Olipop: Ben Goodwin

28:44Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and after five years of trial and error, Ben has finally developed a probiotic beverage that tastes good enough to sell. But now he needs to raise some money to get it out there. And for that, he needs something else. I knew I needed a business partner. You know, I think most folks, most institutional investors would probably say, hey, this guy's brilliant, but I'm not sure that I trust him to manage my money. You knew that alone you would not be taken seriously enough. You thought you needed a partner. Yeah. And I also just, you know, I also feel like in my early 20s, I had been probably probably was just naturally a bit more arrogant.

29:29You know, it's the insecurity of being smart enough to be smart, but being young enough to just, you know, not know enough about the world. and I felt it was important that I find somebody to counterbalance any weak spots that I had. I mean, three of the four years I was in the R &D process, I was looking for a business partner. I actually went through three or four rounds of looking for a business partner. I had one for a while. We didn't work out. We divorced. That was messy. How long would you stay together? Like two, three months or? No, she and I worked together probably about nine, 10 months.

30:06Wow. So that's a long time to kind of come to the conclusion that it's not going to work out. Yeah, that's right. And it was challenging. And I was back out of cash. I mean, they were a high net worth individual, but it wasn't the right fit. Ben, I'm curious, because I think this is particularly interesting and useful for people listening, which is how did you know that person was not the right partner? I think that the cleanest way to analyze it was you really do need someone just mercilessly obsessed as you are on what's important about what you're doing, right? They can't have a problem rolling their sleeves up.

30:46You're co-pilots together in a plane that barely flies that's going 1 ,000 miles an hour. So you have got to be tight and focused. Yeah. And look, good entrepreneurs don't let anything go to waste. And so even when something absolutely implodes in their face and it's really, really painful, you've got to take a really useful lesson out of that. And I realized that a lot of my stress was actually coming from my own ego and that the best way to navigate this situation was staying your size. So I think a lot of times when we feel insecure, we either shrink ourselves or we blow ourselves up to try to deal with the perceived threat or the trigger.

31:42And there's a real strength in staying your size and saying, you know, I'm not going to be reactive to what ultimately is probably another person's ego. I'm not going to shrink myself, but I'm also not going to expand myself and go into this spiral that consumes me. And so that was actually a super valuable lesson that I learned out of that. All right. So you go through a breakup with this one partner. But I guess you eventually get connected with someone who would become your next partner, this guy David Lester. Yeah. And from what I gathered, I mean, he had a lot of experience in beverage, right?

32:23I mean, like he had just left a pretty big job at Diageo at the beverage company, right? Yeah. You know, we talked on the phone. He's from northern UK. And, you know, that tends to be a fairly emotionally monotone group of folks like Liverpool area. And so I remember the first time I talked to him on the phone, I was like, this guy is not interested in working with me. But then I met with him two weeks later in a cafe in Palo Alto. and we really actually hit it off. And, you know, what's also very funny is that he had a job lined up. He had like a safe job lined up that was down the street from where his wife was working.

33:06And they had this, this like picturesque fantasy of we're going to be in San Francisco. We're going to work these great safe jobs. We're going to see each other on our lunch breaks. and then wow he came home from the lunch meeting with me and his wife took one look at his face and she was like ah you're gonna go do this thing with this guy aren't you and I think and he looked at her and was like yeah I think I probably am I totally you know and I actually did ultimately make him the CEO of that venture. And one of the reasons why we landed there was again, going back to now we're starting to reach out to investors and raise capital.

33:54And look, I just, I kind of wanted permissibility to be myself. And I thought that the kind of more straight man that David tends to be. And again, we've both changed a lot over the last decade. But at that point in time, that's kind of how the dynamic, you know, I think that people really love to create categorizations for other folks. So it allowed people to put me in the, oh yeah, he's the kind of brilliant, mad scientist-y guy. And here's the kind of corporate guy. And it allowed them to categorize us in a way that made them feel comfortable at the time. I mean, he knew beverage, right? Because he had been at Diageo, but he probably didn't know.

