to cure or address any medical issues. But certainly, as I said in the intro, one of the amazing things about fiber, especially when you have a reduction and sugar attached to it is it should help you with blood sugar stabilization.

10:43And we actually have some human data. We have human pilot data around that. We took a cohort of folks and we gave them vintage cola. And we did two trials. We did one trial in a fastened state. We did one trial with a high carb meal. We also did the same trials with more of a traditional full sugar soda. And so I can't make the claim across the entire Olipop range, but at least for vintage cola, I don't know if you guys have read a lot of glycemic blood glucose charts, but basically people's baselines are typically around 95. And after drinking a vintage cola, we saw the average increase go from 95 to 104, which is very modest.

11:28And then gently brought them back down to baseline. And then I think this is just as cool as the no big spike. It actually kept their blood sugar stable for the full duration of the test, which is about three hours, which I thought that was very cool. Obviously, the traditional soda took them up to an average of 144 and then brought them crashing back down to below baseline, which I personally call like the metabolic dysfunction curve. But, you know, so the point here being that you have a person who is probably trying to make some serious decisions for their kids, wants to invest in their health and wellness, also wants to give them something that they're going to enjoy.

12:07And then in this particular case, obviously because of what she was experiencing, trying to make some really discerning choices for herself, might have already had a disproportionate awareness that, hey, I need to get some fiber. It has a benefit for me. I want to reduce my sugar. and so you have some that works for the whole family. And then, yeah, natural foods is a great entry point. It was the entry point for our business, and you have typically a little more of an early adopter. You've got a shopper that's willing to spend a little bit more. They're more experimental, and they tend to be more accustomed to label reading and also probably understanding what they're seeing on the back of the pack.

12:45So it's a great entry point for people as they come to the category. What a great summary. I'm very excited to see that data come out. First of all, I think, although you are not a doctor, we know some doctors who do say natural sugar is better for you from a fruit because there's also fiber. And like some of these things are so baseline to us that we know, but we haven't seen translated in a package good yet. And Olipop is a great example of that. The results are unsurprising to me, but I'm excited to see them come out. But yeah, I think what's cool is like, you've had this vision for, as you said, it started in like a long time yeah and now we're talking about this isn't just that theoretical customer that you drew up um we need to reach this customer through eight marketing touch points and like oh for sure it's a real my favorite one is the two most common things you hear when you get people who come from more of the like nba background they're like we discovered white space and when you get people who come from more of the stereotypical like organic they're like i wanted a snacking bar that blah, blah, blah, but I couldn't find it.

13:48It's all like the same. Oh, yeah. It's a lot of the same stuff. And some of that's legit. Fair enough. But yeah, we've always tried to pull from a slightly deeper. Yeah. And I think what's cool here is it's a data point of someone who found you just because someone at the store was talking about like, it's not because she saw word of mouth is still huge, a huge part of what has contributed to our system. It's something I've thought a lot about, How do we do a better job amplifying those customer stories and customer voices? Because that word of mouth is powerful and people seem to have disproportionately powerful experiences with our product, which I'm very grateful for.

14:25And I think that just makes this, it sounds like maybe a one-off data point when you compare it to all of these conceptual archetypes of who might be drinking it, but she probably actually has a pretty standard story. We just don't plan for word of mouth because you can't put marketing budgets towards word of mouth. Yeah, absolutely. I want to pass it off to Nate because the next most interesting part is how she went from just discovering it to actually becoming brand loyal. So Nate, you want to talk about that? So she fell in love with crisp apple in particular because of the nostalgic nature of it for her.

14:57And I'm curious, how does that make you feel? God, I have so much to say about this. I'll try to keep it as consolidated as I can because like, this is also a part of the organic journey that it was. So like we already made the reference to, hey, working on this, had an early iteration, this business called Obi, which was effectively like a probiotic soda. And at the time it seemed insane, but then we started to get some early traction and the root beer was like our top selling flavor. And so that company didn't play out how I wanted it to, but I had all this really good consumer data and this like resonance that, hey, actually, I was testing this concept with Obi and I feel like I got this emphatic yes.

