OLIPOP’s gutsy play to dethrone Coke and Pepsi, with Ben Goodwin

0:00If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups. And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Hey, everyone. Bob Safian here. Today, we're revisiting a terrific conversation I had with the founder of Olipop, the prebiotic soda that's grown to a nearly$2 billion valuation and inspired competition from new startups to major global brands.

0:46We call this episode Olipop's gutsy play to dethrone Coke and Pepsi, and you're going to lap it up. So settle in. Here's Ben Goodwin of Olipop. We've been growing triple digits every single year. In 2020, we grew 960 % in one year. It's like when, you know, the videos, somebody's like riding a rocket and their cheeks are, you know, flapping. That is what it has felt like. Like, oh my God. Like our leaders have to grow at a pace that is inhuman. Between the, like, you can't just do all your work, which is already inhuman, you have to grow as a person and as a leader. I will either be one of the bigger unlocks for this company or I will be the biggest bottleneck.

1:45That's Ben Goodwin, co-founder and CEO of Olipop, the super successful probiotic soda brand. With a mission to make soda that's actually healthy for you and flavors that have captured the taste buds of Gen Z and millennials, Olipop is challenging the$60 billion soda industry. PepsiCo recently shelled out$2 billion to buy Olipop rival Poppy, while Coke launched its own competitor, Simply Pop. I wanted to talk to Ben to hear how he and his company are navigating the turbulence of rapid growth and rising competition, what leadership lessons he's had to embrace along the way, and whether healthy soda is actually healthy or just a TikTok-fueled fad.

2:25Ben doesn't disappoint, so let's get into it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

2:38I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Ben Goodwin, co-founder, CEO, and formulator of Olipop. Ben, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Bob. So I have to start by asking you, your title includes formulator. What does that mean? What's a formulator? Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny because I'm technically kind of a bit of a formulator first, CEO second in terms of the arc of my history as a... Formulator first. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean... That's the top of your resume. That's the first thing on the LinkedIn page is formulator. It's the craft I have the deepest relationship with in terms of the amount of time.

3:23Obviously, Olipop has grown a lot. We've had triple-digit growth every year out the gate. So I've had to learn how to be a decent CEO under really intense conditions. But I've been a formulator since I was effectively 20. The product science, flavor chemistry, all that kind of stuff. I essentially, I do all of the formulation for all of the Olipop flavors. You know, I'm fortunate enough now to have an in-house lab that supports my efforts and supports various kind of R &D stuff for Olipop. But I still lead all of the flavor development. I mean, is being so hands-on, is it important for the business or just something that like you love personally?

4:07I mean, I know you, I heard you started in your laundry room. Is that still your preferred laboratory? No, my laundry room was my upgrade. I started just like in the kitchen. Then in my last place, I actually managed to get it in the laundry room. And in terms of your question, like it is fun for me. It's an art form for me. And it's actually my most direct, unfiltered kind of personal expression to our customers. and then I just I guess you know I'm also fortunate enough to be adequately skillful that you know it's that product quality has contributed to our success and and look at this point it's like a really it's not convenient at all like it's really like a huge pain in the ass to try to run the business and formulate but um yeah but you're not giving up the formulating I don't know maybe it'll happen one day, maybe it won't.

5:05So for folks who are less familiar, Olipop's known as a functional soda. Like, what does that mean? What is a prebiotic soda versus a probiotic soda? Give us the landscape. Soda itself has a really, really interesting, very deep history, right? It goes back a couple hundred years. There's like Middle East roots, there's European roots. So in the U.S., Like, obviously, full sugar soda in a myriad of forms existed for many, many decades, especially kind of starting in the late 1800s. It actually wasn't until 1943 that the federal government stepped in and told Coke and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper that they could no longer call soda healthy.

5:46That's how long it was they were saying that it was healthy, even though by that time it was like loaded with caffeine and sugar. you know and then in the 60s and 70s and then really peaking in the 80s you had diet soda come in right and that was this awareness that hey all the sugar's not great for you let's go with these kind of artificial sweeteners and that's it's been a kind of that two horse race for a really long time functional soda which i am fortunate enough to effectively have been the one that created the category, and I've been working on it since about 2010, is basically this idea that soda can actually be health contributing.