34:41I'm assuming he didn't know much about gut microbiome or probiotics or stuff like that. Yeah, he knew next to nothing about it. So when he tried my products, he was like, we've had teams working on stevia sweetened products at Diageo for so many years. I've tried more stevia sweetened products than I can count. And challenging because stevia has a bitter aftertaste. I developed my own Stevia blend to sweeten the drink with because I didn't like any of the technology that was on the market. So this is one of the most skillful formulations I've ever tasted involving Stevia. And then I just lambasted him with three hours of my obsession with the microbiome and health and how this all rolled up into the greater good for society.

35:29He walked away, you know, very impacted by this dude is very serious about this and he wants to change the world. All right. So you joined forces and and he becomes you decide that he's going to become the CEO. And you start to, I'm assuming, I think, start to pound the pavement to raise some cash so you can you can package and market this product. OB probiotic soda. And you guys, indeed, you raised about$2 million. Had the groundwork already been laid or was it hard to earn, to raise that money? Oh, it was very hard. It was very hard. It's just like you have the meeting and it's unclear whether they're going to move.

36:13And then they have, you have, you just have the, you get strung along often. And eventually the first chunk of funding, I think we raised about 900K in our first go. And it was just this assorted network that we had built up enough rapport with. But yeah, we built up enough groundswell. And actually it was really lucky because I think we'd been working for a little over a year with no salary at that point. And for David, that was like a very unusual experience. For me, it was somewhat normal, but for him, it was really unusual. And I think he was about at the level where he's like, I only have a couple more months of this and then I'm going to have to go find a real job.

36:53So we were pretty much at the end of the pier for David in terms of how much longer he could go without some cash capital inflow. But we kind of jerry-rigged enough partnerships together that gave folks faith and got enough people around the table writing checks at the same time that we pulled it in. All right, so you have the cash, and you've been working on this formulation, and you've had some experience in this business. You probably had some connections to like a bottling plant or a can. These were going to be in cans? So Obie was actually in a tall neck glass bottle with a crown cap. Oh, so like one of those Mexican colas, Coca-Cola bottles?

37:33Similar, yeah. Yeah. The generic glass shape. And tell me where you first started to sell it. Like, I mean, did you start to sell at small, like natural food stores in Santa Cruz? Santa Cruz. Yeah, that's the nice thing. You've got all these health food stores. It's a great place to go start pounding the pavement. You know, had the kombucha market not existed, I don't think there would have been a space for OB. But I think there was enough of an argument around, you know that your shoppers in this natural channel are interested in fermented drinks. What if they could have something that was more powerful but didn't taste like vinegar?

38:06And that was enough of a hook that folks started to give us a try. Got it. Okay. So does it get traction quickly? I can't imagine it got traction that fast. I would say it was like it definitely didn't perform poorly because, in fact, there was a need state for consumers who wanted to drink a fermented probiotic beverage that didn't really like the taste of kombucha, right? And Obie was lower sugar than most of the kombuchas that were on the shelf as well. And you, with Obie, you were doing like cherry vanilla flavor. You made a root beer flavor. That's right. So it just looked like, I mean, it was like soda.

38:51That was the whole goal. So what's the biggest non-water beverage that exists? It's soda, right? It's a$42 billion industry with 97 % household penetration. it's uh it's an absolute legacy product in the united states and i have this theory that a healthy soda is going to gain some traction and so you know we have the root beer cherry vanilla um we had an orange grapefruit and we had a lemon lime so those are our and it's this kind of broad enough blend that you can test it out but guess what our top seller was root beer yeah and that's when I was like, oh, here we go. So that was an insight because it wasn't the fruit drinks, fruit flavored ones.

