After selling her first company, prebiotic soda brand Poppi, to PepsiCo for nearly $2 billion in May 2025 , Allison Ellsworth finally got 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 advisory agreement for Ellsworth, gave her more time to focus on her health. She golfed, went on a GLP-1 and spent more time with friends and family, she says.
But just like in Poppi's earliest days, she avoided a fundamental human need: drinking water, she says. So her husband Stephen Ellsworth — Poppi's former CEO, who teased her about never being hydrated — asked a former employee to concoct a hydration beverage that his family would actually drink.
Such was the beginning of Jetty, Ellsworth's second beverage company, which is set to launch Monday. The startup sells bottled drinks and powder packets with electrolytes meant for "normal people," in contrast to hydration products that market toward athletes or people in search of hangover cures, says Ellsworth.
"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 of these a day. It's just not that deep."
"I don't feel super sexy holding a Gatorade bottle," she says.
When Ellsworth sipped an early version of Jetty, she looked at her husband, and said, "Are we really doing this again?"
As at Poppi, Ellsworth is Jetty's chief brand officer while her husband serves as CEO. They're familiar with the time and effort necessary to build a new brand. And Jetty is set to enter a smaller market than Poppi ever did: Soda is one of the largest players in the beverage industry, while hydration is newer and more niche. Beverages with a hydration claim brought in $10.5 billion in sales over the last 52 weeks, part of $159 billion in total beverage sales, according Nielsen IQ data.
But starting a second business after successfully exiting another comes with advantages, says Ellsworth. Jetty is immediately launching online at Target and Amazon and nationwide at Whole Foods Market stores, saving about two years' worth of brand building, she says. And with some startup capital already in hand, the Ellsworths can wait to seek out external funding, she notes.
"The pressure is a little bit off of generational legacy and wealth," Ellsworth says. "The best part this time is we get to pick who we work with, what we want to do. There's just so much more control of the chaos this time." But external forces can still wreak havoc.
Jetty, which touts having less sodium and sugar than sports drinks, isn't the first hydration business to sell electrolyte mixes meant for non-athletic use. Nuun, for example, describes its no-sugar electrolyte tablets as a "water enhancer" for "everyday hydration" that users can also drink up to three times per day.
Still, such products don't exactly dominate the drinks aisle at grocery stores. Beverages with hydration claims, half of which are sports drinks, make up 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 requires to function — from a healthy diet, the Cleveland Clinic wrote in a September 2023 blog post .
Ellsworth spots opportunity nonetheless, with some American consumers shifting toward "functional beverages" and away from soda, according to an October 2026 report from consultancy EY-Parthenon. Hydration isn't yet a distinct category, like sports or energy drinks, but it feels like the next step in beverage evolution given how much today's consumers prioritize wellness, says Don Johnson, principal in the EY-Parthenon Consumer Strategy practice.
Gen Z also cares a lot about flavor, and young consumers may be more prone to try hydration drinks instead of regular water, says Lokesh Ohri, consumer products sector leader at EY Americas.
Ellsworth says she's confident that Jetty can attract such customers with the type of culture-focused branding that helped elevate Poppi. "People laughed at me when I was like, 'I'm making a better fruit soda,'" she says, referring to her first company. "Now it's like, 'Hold my Jetty.' It doesn't scare me."
But getting consumers to try a new drink is only half the battle for businesses like Jetty, notes Ohri. If a beverage startup wants to build loyalty and longevity, it has 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 her new startup, the husband-and-wife duo decided to focus on hiring and investing in personnel even before coming up with a business plan, Ellsworth says: "When I brought in people that were better than me [at Poppi], it allowed me to shine at what I was good at, which was the creative, the brand, the digital-first, the culturally relevant stuff."
They're applying other lessons from building Poppi too, says Ellsworth. In April 2025, just before Ellsworth's exit, Poppi settled a class-action lawsuit — which alleged misleading health claims, related to the company's former tagline, "Be gut happy. Be Gut Healthy" — for $9.8 million.
"We were really buttoned up with this product to make sure there's nothing we couldn't say on here that anyone could sue us for," she says, noting that Jetty's branding avoids the word "healthy."
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