6:24I was looking at the evolution of the science around digestive and microbiome health and decided that this kind of nutritional intervention was, I thought, was actually a superior strategy. The base of our kind of nutritional pillars are fiber, prebiotics, and nutritional diversity. So sometimes when I hear people say the prebiotic soda category, I'm like, well, that's true, but that's just part of the story because a lot of the other competitors that have come into the space are kind of just looking to capitalize for the most part on a trend. But it only is kind of actually technically a part of what we offer.

6:58The health benefits, not everyone's on board about them. You know, there've been class action lawsuits, not about your claims, but about claims from others. is Olipop actually healthy for me or is it just better for me than traditional soda? You know, I'm actually so grateful that you asked that question. I don't want to wade into trash talking territory here, but I do think a lot of the other entrants, they've either got a really small amount of total fiber or they're putting some of that fiber and it's not even stable in their product. You kind of really want like a blend of different high quality prebiotics.

7:33It's how you get to the best outcome. That's at least my formulation philosophy. um olipop is actually healthy we have done multiple in vitro clinical trials now at purdue we have a partnership with their stability lab we have a partnership with their complex carbohydrates laboratory and we've looked at microbiome and digestive health outputs we saw incredible bifidogenesis we saw the fermentation of multiple forms of short-chain fatty acids and then we just finished our first uh pilot human clinical trial and we were looking at blood sugar stability and blood sugar response. And basically of the folks that we studied, it kept their blood sugar stable for a full three hours.

8:15So like if you start stabilizing people's blood sugar response, you start benefiting their digestive health, microbiome outputs. I'm, you know, I don't know exactly what level of data most people need to classify something as healthy, but I'd say that certainly meets my criteria. My goal is to say health and wellness should be actually contributing to your health and wellness, and you should have some empirical data to validate that. If you're going to ask consumers to spend a premium, you want to know that you're actually giving them real outcomes for what they're spending. You mentioned how fast your business has been growing, and it's one of the fastest growing U.S.

8:59beverage brands ever. He recently raised funds at, I don't know, around a$2 billion valuation. But you do have this intense competition, right? Poppy, which is known for these Super Bowl ads that was recently acquired by PepsiCo for just under$2 billion. Coca-Cola's launched. Simplipop. Like, how much does that change the game when the sort of the big players step in? I really want to see this category live up to its full potential. You know, you've got soda, which is a$60 billion, 98 % household penetration market in the United States, right? If we can do good in that category and use that as a kind of a Trojan horse to drive healthy outcomes for people, it's really powerful.

9:43In terms of like big players entering the space, to be honest with you, I think it's fantastic. Some of the largest brands and the largest players in the soda and beverage space in the world getting into your category goes a long way to massively validate what you're doing. And so, like, hats off to Poppy. I know that getting out, selling their business was really important to them. Coke as well, getting involved. It's like, to be honest with you, it's a bit of an honor. One of your investors is Indra Nooyi, the former PepsiCo CEO. I imagine that PepsiCo may have approached you at the same time as they did Poppy.

10:19I don't know. Do you consider tying up with a bigger place? Look, I mean, you know, I can't I can't really speak to that with a lot of detail. I don't want to be overly coy in terms of Olipop does need to create a liquidity event. Right. The reality is we've taken on investor capital. You just pointed to that. That was our final round into the business. We're like very, very fully profitable and really liquid, pun intended. but um uh we have raised investor capital which means you need to generate liquidity then there's multiple ways that you can go through mna um there's obviously ipo going public and so that is where right now we're just preserving optionality i mentioned poppy's super bowl ad earlier they spent i don't know 16 million dollars on a on a one minute spot you more than that yeah you didn't make that investment and instead you tease them for their spending on social media which they then called online bullying.

11:14Like, is that kind of back and forth with them? Is that strategic? Is that what customers want from brands? You're laughing. I have no idea. The online bullying thing is really good. It's really good. First of all, there's a difference between the stuff that I personally authorize and sometimes the stuff that the social media team decides that they want to get up to, right? And that was a moment where, to be honest with you, there's a little bit of a gap, right? I was actually at a friend's wedding in Puerto Rico. I was not the one hitting send on the whatever platform it is that we were commenting on.