39:34It was a root beer flavored one that people wanted. I think at one point it was 30, 40 % of our sales for the line. Wow. Okay. You guys launched this product, I think in late 2013 or maybe early 2014 in stores, right? No, that sounds about right. Yeah. Okay. And it lasted for about two and a half years. And then you guys were acquired. I help me understand what happened what was going on I mean at its height I mean imagine in two years you never never ever got close to profitability right yeah so the the version that I can legally communicate is that we got acquired um you know the reality is we actually were we weren't having a drop off of product traction uh the product was continuing to grow I think we were, I mean, slower in comparison.

40:31But after that kind of, you know, two-ish years, we were up at about a million bucks in revenue. Really? Yeah, we were checking along. A million dollars. Yeah. It's not bad. It's pretty great. So it wasn't like I was looking at our performance and was dissatisfied. It was going along. But it just got to the point where, hey, it's untenable with the kind of current corporate structure that we have and the partnerships that we have. We simply just can't continue this. And in late 2016, we finally kind of washed our hands of the business. So safe to say that you and David did not walk away from that experience flush with cash yourselves.

41:09I had just about recouped my R &D budget. But yeah. Well, I mean, you'd put four years into developing it and then another three years trying to. So this is seven years of your life, right? Yeah. Was it, I mean, you're talking about it like, you know, and then we did this and this, but I have to imagine this was emotionally painful. I mean, 100 % there were moments when exasperatedly I would say I just set seven years of my life on fire. That's how in certain moments it felt. Yeah. On the flip side of the coin, I had gotten a lot of really useful market data. I had proved out the hypothesis that I was exploring, which was are consumers actually ready for a health contributing soda?

42:08And I developed a lot of good relationships. And because of how we had exited, I had retained those relationships. Yeah. And part of it was, you know, learning to trust myself has really been a lifelong journey for me. You know, coming out of a high trauma childhood, that's a trust in general is not a strong suit of mine. Learning how to filter out the noise and figure out how to act on my instincts and my intuitions and my survival instinct has been key. But I think the other thing is, you know, to have a certain amount of self-respect for the fact that I had been in the trenches for years and years and years learning how to survive.

42:55So when this thing unwound, right, and you were basically back to square one, I'm assuming there were some restrictions on what you were allowed to do, probably not allowed to directly compete for a while with the company you were leaving. Yeah. So I, yeah, I basically signed a document saying I wouldn't go back into probiotics. So you were, but that had been your life. So you're now. I know. So probiotics, done. So you've got to figure out the next thing. So first of all, what did you do in the weeks and months after that ended? Did you start to think right away, okay, what am I going to do next?

43:36Or did you kind of wallow? Or did you and David go your separate ways for a while? So, I mean, look, David, I think, you know, my impression is that was the most challenging life experience that David had had full stop. Yeah, he gave up a great steady job to go do this thing with you. And he walked away after a few years, probably with very little or no cash out of it. Yeah, I mean, again, we made enough that we were able to live off of that and use it to start to start Olipop. But yeah, it certainly wasn't the outcome that we were looking for. But it's also, you know, I don't know, you may know this about Europe, and maybe it's changing, but the entrepreneur culture is quite different in Europe as well.

44:20So if you fail as an entrepreneur, at least it's the way that David described it to me. He's like, if you fail as an entrepreneur in the UK, it's very shameful. Yeah. It's not like, yeah, woo, you failed, draw some. It's not like the Bay Area where they're like, how many times have you failed? Yeah, cool. Exactly. So it's a little less plucky to that effect. And it's just been very, very, very, very stressful. I mean, it was, we got properly slapped in the face. Now, again, as somebody who'd been getting slapped in the face for years, I was like, it was a particularly brutal experience. And I also had a certain amount of that experience.

45:00I think David, so David and I did, it's not like we lost contact, but we did take a little breathing space. I was like, okay, I'm like in my late-ish 20s and I suddenly just got a small pile of cash. And so I'm thinking, awesome. I don't have to immediately go find a job or something. And my whole life I had wanted to go to Japan. And so I'm like, I'm going to Japan. So I spent about two weeks. I went to five or six cities. I walked 170 miles. and one of the things I wanted to do while I was over there was study their beverage market because I have always been very fond of Japanese formulation.

