Poppi founder launches Jetty, a hydration startup

After selling her first company, prebiotic soda brand Poppi, to PepsiCo for nearly $2 billion in May 2025, Allison Ellsworth was finally able to take time off.

“I went to the doctor for the first time in 10 years and started working out,” says Ellsworth, 38. The sale, which included a three-year consulting contract for Ellsworth, gave him more time to focus on his health. She played golf, took a GLP-1 and spent more time with friends and family, she said.

But just like in Poppi’s early days, she avoided a basic human need: drinking water, she says. So her husband Stephen Ellsworth — the former CEO of Poppi, who teased her that she was never hydrated — asked a former employee to concoct a hydrating drink that his family would actually drink.

That was the beginning of Jetty, Ellsworth’s second beverage company, scheduled to launch Monday. The startup sells bottled drinks and powder packets containing electrolytes aimed at “normal people,” as opposed to hydration products aimed at athletes or people looking for hangover cures, Ellsworth says.

“It’s a solution to boring water,” says Ellsworth, adding that she wanted something more natural than red-colored sports drinks for her kids after soccer games. “You can drink three a day. It’s just not that deep.”

“I don’t feel very sexy holding a bottle of Gatorade,” she says.

When Ellsworth sipped an early version of Jetty, she looked at her husband and said, “Are we really doing this again?”

As with Poppi, Ellsworth is Jetty’s brand director while her husband is CEO. They know the time and effort it takes to create a new brand. And Jetty is about to enter a smaller market than Poppi ever did: Soda is one of the biggest players in the beverage industry, while hydration is newer and more specialized. Beverages with a hydration claim generated $10.5 billion in sales over the past 52 weeks, a portion of the $159 billion in total beverage sales, according to Nielsen IQ data.

But starting a second business after successfully exiting another has its advantages, Ellsworth says. Jetty launches immediately online at Target and Amazon and nationwide at Whole Foods Market stores, saving about two years of brand development, she says. And with some startup capital already in hand, the Ellsworths can wait to seek outside financing, she notes.

“The pressure comes a little bit from generational heritage and wealth,” says Ellsworth. “The best part this time is we get to choose who we work with and what we want to do. There’s so much more control over the chaos this time around.” But outside forces can still wreak havoc.

Jetty, which claims to contain less sodium and sugar than sports drinks, is not the first hydration company to sell electrolyte mixes intended for non-athletic use. Nuun, for example, describes its sugar-free electrolyte tablets as a “water enhancer” for “daily hydration” that users can also drink up to three times a day.

Still, these products don’t exactly dominate the beverage aisle in grocery stores. Beverages with hydration claims, half of which are sports drinks, account for about 6% of overall beverage sales, according to Nielsen IQ data. Notably, most people get an appropriate amount of electrolytes — elements like sodium, potassium and magnesium, which the body needs to function — through a healthy diet, the Cleveland Clinic wrote in a September 2023 blog post.

Ellsworth nevertheless sees opportunity, with some U.S. consumers shifting toward “functional beverages” and away from soda, according to an October 2026 report from consulting firm EY-Parthenon. Hydration isn’t yet a separate category, like sports drinks or energy drinks, but it appears to be the next step in the evolution of beverages given how much today’s consumers prioritize wellness, says Don Johnson, director of EY-Parthenon’s consumer strategy practice.

Gen Z also cares a lot about flavor, and younger consumers may be more inclined to try hydration drinks rather than plain water, says Lokesh Ohri, consumer products sector leader at EY Americas.

Ellsworth says she’s confident Jetty can attract such customers with the type of culture-driven brand that helped elevate Poppi. “People used to make fun of me when I said, ‘I make a better fruit soda,'” she says, referring to her first business. “Now it’s like, ‘Hold my pier.’ It doesn’t scare me.”

But getting consumers to try a new drink is only half the battle for companies like Jetty, notes Ohri. If a beverage startup wants to build loyalty and extend longevity, it needs to prove to consumers that its product actually improves their lives, he says.

Ellsworth has another reason for starting a beverage company: She’s too young to retire, she says.

Instead, she aims to take what she learned from Poppi and apply it to Jetty. With their new startup, the husband and wife duo decided to focus on hiring and investing in staff before even developing a business plan. Ellsworth says: “When I recruited people who were better than me (at Poppi), it allowed me to shine at what I was good at, which was creative, branding, digital first, culturally relevant things.”

They also apply other lessons learned from building Poppi, Ellsworth says. In April 2025, just before Ellsworth left, Poppi settled a class-action lawsuit – which alleged misleading health claims tied to the company’s former slogan, “Be Happy.” Be healthy” – for $9.8 million.

“We were really committed to this product to make sure there wasn’t anything we couldn’t say here that someone could sue us for,” she says, noting that the Jetty brand avoids the word “healthy.”