11:50But at the same time, I kind of understand where the consumers were coming from, which is like we do live in a time with an enormous amount of income inequality. Whatever it was about how Poppy showed up, that hit a nerve for a lot of people. They made their own voices heard. I don't need to add to that conversation. And, you know, our team did say a couple of things, but then they stopped. And that's good because they probably would have been fired if they hadn't. And and we just kind of went on with their lives. But, yeah, I think that we we don't spend the same amount of money on marketing that that that Poppy does.

12:24I'm OK with that because a lot of what has driven our business has been organic demand and organic word of mouth. That is like real sustainable growth that we're experiencing. and I'm really proud of that. And as long as you can continue to grow the business like that, you should. I think that we will probably have increases to spend in marketing as we go, but it's okay for us as brands to have different strategies in terms of how we approach growth. I asked about the social media in part because you guys have been very successful, popular on TikTok. Your videos are praised for not being highly produced, for feeling authentic, which is easier said than done for a lot of brands.

13:06Well, you know, 70 % of our content creators and social media are first, they're not professional influencers. They're first time creators. They're not professionals at all. And we really love that because they're real customers. They're real fans of the product. That's a big part of how you get to that authenticity. The other thing that I love about it is we have this really high level of brand affinity from our customers, even as celebrities that we've ended up partnering with. um they're big i was gonna ask you about that because you've got you've got a slew of celebrities as investors and they write the jonas brothers and gwyneth paltrow mindy kaling like does does that help your brand the celebrity that we have the highest um level of relationship with is actually camilla cabello we got connected to her because she was out photographed drinking a bunch of strawberry vanilla a bunch of times and eventually we're like hey do you are you a fan And it just kind of worked out with an investment and then an actual talent deal between us.

14:03We shot an ad with her. It was kind of an anti-celebrity celebrity ad. And she brought her, that's her real family in the ad. Like she brought her real family in to shoot that. And that, so the authenticity of the relationship we've been able to have for her, the way that she really gets what we're doing is that's the thing that's made it really thrive. and I mean I think you can build I think celebrities can be very useful but I think they're the most useful when the relationship is authentic and I just think like if a if a consumer sees that and feels like oh that's transactional I don't think it carries the same weight I mean how how much of your success do you feel like is from the marketing versus from the product.

14:49You know, like some people are like, oh, the product has to speak for itself. And other people are like, hey, I can sell anything. To my chagrin, actually, as a product guy, you can cut corners on your product. And if you're really effective in marketing, you know, again, to my chagrin, I think this is a bummer. But there are people who've built perfectly successful companies that way. I don't love it. It goes against kind of everything I stand for as an entrepreneur and again, it's like a formulator, but that is still technically an option. I think you're in much better territory though, if you upload, you know, you spent your upfront energy really getting your product in a great spot.

15:32I think we live in a world where let's just be like honest, like a lot of life is a scam. Everything's kind of trying to rip you off all the time, especially in the United States. And I think, you know, I think one of the things that really builds real brand affinity is when a consumer, a customer has an interaction with the brand and then goes like, oh, whoa, this actually delivered on what it said, right? This actually really gave me that satisfaction. I personally just like, that's so satisfying to me that I just like couldn't bring myself to build a company that was all marketing driven and, you know, no subs, all style, no substance.

16:12It's one thing to market a product well, but as Ben points out, delivering on that promise is where brands earn lasting trust. So how did Olipop survive what Ben calls, quote, the death hurdle of growth? And how are he and his leadership team dealing with rising pressure and expectations? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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17:48Then you get to focus on the cooking of the food and making the experience great. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Before the break, Olipop's Ben Goodwin explained why healthy soda is soaring in the marketplace. Now we talk about the leadership challenges and lessons in managing breakneck growth, including his own personal mental and emotional journey. Let's dive back in. You alluded earlier to the things you've had to learn moving from being a formulator to being, you know, a CEO. And obviously you've had a ton of growth. Growth has its own challenges. Are there lessons in that transition?

18:31I mean, I was looking, your revenue jumped from like 200 million to 500 million in a year. I mean, crazy, crazy kind of growth. Man, it has been, it's like when, you know, the videos, somebody's like riding a rocket and their cheeks are, you know, flapping. And that is what it is. That is what it has felt like. You just try to keep your physical and emotional sanity as a leader and all of that. The first death hurdle is 10 million. Getting from zero to 10 million, like your chances of death from zero to a million are just astronomically high. Your chances of death from one to 10 are still pretty high.