45:47It's nuanced, it's balanced, it's subtle, it's intriguing. The flavor profiles are intriguing. And I started seeing some drinks that were over there that had fiber in them. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting that they've got all these drinks with fiber. So you basically start to kind of – I mean you're essentially banned from working in probiotics from this contract. But in a sense – and maybe you've only recently come to this realization. That was a gift that they gave you because it forced you to look at a different part of this. I mean you were an expert in drinks and beverages at this point.

46:26But you couldn't do probiotics. But you could do prebiotics. Yeah, 100%. This new research around prebiotics, which is basically the food that bacteria essentially in our gut eats, right? I mean to sort of oversimplify it. And a lot of it comes from these like certain fibers, non-digestible fibers that encourages bacteria to grow. Good bacteria. Yeah. And tell me when you start to think, okay, maybe that's the thing. Maybe if I go back into beverage, I should focus on this thing called this prebiotic function. Yeah, absolutely. And just to be clear, I totally understand why the category is often referred to as the prebiotic soda category, right?

47:14Because that's kind of the salient ingredient that it's easy to understand. But the bigger nutritional platform that the product offers is also important. Which is fiber? It's fiber prebiotics plus nutritional diversity, right? So we've got an ingredient mix called OliSmart, which has eight different ingredients in it. And again, the reason why that's important is because, like, so we've got three different sources of fiber right now. And so you're getting a large bolus of fiber, but you're not getting it from just the same prebiotic ingredient. And the reason why that's important is because if you are trying to benefit the microbiome, you want to bring up multiple strains of beneficial bacteria simultaneously.

47:56If you overfeed one strain, you actually can just create a new imbalance. So the complex kind of functional formula is designed to be beneficial to digestive health, and it's been pretty meticulously arranged so that it's a bit more comprehensive in its nature. All right. So this is around 2017. And I think somewhere during that year, you reach out to David, your partner at OB, and you ask him if he wants to go in with you on this new idea. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Eventually, I did ring David up and say, hey, I think I got another one. And he was, you know, I think he'll admit he was a little gun shy at first.

48:47We had both felt pretty challenged by our prior experience. And I think it was a real moment of reflection. Are we willing to sign ourselves up for that again? And obviously, I think he got he ended up getting excited about the kind of strategy of formulation. But I think ultimately, you know, the thing that I landed on, which I communicated to him, I think resonated with him was, hey, man, we didn't finish the mission. Like we owe it to, I don't know, the world, consumers, whatever, to ourselves to get back out there and finish it. but I am only doing this again if I am coming back 10 times better and 10 times stronger with all the learnings from everything I've taken before and if we're going back and we're going to do it again we are going to punch through the board.

49:40When we come back in just a moment have Ben and David punch through the board. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

50:05Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017, and Ben has gotten back together with David to launch yet another beverage. This one, a prebiotic soda with fiber that encourages the growth of good gut bacteria. So what we felt that we took away from OB was that consumers didn't like the word soda, but they wanted to drink soda. And especially with like low calorie ingredients, you're building a structure where all of the elements have to click together just right to create a really compelling illusion. Where did you start to experiment with the powders and the ingredients and mixing it into a beverage?

50:57I mean, literally my kitchen. I mean, by this time, this stuff is somewhat second nature to me, right? I know who to call when I need to go find a bunch of samples of ingredients. I'm assuming like you're looking at chicory root or like I know you looked at marshmallow root and Jerusalem artichoke. And basically you have to you have to powderize it, mix it into a beverage and hope that it still tastes good. Like it's still going to be delicious. Well, that it has to stay in solution. Right. And it has to it has to survive manufacturing. So our Olly Smart is cassava root, chicory root, Jerusalem artichoke.