15:47And I really cemented in myself that, okay, this is an idea whose time has come and I'm going to come back and I'm going to hit even harder with Ollipop. And these basic things when you I knew these basic things when I started Ollipop, which is OK, like soda industry, soda category is enormous, 50 plus billion dollars now in just North America, 98 percent household penetration. Obviously, sugar sweetened beverages are problem and they're the number one cause of added sugar. And so there's this enormous opportunity to do something positive. Right. You'd like all those stats. But one of the things that has really evolved for me throughout the experience with Olipop, because when you start getting to a larger and larger scale, you start impacting more people, start getting some of these stories back.

16:36And the, I would almost call it, like, not to get too esoteric, but I almost call it, like, the identity infrastructure of these flavor profiles for so many people. is actually pretty, it's quite meaningful to be the way to describe it. So a similar story to that story was a woman wrote into us probably like four-ish years ago. And similar in that her, actually her grandmother was in hospice with stomach cancer. And she really couldn't keep much down. Everything was too painful to consume. and they brought her Ollipop root beer, A, because it was one of the few things she could keep down, which that's awesome by itself.

17:23I'll just leave that there. But B, because the flavor profile of the root beer reminded her of the root beers that she had growing up. And she would have the root beer, it would trigger a memory, it would trigger a story, and then she'd share these stories, and there were stories that the family hadn't really heard. And it had become this really important like cornerstone of this bonding experience or this meaningful experience that she was passing through to the end of her life. And then she wrote in, we're all drink root beer now to remember your root beer to remember my grandmother. So you get an email like that.

17:59And once you're done crying, you step back and you reflect on just, wow. And, and it's that same, it's this exactly, It's if, as the formulator, like I'm this weirdo, neurodivergency, self-taught kind of, and so obviously I have to have a solid grasp on the science, whether it's the nutritional science, stability science, acid sweeteners, mouthfeels, blah and blah, the chemistry. but now because I've now been a formulator for 20 years the science kind of sits in the background as a fairly I'm always learning new stuff but it's like kind of sits in the background and so what that allows me to do is I actually really focus on the expression in the flavor it's like it's a as much of an art for me at this point as it is a science there's actually a lot of emotion in the flavor for me now it has to go from my bench to the like trial pilot and then has to go into the co-packers so there's all these like opportunities for fidelity reduction as it goes as it scales from benchtop through to commercial production but if you've done a good enough job enough of it is still there so that it transmits the message that you were interested in so part Part of it is, I think, the power, the underlying power of some of the flavor profiles.

19:31But another part of it, hopefully, is the approach to the formulation. So those things can meet. And then for a lot of people just create this, create these experiences. But the other part of it is, look, this is also why Soda is this very powerful vehicle. A can of Coke was there at somebody's fifth birthday. Olipop wasn't anywhere. This is why this elitism around health food has always just driven me crazy. Look, these flavor profiles came into a lot of people's lives while they were still forming their identities. And oftentimes during these moments, they had friends and families and all these attachment componentry to them.

20:15And so they're ever imbued as part of their identity. Yeah, look, it's like a great, at the end of the day, it's like a great honor to be able to facilitate that experience for people. And what I love about it as well is it's not, I'm hopefully not just delivering on flavor, but then it's also uses the vehicle for what's hopefully like quite transformative health. And that whole combination, I think it's foundational to our success, but also has made the work I do more meaningful. I'm blown away and it's super meaningful. And given that the story, some iteration of the story happens enough that I'm like, I got to go figure out what's going on.

20:55And that's where I landed. Do you, because obviously there's something here also about just like nostalgia, whether it's from the flavor, whether it's from a certain type of product. Was any of that intentional when you were building the brand? Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. But yeah, even our design language, I think of as modern nostalgia. The thing I like about nostalgia that's really cool, and I still don't know, we still have work to do, I think, in translating the brand, and we're working on it. But like, in theory, what's cool about nostalgia is nostalgia, then is it 30s nostalgia, 50s nostalgia, 70s nostalgia, early 90s nostalgia, which also offers you up to some very cool flavor worlds.

21:36nostalgia is a very powerful vehicle and because of the modern way that we're trying to approach it it also allows it to be quite flexible yeah why do you think it it's worked so well with this brand and not another because i feel like olipop stands out as one of one that feels really nostalgic and like homey in a way yeah so i'm curious like why do you think it works so well that's an interesting observation of the hominess because i agree i think there are some natural translation dynamics that have flown through to the visual and brand identity that are like a byproduct of the actual intent behind the company.