19:12You get to that 10 and you're like kind of on more stable ground, but really you got to then get up to 100 if you want to then be like breathing well. And then from there, it's okay, 200, 500. And then you add a billion, you're just in very, very rarefied territory. But like one of the things that I really saw, so we have something in the company called Olipop Leadership University. And it was, for me, it was just kind of based on the premise. It was exactly what we're talking about now. Holy s***. We've been growing triple digits every single year. In 2020, we grew 960 % in one year, which irritated me a little bit because I'm like, we're 40 % away from quadruple digit growth, right?

19:52We're just so close. But I'll take it. And, you know, and like, I really realized like, oh my God, like our leaders have to grow at a pace that is inhuman between the, like you can't just do all your work, which is already inhuman. You have to grow as a person and as a leader. It's like it takes every ounce of everything you've got and a lot of people still aren't going to make it. Well, guess where that was more true than anywhere else? Me, because I recognize like I will either be the one of the bigger unlocks for this company or I will be the biggest bottleneck. And you learn as you go through that process that leadership is like a really conscious effort.

20:42The best leaders are very, very conscious about how they're showing up. They're very conscious about what they're saying, what they're not saying, when they're saying it, what tone they're using. The other thing that you're learning about being a leader at a larger company is you're a systems engineer. Because you've still got to be able to sniff out bullshit and, like, see around corners and pivot. But you also have to become a systems engineer because you can't sit down with everybody in the business anymore. So now you have to think about how whole departments work and how they interrelate and how the sub-departments work.

21:10And do I have the right leaders sitting over the right verticals and all that kind of stuff? And you have to hire people who are better than you in every single area of the business. A lot of founders who become the senior leaders, basically what happens to them is they can't let go of control. And now you've got to be able to say, step away from that. A lot of leaders start to struggle with, well, what's my relevance? What am I good at anymore? And you've got to realize like your job is now to become a that systems engineered, but it's also you need to become an excellent leader of people. like you need to understand people you need to be more emotionally mature than you are today and that and so that means like maybe you need to go to therapy maybe you need to start dealing with some of your and that's a hard thing for a lot of people to to absorb you spent years sort of toiling away on an idea that you know other people kept saying was a crappy idea you know And you've kind of gone from being a renegade who is going against the grain to kind of, you know, which was motivating, right?

22:17To now like riding this wave of accolades and momentum. Like how much of an adjustment is that for you? Man, that's a great question, Bob. No one's ever asked me before. That's a really interesting question. I actually, I do have this like pretty defiant personality in a lot of ways, right? Which a lot of entrepreneurs do. and uh that's one of that that creates the grit right that's like that's like a big part of our makeup oftentimes both my co-founder and i experienced this lag where all of a sudden we both were like oh like we have all this power now and it's really weird we were just so used to being that underdog and now all of a sudden you've got some like momentum under your belt 200 million 400 plus blah blah blah and all of a sudden you're like the final boss in the interview of VPs and up and people are like nervous to talk to you and you're like an idea for people now and it's this whole weird thing and for a while it wasn't the right strategy I just didn't know how to deal with it I kind of stuck my head in the sand a little bit like I basically like I understood that like okay I gotta I know I need to start acting differently now I know I know I need to be responsible with my power but I don't want to deal with this whole being a thing for people thing and uh then you know and then i had to i eventually came to the point i was like actually they need me to be a thing like they kind of need it and it's like going back to like being conscious about your style like what is that right line where you're still authentic but you are becoming more skillful hopefully and you are recognizing that it's just it is part of your role and then how do you lean into that well as much as you can you know then it all of a sudden starts to become about like making sure that you don't lose touch with yourself in that as well i went through a period of that where okay like finally flipped over but then i like lost touch with myself a bit i didn't kind of know i had lost playing a role instead of being yourself and it's painful it's like physically and emotionally painful and and you it happens kind of gradually and you're overwhelmed so you don't see it happening and actually somewhat recently i've started to reclaim that center of gravity with myself and i was like oh thank god i did like that was what was missing you know so look i think you just like notice how i've spent a lot of time in this whole arc talking about interpersonal mechanics emotional mechanics maturity i think that like people really do not talk about that people go and get their mbas right and people talk about all this stuff like here's the three steps of strategy of how you do this and that like you're like if you get the right people around you and you're not so foolish as to not listen to them a lot of those skills are going to come with with by necessity and by learning, if you're good at learning.