51:35That's our fiber blend. And you're mixing it with maybe fruit juices and soda water, right? I mean, initially, probably something like that, right? You know, I have always used a SodaStream. A SodaStream. Okay, yeah, I gotcha. It's hilarious how simple my lab has always been. And it's still as simple today as it was back when I started. It's two scales that are very expensive, but one goes out three decimal places, one goes out two. It's a Vitamix, it's pipettes, and it's a SodaStream. And I still use that exact same setup. We have a more complex lab in the Bay Area that we use now. But when I'm formulating, that's still— Just to start testing out.

52:21Yeah, you can do. So you're playing around with this stuff. And while you're thinking about this, right, you know, because there are a lot of products out there that start by focusing on their health claims or the benefits of the product. And they soon discover that actually a lot of consumers don't care. They just like that taste good. So when you were coming up with this, who are you thinking the consumer might be? I mean, again, and forgive me, people listening, because I know there's a lot of generalizations here, but you do have to think in categories, at least initially. Were you thinking like yoga moms?

52:57Were you thinking women rather than men? Like, who did you think would this product appeal to? Yeah, that is funny because call me unsophisticated, but I don't – I certainly haven't historically thought in demographics. That is one of the nice things about going after something as large as a soda market. You just thought, I'm going to make something that people want because they want to get healthier. Well, yeah. And also, all of our data shows that you are 100 % correct. I mean, in terms of the earlier comment you made, good luck trying to get a bunch of people to switch their behavior if something doesn't lead with delicious flavor.

53:37And when we talk to our consumers and try to figure out, hey, what's contributed to our kind of growth and the high level of kind of advocacy that our customers have for the product. It's it really a lot of it is the emotional and flavor relationship first. In fact, that's core to my approach to formulation is every flavor has to have a hook in it that registers in some part of the brain in a nostalgic way. Like, oh, Oh, cream soda or orange soda or yeah. A great example, you're totally right. A great example is our tropical punch, right? So I grew up drinking red Hawaiian fruit punch. So good.

54:22I want one right now. And there's a really specific flavor note in there. Yeah. You instantly know what flavor I'm talking about when I reference it, right? So our tropical punch has a toned down version of that same note in it. Yeah. So you're hopefully creating historical referencing but future-focused ownable formulas. And I should mention you were not using sugar. You were using a Stevia blend, like a not – right? You wouldn't register a lot of sugar in the final product. Yeah, that's right. So I tried a bunch of stuff. I tried monk fruit. I tried Stevia. I tried all of those. I landed on Stevia at the end of the day because the technology is farther along for Stevia.

55:08but obviously understand that for some folks especially less kind of skillfully put together formulas can be challenging Okay, tell me about the name How did you come up with the name Olipop? It's a great name, but where did it come from? Yeah, thank you So the Oli is short for oligosaccharides which is a family of prebiotics that it's used in the product. Got it, okay Pop is soda Right. Okay, great. So you get the name and you started out. So you were ready to launch and you're going to launch with, I think, three flavors, ginger, lemon, strawberry, vanilla, and cinnamon cola. Yes. How did you, so again, did you go back to the playbook from your previous company?

55:53Did you go to investors and start raising a bunch of money to get the funding to start canning this stuff or bottling it and then distributing it? Yeah. So all the kind of branding work, formulation work, I think even maybe like the initial test run, that was all self-funded by - You guys funded that with the proceeds from the sale of your previous business, which wasn't much, but it was enough to get this off the ground. Exactly. And then obviously we knew, hey, we're going to need to raise some additional capital. and actually a lot of the folks that we went back and spoke to were the investors from obi that we felt like we had we particularly enjoyed working with right um and you know look i think what what some of these folks um saw was that we had absorbed a lot of the lessons from from obi um and that the new product was at a a much higher it was just a better level i remember one of our Bay Area investors tried an early version of strawberry vanilla and was just like, oh, this is it.