22:22So there's stuff I can't talk about this coming up. When I step back and I look at the design architecture on the cans, One of the things I like about it is that it's not very perfect at all. It's unassuming, but it's because I think if it's going to be so pretentious, but I think if you are legitimately trying to like go out and help people, it should be like fairly humble work. like i i live in a house now where this is the first time i have a dedicated room for my formulation lab and it's in the garage it's like i got this house and it was and i was like i was in the garage and there's this tiny little room and it had a hot and cold water coming out of the wall and i was like oh i can put my lab in here and i was asking like what did you guys what is this room supposed to be and she was like oh it's gonna be our dog washing room that's how small the room is oh boy whatever it's got water i can put a sink and some counters in and then i just brought like a one of those like a leftover big one like lab metal lab table i had from the other house and i just extended the wall so i had some space like before that i had my lab in my laundry room which is a big upgrade from where i had it before which is just like in my kitchen and i still formulate that way like we have a we have a proper adult lab in the bay area with gas chromatography and every measuring instrument you could imagine but what i'm formulating i just i put on some tunes and i just i have two scales that go to different resolutions a vitamin splender pipettes all sorts of different pipettes i carbonate in a soda stream like i still and then i just have like several thousand flavors and a and like a fridge packed to the gills with juice concentrates that i rotate out every once in a while so they don't spoil but it's like but you know what i mean like it's not so i think that some of the way that hominess has just come through is that's just like the vibe man it's the vibe everywhere inside and out and that it's an authentic expression i think of who we are but i think that authenticity also lends itself to the nostalgia because inauthentic nostalgia feels just like the most the cheesiest thing remember the good old days no it's a feeling it's like a it's like a it's a legitimate feeling that means like somebody so So yeah, hopefully that lineage of authenticity is part of what's coming through.

25:10So we talked about Amy a little bit. Amy obviously only represents this one archetype. A customer who actually really does care about the functionality, might be shopping with these health concerns in mind, who replaced soda she was already drinking with Olipop. But you've since appealed to customers who haven't really been drinking soda maybe for years, and they might not be looking at the specific fiber claims. It's just a better for you option. and the traditional soda. So can you tell us, was that like strategic pivot to try and reach some of that broader audience? And if so, or even if not, how have you been able to maintain customers like Amy without isolating them while appealing to the broader audience?

25:52Yeah, super valid point. So a couple of things. I have enough experience thus far as an entrepreneur, right? I haven't had a job since I was 20. So I've now been an entrepreneur for a long time, And for better or for worse, my adrenal glands are shot, but I've lived an interesting life. You balance it out. So there's a little bit of a begin with the end in mind mentality that I have had since I started Ollipop. And that's great because it means that you can do a couple things more purposefully than you would otherwise. It was always the goal or the strategy to start a natural for the reasons I described earlier.

26:26You've got more adventurous consumers who are more oriented to label read. They tend to have a little more disposable income because they're shopping in a higher end set. And so it's a great place when you're a fledgling brand to start because you're going to you need to test and learn. You need to find out if you got what you think you did. Now, we were lucky because the second Olipop hit the shelf from like literal day one, especially before we had any competitors. we would just i remember like cases would land at whole foods at the beginning and like they were gone so far from the shelf that the buyer thought they hadn't even arrived they were like yeah we never got these and then he talked to his staff he's like oh they sold out in 24 hours crazy so that was awesome that was very lucky that we had that we got that traction early on The goal was always to just occupy soda territory.

27:25Like we are a soda, right? And the thing that's also funny, and I have this whole thing, it's like, it's designed to be a bit of a Trojan horse. It comes in with something you recognize and you have nostalgia around and tastes really good. And then it's finding a way to deliver like high impact nutrition, but the nutrition doesn't get in the way of the consumption experience. But yeah, the goal was always to create something that appeal to as many folks as possible. And so that's why we've never had goji berry lemongrass flavor. And I think the other piece of it is, this is where the fairy dusting that happens in a lot of the health products drives me crazy, because if you've really got a product and you can really build a well of data around it, and also the fundamentals and nutritionals and the formulas like are efficacious, then you should have something that customers can feel whether or not you've hammered it into their brains that it does a certain thing.

28:34And the final point of this, I think is like really interesting is if you actually zoom out and look at soda's legacy, soda actually has spent more time in human history being a legitimate or at least perceived health product than it's spent being a quote unhealthy product because soda goes it's so true back to the american colonies like early soda was different medicinal herbs berries barks whatever sugar was put in both for taste but also to facilitate fermentation that's what created some of the CO2, but then the fermentation was stopped early so that it wouldn't become alcoholic. And so then it was sweet.

