How Olipop went from a laundry room lab to a billion dollar soda company

[ResidentialBusiness]

Since its launch in 2018, Olipop has been a bit of a Cinderella story in the oft-unforgiving beverage game. The prebiotic, fiber-laden soda designed to be healthier than the category classics is currently thriving: It just closed a $50 million Series C and announced a $1.85 billion valuation. Last year, it surpassed $400 million in revenue. Its reps cite it as the No. 1 nonalcoholic brand in dollar and unit growth, “outpacing legacy giants like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Red Bull.” It’s now sold in nearly 50,000 stores and is even outselling Coke at one major national retailer (though they won’t disclose which one, per that retailer’s regulations).

Which is all to say: There’s no way cofounder and CEO Ben Goodwin still formulates all of the brand’s cult-fave flavors in his laundry room himself, as he did back in the day. 

. . . Right?

“People would be shocked. Established flavor chemists, if they walked into my little laundry room lab, their heads would explode,” he says with a laugh. “I have my own kind of differentiated way that I approach formulation. And from there, it’s all about my nose and it’s about my senses and my vision for the formula. And it’s all I need.”

In lieu of Cinderella, Goodwin has been described as the Willy Wonka of soda. And, well, that tracks.

[Photo: Olipop]

Oli and Microbiology

Goodwin grew up in Monterey, California, in a low-income family with food instability and food insecurity. As a result, he says he suffered from weight issues and anxiety—but he realized at 14 that better health would yield a better life in the long run. So, he actively pursued just that through a variety of means, notably nutrition and adopting a vegetarian diet.

Ben Goodwin [Photo: Olipop]

“It was a very powerful interpersonal awakening for me [that] also affected my emotional stability, my cognitive function,” he says. “It was like a paradigm shift for me as a person, and it’s also part of what then led me to have this really deep passion about how poor nutrition and poor health outcomes can undermine society’s well-being on all levels at scale.”

Goodwin went on to study environmental science in college, but didn’t want to emerge saddled with debt. After reading about successful entrepreneurs, he dropped out of college in the early 2000s. He says he felt drawn to the beverage industry, and went to help out a friend who had launched Kombucha Botanica . And that’s when he began to go down the rabbit hole of microbiomes.

“The connectivity occurred for me of, Oh, wow, this is probably what I activated as I went through my own nutritional journey—and so that really then became the center of my focus.”

After a few years at the company, he spent half a decade freelancing in product development, but eventually found himself pulled back to the beverage industry. He took what he had learned about fermentation at Kombucha Botanica and worked with a microbiologist to develop Obi Probiotic Soda, which was made from non-dairy kefir. He realized he could go the natural product route, or he could meet soda customers where they truly were in the mainstream and think bigger—something that would prove critical for Olipop down the line.

“[Soda] is arguably the most deleterious nonalcoholic drink in all of human history,” he says. “So, if I want to make the most impact, here’s where I can make the most impact.”

He met ex-Diageo innovation head David Lester as he was working on the product, and the two launched Obi together in 2013. The brand eventually folded a few years later due to what Goodwin dubbed “partnership issues on the investor side,” but the pair had witnessed something critical: potential.

“We learned that there was a real opportunity here around this healthy soda concept,” he says. “When Obi came to its conclusion in late 2016, my passion for the mission was not only not diminished—it was actually enhanced.”

[Photo: Olipop]

A Sodastream and a Dream

After Obi folded, Goodwin says he and Lester took $100,000 they had made from the brand and immediately went back into the soda game. For Goodwin, that meant formulating. He was focused on fiber, prebiotics, and nutritional diversity—and, of course, flavor. From a makeshift lab in his California kitchen, he started working on the first three Olipop varieties: Cinnamon Cola, Strawberry Vanilla, and Ginger Lemon. The first was the most soda-like, but while cola traditionally contains cinnamon, people assumed it would be spicy—so they changed the name to Vintage Cola, which Olipop drinkers know today. Ginger Lemon, meanwhile, was intended for health-focused kombucha consumers, and Strawberry Vanilla was an innovation test flavor inspired by one of Goodwin’s favorite candies as a kid.