56:51This is going to become a cult classic. And it absolutely has become a cult classic of ours. Help me understand before we even got into stores, what was the value proposition? What were you going to be able to present to consumers for why they should drink this because it was low sugar or no sugar. I mean, a lot of people don't want sugar. They just want a nice soda. Yeah. But were you going to say, oh, and this also has a bunch of fiber and it's good for your gut? Like, what were you prepared to say that was, you know, that wouldn't put you in trouble? Yeah. Look, one of the things that I love about the territory is more of a understood inevitability now.

57:34But at the time, even just the concept and the communication of a healthy soda was at that time an intrinsic contradiction. Like we felt like we had insider data that showed people want this. We also knew that it was like a, that contradiction creates mental stickiness because you look at it and you go like, healthy soda? Is, yes, no, I don't know. Like, and then, okay, cute packaging though. I'll try it. Oh my God, it tastes great. Oh, then I look at the nutrition facts panel. Then I look at the ingredients. So I had faith that if it tasted right and the pack was right, that just the concept of the healthy soda would create enough kind of mental noise for people that they'd want to try it.

58:19And I was right. So, all right. So you launched this product in 2019 in about 40 grocery stores all in the Bay Area. And I remember seeing it because I remember seeing a strawberry vanilla soda and I was like, oh, that looks interesting. I'm going to try that. But I'm also an outlier because not everyone's like that. But so how did they do? How did you get in those stores? But then what? I mean, there's like hundreds of beverage options in those stores. One million percent. We were really, really lucky that the data was incredible, basically from the word go. How? Why? What explains it? I mean, it was another beverage in the cooler.

59:04Yeah, but I think, you know, it starts with you, the outlier, right? Starts with the, and that's also why we chose to launch in the natural channel because there are more folks with a little more expendable cash. And there's folks who are willing to try novel things outside of the norm in order to pursue their health. But it's also a product and a concept whose time has come. There is a quite a deep pain point for a lot of American consumers that love soda, that have migrated away from the category because of how unhealthy it is. And by offering something that really scratches that itch, but the deeper you dig into the science, the more you actually come away feeling, wow, they're not messing around.

59:51This is actually contributing a benefit. That is the kind of equation that develops organic traction. All right. Let me ask you a health-related question here, which is, as you know, as some – we've talked about this. I'm super into fiber and having a good balance of vegetables, nuts, and seeds and things like that. What's the argument? And like, could you, would you argue that, yeah, you know, if you just drink Olipop, you're going to get enough fiber where you don't actually need to worry about eating almonds and, you know, roughage and kale and chia seeds that give you fiber. So I really appreciate you asking that question.

1:00:39One of the most common things I see in articles that are discussing the category, usually with a hatchet-y style, is experts agree that Olipop and comparable beverages are no replacement for a healthy, balanced diet. I totally agree. All of that said, 90 % of Americans are not getting adequate levels of fiber. 90%. And arguably, the FDA's recommended daily allowance of fiber at 28 grams is already a bit of a pittance. It's too low. Compared to what has actually historically been consumed by humans, and it's lower than the WHO recommendations around fiber consumption. So Olipop has never been designed to replace a healthy diet.

1:01:34It's meant to help to complement the diet of a population that is chronically deficient in this absolutely essential nutrient. So essentially what you're saying is, look, hey, you got to eat the broccoli and chia seeds if you can. And instead of grabbing a Diet Coke, you might as well have this because it's just going to add to your total fiber consumption. A billion percent. And the other thing that I find really funny about it is I don't hear the same level of outcry around protein supplementation. Right? Like, you know, nobody kind of bats an eyelash if somebody throws a scoop of protein in their smoothie.