29:19It was carbonated. The fermentation made, should have, in theory, increased the bioavailability of some of the nutritional componentry. And in fact, forced carbonation was created because there's this big rage in the 1800s of people going to these geothermal hot springs. And there's like bubbles, right? Gas coming up from the earth. And so they ascribed the perceived health benefits they were experiencing, hot springs to the carbonation. So that's why they were even trying to figure out how to force carbonate. And so it wasn't, and again, you might as well know this, but it wasn't until 1943 that the federal government stepped in and said, you guys can't keep calling soda a health product.

30:00Like, even Coca-Cola, you guys might know this, but like, I find all this fascinating. fascinating. Coca-Cola was created by Pemberton, who was a Confederate soldier who took a bayonet to the chest. He had chronic pain and was addicted to opiates and invented Coca-Cola because he was a chemist and he was experimenting with ways to get off of opiates that he was addicted to. And everyone's like, oh, it had cocaine in it. It's just a little more of a nuance and had coca-leaf extract, which is not the same thing as cocaine, but yeah but it's still obviously it's a stimulant and it does some interesting stuff and it increases the amount of oxygen your hemoglobin can carry and that's why it's consumed to the andes when people yeah hike up at thinner oxygen anyway but the point basically being like olipop is returning soda to those that root system but it's doing it in a way that also acknowledges its more recent history and i'm excited about that i don't know if as a species we have like subconscious memory of soda and it's his it's healthy days but i don't yeah i don't think it's anyway we are way off topic from your original question but yeah like i don't think it's that big of a i don't think it's it's started to build traction i wasn't i was hopeful that it would do well but i wasn't surprised especially in the midwest yeah like i always thought that the midwest had less heartburn around the concept of a healthy soda that turned out to be true i was thinking that you alluded to this earlier you did essentially create the modern soda category and at some point in the brand's evolution you shifted to using the term soda at all that wasn't in the og ob okay so it was so the first half a year or year whatever it's like the first for a while i just put probiotic soda on ob but we were just on the coast and just in the natural channel and back then this concept hadn't arrived and people were having issues with the term soda.

32:07Okay. So we took it off. Irrespective of that, the top selling flavor was still root beer. People didn't want to call it soda, but they wanted to drink soda. Right. I feel like a lot of the, some of the coastal people come with baggage when it comes to these products. They can. And they're much more used to innovation getting thrown at them. I always liked this idea of, look, 80 % of the country is not getting as much innovation for them. I had this whole philosophy around pro-social innovation. And I was like, this should be innovation for everybody, innovation for the entire country. And Soda gives you the platform to do that.

32:50At what point then did you become comfortable with using the Soda nomenclature for the bi-coastal elites, if you will? Yeah, I think it's when the thing started to just gain more momentum and it seemed like an adequate mass of folks were like, oh, okay, it's a separate category. But that does also go back to a question I think you referenced in, there was an indirect reference before, which is the people who've lapsed out of soda. Yeah. And and one of the things this category does a really good job of and all I pop does a good job of is pulling folks back in because but giving them and giving them a way to experience it that addresses the reason why a lot of them left in the first place.

33:37And typically I'm like mission-based and I'm like, sometimes the P &L is like a necessary evil. But I will tell you that it is actually really good for the whole ecosystem because it's good for the retailer also. Because if they CSD over to sparkling water, the margin differential is not terribly large. But CSD over to traditional CSD over to functional soda, it's a real win for them. And just for those who don't know, CSD is carbonated soft drinks. For the non-food and beverage analysts amongst us. Exactly. And that's the whole thing. Like, you want to create a bunch of wins for your customers, a bunch of entry points for them.

34:21But you also want to create a bunch of wins around the ecosystem in general. So it's something that everybody can get behind because there's the benefit that goes around. Now, for me, it's always just been like, if I have a premium product, I have to damn well know that I'm providing premium value, which is oftentimes where the gap exists in the health and wellness industry. Yeah. So clearly you're not shy about Alipop trying to replace traditional soda. I'm not, like, coming for soda. What I'm more I'm trying to get at is, like, there's a place for everything. Like, diet soda drinkers, some of them interact with the functional soda category.