25:21It's the emotional interpersonal development stuff where there's the most value and it's the most underrepresented in terms of what we discuss. And I think that's a shame. Now, as part of the reason I asked at the beginning about, you know, why you keep doing the formulating, because it's like sometimes you just got to do the stuff that feeds your soul, right? That keeps your energy up. You're so right. You know, self-aggrandizingly, I am also pretty freaking good at formulating and your, sorry, which is, let's like, that's embarrassing to say that out loud, but, uh, but I am pretty good. And, um, and also you're right.

26:02Like it is, it is a, for me, it's almost like an act of, uh, of service a little bit for our customers. You need all those skills. You need to know how acid works, how mouthfeel works, how sweetness works, how bitter, like you've got to know how all this stuff works how you know what's your ph to stabilize what are your bricks and titratable asses but you try to learn those things enough so that the art form can flow through which uh you know that does there is something really special and and grounding to me about that and you know you have all those butterflies you'd have almost like i made a song are people gonna like it as much as they like the last song when it works it's a great feeling so i there's the The stat that I saw that Alipop received half a million job applications last year, people wanting to work at the company.

26:52Is that right? That's kind of crazy. Yeah, so it's about 400 ,000. And yeah, that's a mind blur. How many people work at the company now? We have like 210. So first of all, massive hats off to the people team and the talent acquisition team. The year prior, I forget that. I think we had some like 84 ,000 applications. and it was like, it's officially harder to get into Olipop than Harvard. And then this last year, we had almost worth$100 ,000, and they were like, it's officially harder to get into Olipop than to become a professional NBA player in the United States. Wild s***, dude, wild s***.

27:31Obviously, I'm really grateful for that. By the way, if you have applied for Olipop and didn't get a job, now you know this stat. Please don't take it personally. So what's at stake for Olipop now? I mean, you're in 52 ,000 retail locations over, I don't know, 12 ,000 Starbucks outlets. You've also got your hardcore fans that buy from you directly. Yep. You're in one out of five households. Like, this is the dream for a lot of brands. Yeah, I know. I've got a bunch of different feelings about it. Like, you know, there's a part of me that from the beginning set off with like a very audacious vision, which is like, hey, let's go, let's go be this like third wave of soda.

28:14Let's go, let's go be as big as diet soda. And like, you know, let's go take it on. And in order to do that, you've got to be huge and you've got to be really, really lucky and really, really successful. So there's a part of me that's tracking all of this is just kind of going awesome. We're on track, you know, in a very, just kind of like matter of fact way. There's a part of me that's just like mind blown. And it's like, you're totally right. This is like Like, absolutely. This is absolutely the dream. And I'm beyond lucky. And I'm so thrilled. And mostly I'm just that I know this, like, I don't know if it sounds cliche or not or whatever, but like, I'm really genuinely seriously.

28:46I'm just so grateful for our customers. Like when we were in a major retailer and major national retailer, we overtook Pepsi in size. And I was just like, what? What? So I'm really grateful for that. There are moments that I experience and I always just try to bounce back from them. But there are times, there have been plenty of times when you are just so burned to the ground. Like I remember this event that there was some really cool pop-up and they were featuring Ollipop. And I think that was right around the time that we were launching the Minions Banana Cream flavor. And that was something I did not think was going to work, but I like challenged myself with it.

29:30And it was this like weird cult hit. And I was just like, it was all coming together at once. and I remember being so burned out that I couldn't even go to the event. Sometimes you have those experiences and you're a little sad because you're like, wow, I worked so hard. This is such a cool thing. I'd get to interact with the community. But then you go a couple months and you kind of surge back and then you go get to do something like that, right? So there's definitely these moments where you feel like, damn, I'm so busy and I'm so taxed. I'm not really getting to enjoy this moment. and I'm kind of not really getting to enjoy that feeling of success.