Allison Ellsworth once helped sell a car to pay for bottles, and when PepsiCo finally paid for the soda that followed, she sat refreshing her bank app, waiting for the number to change.
The most quoted number in Allison Ellsworth’s life is one PepsiCo chose. It heads every account of the soda the Austin-based founder started with her husband, Stephen, in their kitchen, and it makes everything before it look like a straight line.
The road was anything but straight. The usual retelling also folds three separate days into one: the day the papers were signed, the day the deal closed and the day the money arrived. The third is the one she still talks about, and it is the least grand of the three.
Each of the three has its own paperwork and its own audience. The signing belongs to the lawyers, and in this case to a weekend. The closing belongs to the auditors, who need a date on which to hang a balance sheet. The arrival belongs to the people being paid, and when they describe it at all, they tend to use the language of ordinary life.
Our rule here is that PepsiCo’s own announcements and its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission settle the deal, and the day itself is told the way she has told it. The price belongs to a public company. The phone belongs to her.
PepsiCo bought Poppi in spring 2025
PepsiCo’s quarterly filing dates the definitive agreement to 16 March 2025. That was a Sunday, so somebody’s weekend went on it. The announcement came the next day, and PepsiCo’s release put the price at $1.95bn. It added that the sum included $300m of cash tax benefits the company expected to collect, so the soda cost PepsiCo rather less than the number that travelled.
The tax line is the sort of detail that sits in the second paragraph of a release and almost never reaches the first paragraph of anyone else’s story. It is the part of the price PepsiCo expected to see come back to it, which makes it the most corporate sentence in the whole announcement and the one a finance director would read first.
The deal closed on 19 May 2025. PepsiCo’s annual report for 2025 shows that the cash came with contingent consideration, further payments tied to milestones, which the company valued at $0.2bn on the day it took control. That figure is an accountant’s fair value of what might yet be owed. The milestones have not been made public, and anyone quoting their terms is ahead of PepsiCo’s own filings.
The structure means that part of what Poppi might yet be worth to its sellers depends on what Poppi does under its new owner. The story, in other words, did not stop on the day it closed, whatever the headlines implied.
By the time of the sale, Poppi’s chief executive was neither Ellsworth. Chris Hall held the job and spoke for the brand when the deal closed. It is a detail that rarely survives the retelling, which prefers its founders behind the desk until the last possible minute. Allison Ellsworth’s voice was in the March announcement, where she took the story back to its first premises.
“When I created poppi in our kitchen, it was fueled by a desire to create a better-for-you soda,” she said in PepsiCo’s announcement of the deal.
Every acquirer likes a kitchen. This one has the merit of appearing on PepsiCo’s letterhead, in the founder’s own words, beside the price.
Payday came through a banking app
Signing a deal and being paid for it are separate events, with a good many lawyers standing between them. Austin Monthly, in a profile published in November 2026, reports that she remembers refreshing her bank account, waiting for the numbers to change, and that the money arrived 60 days after signing.
That is a different clock from PepsiCo’s closing date, and neither PepsiCo nor the Ellsworths has published the day the transfer cleared. The two clocks are not in competition. A deal can be complete on paper and still take its time to reach the accounts it was written for, and the people waiting at the far end of the wire only ever experience the second.
It hardly matters which day it was. The detail people repeat is the posture rather than the date: a woman who had just sold a company to one of the largest food and drink groups on earth, doing what everyone does when a refund is due, which is pulling the screen down with a thumb and letting it spring back.
DDW’s reading is that it is the most honest thing said about the deal by anyone involved. Corporate releases describe strategy and portfolios; founders describe the moment the balance moves. (This correspondent’s own experience of the posture involves a refund from a budget airline and a considerably smaller number.)
Austin Monthly reads the scene as a symbol of how little her life has changed since the exit.
The kitchen came before the company
Before Poppi there was Mother Beverage, the drink Allison and Stephen Ellsworth took onto ABC’s Shark Tank in an episode first broadcast on 9 December 2018. The same Austin magazine puts the deal they left with at $400,000 from Rohan Oza in exchange for a 25 per cent stake. Oza is the investor in the story who got in at the television price.
A deal struck on that programme is public from the moment the episode airs, which is why anyone can say what Oza agreed to years before anyone could say what PepsiCo would. Most early investors in most companies enjoy rather more privacy.
The name did not last. Mother could not be trademarked, so the drink became Poppi, and the new brand launched in March 2020, a month not otherwise remembered for its successful product launches. DDW counts the rename as the first decision in the story a later buyer had reason to be grateful for, since a name nobody can own is a hard thing to sell.
The early money was their own, in the least glamorous sense available. They maxed out credit cards, sold a car to buy bottles and opened their own manufacturing facility, which is a great deal of commitment to a carbonated drink and exactly the commitment the thing required. Founders who build a factory before they have a fortune tend to know where every pallet is.
Those are the years PepsiCo’s release compresses into a single kitchen.
Six years separate Shark Tank and PepsiCo
By our count, six years passed between that Shark Tank broadcast and PepsiCo’s announcement in March 2025, and six years and five months to the closing in May. Rounder versions of the story make it seven, which is generous to the struggle and unkind to the calendar.
Six years is quick for a soda to travel from a pitch on network television to a corporate balance sheet. It is a long time to keep checking anything.
The span also explains the quiet of the sale day. By the time the money moved, the Ellsworths had already done the frightening part, the credit cards and the car and the factory, at a stage when nobody was writing releases about them. A bank transfer, however large, is an anticlimax after maxed-out credit cards, which Fortune reported in May 2026. DDW’s view is that this is why the refreshing reads as calm rather than giddy: the people doing it had seen their accounts move in the other direction for years, and knew what a number on a screen does and does not change.
The sequence matters to how the story should be told. The television appearance came first, the rename and the launch second, the factory and the debts alongside them, and the corporate buyer last of all. Read in that order, the sale looks less like a lottery ticket and more like the bill finally being settled.
She advises Poppi and has started Jetty
She stayed close to Poppi. After the sale she remained on hand to advise the brand, and she has since become the first former Shark Tank contestant to return to the programme as a guest shark, the reality-television equivalent of being asked back to your old school as a governor.
The invitation puts her on the other side of the table, in the chair Oza occupied when Mother Beverage came looking for money. Founders who have pitched tend to listen to pitches differently, having sat through the silence that follows the asking price.
Families who share a business are a recurring subject on these pages, the Kardashians included. The Ellsworths are a smaller and more beverage-minded example, and they have not finished.
So, what is Allison Ellsworth doing now? She and Stephen Ellsworth are starting again with Jetty, an electrolyte drink, and the money going into it includes their own. Putting your own money into a second drink after selling the first is either confidence or habit, and in founders the two are hard to tell apart. PepsiCo owns Poppi and still takes her advice. The Ellsworths, meanwhile, know better than most how long a transfer takes.
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