1:02:12Well, what do you think Ollipop's doing? It's doing the same thing. It's supplementing, but critically, it's doing it in a way that's incredibly enjoyable, and you might just use it to replace something that's not good for you. I mean, I know that in the first year, you did$850 ,000 in revenue, which is pretty great. You did this all with a very – and I guess we should mention, you did raise some seed money from those former investors, a little over$2 million. So with that money, you had some flexibility, right? You could build up inventory and do some marketing and maybe hire a couple people.

1:02:54But one of the things that you guys also did in the first, I think, year or so is you went into Erewhon. It's a very fancy natural food store, mainly in LA, and it's frequented by celebrities. They love Erewhon. And so when you're in Erewhon, there's a good chance that a celebrity is going to pick up on your beverage. Was that also, I mean, you know, I think that was the first store you went into in Southern California. Yeah, you're right. I think it was one of the first. But do you know who else frequents the Erewhon aisles? Is the Walmart buying team. The Walmart buying team. They go there because they're looking for cool things.

1:03:32They're looking for the future. So yes, it's the celebrity and the influencer crowd, but it's also senior buyers at mass grocery. And so that was also strategic because you wanted to be in Target and Walmart fairly quickly? Well, we wanted to be ready to transition when the time was right. So Walmart's one of our biggest customers now, but they approached us to go into the stores about 18 months before we felt ready to do it. Yeah. Um, so it was, what we knew from the beginning is we are looking to create a mainstream product that can go toe to toe with soda. We want to start in the natural channel to build up our early adopters, to build up our revenue base and, and our rudimentary proof of concept and brand awareness.

1:04:22And we want to build the brand and the flavor profile such that, so that it's, it's ready to jump the fence and go mainstream. Right. Because I think a lot of times brands from an advertising perspective and a flavor profile perspective will over leverage their product to be successful in the natural channel. And then it really struggles to gain traction in mainstream channels. When the pandemic hit in 2020, you've been out for a while, right? For about a year, less than a year, but you've been out. But still, like, I imagine you didn't have a huge marketing and advertising budget at that point.

1:05:03I don't think you did. How did that – I mean, it turned out that year was very good for you. Yeah. But how did people discover the product when they weren't going and spending a lot of – you know, people were just popping in and out of grocery stores quickly that year? Well, and you're never – you're doing no demoing, right? Right. And so that was a really fascinating experience because obviously at the beginning of the year when the shutdowns occurred, everybody was rightfully losing their minds. The prevailing logic at that point in time would have been this is an impulse purchase that people pick up when they're grabbing their sandwich.

1:05:40It turned out that for those customers that had discovered us and basically were falling in love with the brand, they were already considering it in an essential shop for the week. So people weren't just going in and grabbing a can. They were going in and grabbing enough cans for the whole week because they were already making it a regular part of their consumption habits. But that was for me this real epiphany moment of like, oh my God, something is happening here that's at a whole different level than I could have expected it would be. You guys are, I think, just hit profitability, right? We have been profitable every month this year, and we'll be profitable through the year.

1:06:22Amazing. And you've, of course, had other rounds of raising money. And I think this year, 2024, you're on track to hit possibly half a billion dollars in sales. Looks like, yeah, just south. So, all right, tell me what the game plan is here. I mean, Coca-Cola,$280 billion market cap. Pepsi,$234 billion. I have seen you quoted, and maybe you, you know, I don't know. basically saying, look, we want to kind of take those companies on. Yeah. I mean, look, I is a tricky territory guy, very tricky territory. The way I would describe it is we have had triple digit growth every year since inception. In fact, in 2020, we almost had quadruple digit growth yeah um and there is a lot of room headroom left to hit anything that even remotely resembles a ceiling so uh exactly what that future looks like is still unclear but for right now we are just a hundred percent focused on continuing to go after the enormous market opportunity that's still in front of us.

1:07:39Because the way that I'm conceptualizing this is this is the third wave of soda, right? You had traditional soda, and then there was diet soda in the 1980s. I think in three or four years, diet soda became 25 % of all soda sales. And now we're looking at similar trajectory in terms of the rate at which this category is achieving household penetration. I think the other piece of this as well is that traditional soda's pipeline of young consumers has collapsed. And over the last 10 years, there's been a 60 % reduction in, let's call it Gen Z, Gen Alpha, traditional soda consumption. That's exactly – I mean, we're a big tent.