Goodwin still formulates flavors much the same way today, despite running a company worth billions of dollars. He is the chief formulator, and his lab is now in the laundry room of his Washington-state home by virtue of convenience. There’s a sink, and he can put a metal table in there. It’s an otherwise deceptively simple rig consisting of a couple scales, a Vitamix, pipettes and measuring devices, and a Sodastream. 

“[At our headquarters] we’ve got a much more sophisticated setup with an Alpha MOS mass spectrometer and all that kind of stuff. But when I’m in what I would call ‘the artistic phase,’ I don’t want any of that stuff interfering with my process.”

He says he knew he had a knack for formulating back at Obi, and enters a flow state when he’s working. He spends a lot of time up front thinking about the architecture of the flavor he wants to create: What’s the story he wants it to tell? What’s the mouth-feel? The acidity? The resolution as you drink it? Critically, he says he always tries to create something that has a nostalgic anchor, but is innovative and ownable at the same time. 

As the flavor progresses, he breaks out a yellow legal pad to jot down his formulas. He has cupboards filled with these notebooks—in total, he has created more than 50 flavors over the past seven years, and has brought 22 of them to the market, including favorites like Crisp Apple, Tropical Punch, Cherry Cola, and Cream Soda.

Olipop’s flavors have the essence of traditional soda drinks, but they don’t taste exactly like a Coca-Cola or a Dr. Pepper. Rather, they look to channel a similar vibe using sweeteners like stevia, cassava syrup, and fruit, alongside botanicals, plant fiber, and prebiotics (the stuff that feeds the good bacteria in your stomach).

“Something I love about formulating: It’s a proper blending of science and art. And I’m still growing as a formulator every time I formulate,” he says. “I take craftsmanship extremely seriously, and it’s like the formulas that I create have the least distance between me and the Olipop customer of anything I will ever do. It is my most direct and unfiltered communication tool.”

[Photo: Olipop]

Olipop’s can design is perhaps the ultimate mirror to his formulation strategy. It’s clean, thanks to the brand name set in the Ano typeface and the accompanying minimalist illustrations; it’s warm and nostalgic, owing to each flavor name set in the friendly Windsor; and ultimately it harkens back to a more innocent time when we didn’t know traditional soda was terrible for us. (As for the healthiness of Olipop and its competitors, with fewer calories and added sugars than traditional soda, and no high-fructose corn syrup to speak of, they’re indeed a healthier choice than cracking a Coke. But the Cleveland Clinic and others have written that while they can be a good occasional supplement, it’s still best to get prebiotic fibers naturally from eating whole foods.)

[Photo: Olipop]

Olipop pops off

When Goodwin and Lester were trying to get Olipop off the ground, they approached the distributor Dairy Delivery, which Goodwin says agreed to launch the brand if they could get 100 stores on board. Olipop managed to net 40 or 50 accounts, and Dairy Delivery got them into some small chains in Northern California.

Goodwin says Olipop has always had robust organic traction, experiencing triple-digit growth every year since launching in 2018; 2020 was particularly critical, with 960% growth. Influencers and TikTok played a big role, and at a time when the world receded from groceries, Olipop’s in-store sales were strong, indicating people were picking it up as an essential item in their strategic grocery runs. The company’s DTC sales (which today account for less than 5% of the business) were an added bonus on top of it all. 

“That was actually my first clue that something really different was happening with this brand than what is even remotely typical,” Goodwin says of Olipop’s COVID-era sales surge.

Olipop has a lot of flavors compared to most bev brands. While Crisp Apple is the company’s top seller, Goodwin says none of the brand’s kaleidoscopic cans have ever really been a failure, so Olipop walks a careful line of skew effectiveness and the right cadence of novelty.

“It’s a great problem to have, but it does add to the complexity in terms of what choices we make,” he says. “It’s always a tension between supply chain going, ‘Guys, you’ve got enough SKUs, you’re going to kill us,’ and sales saying, ‘We want more SKUs, we want to go sell more product.’” 

Of course, the behemoth brands have been watching. What does he make of Coke joining the category last week with the launch of Simply Pop, with Pepsi also reportedly prepping its own response?

“I gotta tell you, there is kind of no bigger compliment,” Goodwin says. “Back in 2010, [I said], ‘I think this is important. I wonder how this will do.’ And now in 2025 to have the biggest soda brands in all of human history decide that they agree, putting their money where their mouth is and launching products . . . it’s incredible.”

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