1:08:21We still work really great with Gen X and millennials. And we over-index with these younger consumers. So I think we've got a really great opportunity to be the spearhead of soda, which is a great American institution, doesn't need to die off. It just needs to evolve. Yeah. So now the question is, you talk about the mission and things like distributing it around the world. And the obvious answer to that is Coca-Cola or PepsiCo. I mean, they have the biggest distribution networks on the planet. I mean, they can take a brand doing a million dollars a year today and turn it into a hundred million dollar brand tomorrow.

1:09:02At some point, you've got a bunch of investors. You guys have raised money over the last couple of years. It's right. It's like go public or sell. So it's probably too early to talk about it now, but it seems like there is a world where if the right partner comes along and says, hey, you know what? You guys have crushed this. we're not going to compete with you. We just want to take it over. I mean, they did it with Topo Chico. They've done it with Honest Tea. I'm talking about Coca-Cola. You know, other big brands have taken on smaller brands and really continued to make them and distribute them.

1:09:39And they're still good products. Yeah. I mean, look, again, I'm going to artfully dodge the specifics of - The artful dodger. Yeah. And it's so artful that I'm just going to say it out loud um but like i i would say i like obviously i hear what you're getting at um if i just exit olipop and i'm like oh yeah i've got my small mountain of cash oh it'll be it'll be a large mountain of cash if you exit let's be it will be i mean let's be honest there's nothing wrong with that i'm just it's gonna be a lot of cash i'm sitting on my cash and then 10 years goes by olipop has disappeared or i don't like what it's doing in the world anymore i will not have consider that a win.

1:10:20But going public is no walk in the park either, right? There's a whole bunch of minefields associated with that choice. What's nice is with the way that we're growing, I have no plans to sell the company right now. So I'm fortunate that we don't feel a lot of pressure from our investors because they're all so up on their money already that we're doing fine. I'm sure they want you to wait, actually. They have a range of opinions. Yeah. Okay. I got you. Ben, when you think about where you've landed, you know, and the journey you took, right? Everything from, you know, meeting David Lester or, you know, working at kombucha place or I don't know, everything that happened along the way.

1:11:07How much of where you are do you attribute to luck? And how much do you think has to do with the work you put in, the hard work and your skill? Yeah, I mean, it would be absolutely asinine to not acknowledge that it's a mix. I was born with a brain that has allowed me to do things that are hard for a lot of people. I'm sure my genetics have played into my resiliency. I grew up in a really bad situation, but I also grew up in a nice area. So one of the things that happened when I was a teenager going through my metamorphosis, I was able to go for walks and just psychoanalyze myself with my head in the clouds for like three hours at a stint.

1:11:52If I grew up in like a dangerous neighborhood, I wouldn't have been able to do that. And there's where we are in the health and wellness industry and consumer receptivity and the kombucha coming up, paving the way for OB and then paving the way for digestive health. Um, there's a million of those different instances where a hundred percent I was, I was given a good hand. There's a bunch of other spots as well where I was given a terrible hand and that's obviously life. And so then there's how you respond to it and how you build a framework of meaning around it. Um, and also how you facilitate self-awareness and self-development through all those different experiences.

1:12:32That's Ben Goodwin, co-founder of Olipop. By the way, the company just announced that its soda will be sold at the L.A. Clippers' new sports arena, the Intuit Dome. It's a major coup for the brand because normally Coke and Pepsi have exclusive deals that prevent any competition at sports stadiums. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at GuyRoz.com.

1:13:13This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramteen Eravlui and Sam Paulson. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Kwasi Lee. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Devin Schwartz, Carrie Thompson, Alex Chung, John Isabella, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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