Ben Goodwin says Olipop is well over a half billion dollars in gross revenue and aiming for $1 billion

Ben Goodwin put a number on Olipop’s next can-shaped mountain: the prebiotic soda company is already “well over a half billion” in gross revenue, and his target is $1 billion. That’s the line people will screenshot from this How I Built This Advice Line, because after PepsiCo bought Poppi, every beverage-watcher with a LinkedIn account and a dream started mentally pairing Olipop with Coca-Cola.

Goodwin did not exactly play along. He did the founder thing where the answer is technically open-minded, spiritually allergic to being pinned down, and wrapped in mission language thick enough to frost a cake. But inside the usual “we have options” choreography was a useful business update: Olipop is not talking like a cute little gut-health soda brand anymore. It is talking like a category leader deciding whether it wants to be bought, go public, or invent some third route that bankers can later pretend they saw coming.

my target right now in my head is, okay, I need to get to a billion dollars gross revenue. we’re well over a half billion and we’re chugging towards that line

The Poppi deal made Olipop’s ceiling visible

Guy Raz teed up the obvious question without pretending not to see the obvious question. PepsiCo’s acquisition of Poppi, described on the show as almost a $2 billion deal after tax credits and the rest of the math confetti, made Olipop’s future feel less like a private-company mystery and more like an auction waiting for a paddle. If Poppi could fetch that kind of price, what does the bigger, older, louder rival get?

Goodwin’s answer was both principled and convenient. Which is often how founder principles work. He said he does not want to look back in five or ten years and see the product delisted, gutted, or drained of the value that made it matter. That is noble. It is also exactly what a founder with pricing power says when every strategic buyer knows he has pricing power.

I don’t want to live in a world where five, ten years from now I’m staring at a product that’s being delisted or it’s been cratered out to the point where it’s no longer providing value.

The health claim got a sharper edge than the usual better-for-you burble. Goodwin said Olipop had published human research on blood sugar stability, specifically using Vintage Cola, and found that it did not spike blood sugar. A transcript can tell you he said that. The context is that the soda wars have moved from “less sugar” to “functional benefit,” a phrase that can mean anything from clinical study to vibes in a lab coat. Goodwin’s version sounded more substantial than most, though listeners should still remember the study is being cited by the person selling the can.

The strangest flex was the office that doesn’t exist

The revenue number was the marquee item, but the supporting detail was almost as good: Olipop is doing this with roughly 280 employees and no central office. Not “hybrid.” Not “we value flexibility” while quietly tracking badge swipes like a mall cop. No central office.

Goodwin said he and co-founder David Lester disliked commuting early on, then Covid forced the company to learn remote culture properly, and after that there was no compelling reason to reverse course. This is where Olipop becomes an annoying data point for every executive demanding everyone return to beige carpet so they can have “collaboration” under fluorescent lights. A soda company with national retail complexity, advertising, research, distribution, and a billion-dollar revenue target is apparently operating without the sacred foosball table.

That doesn’t prove remote work scales for every company. Manufacturing still happens somewhere. Sales teams still visit stores. Cans still need trucks, not Slack channels. But it does make the lazy office-is-culture line look flimsier. Olipop’s culture may be idiosyncratic, intense, and founder-shaped, but it is not dependent on a lobby succulent.

Goodwin’s actual advice was less sexy, more useful

Once the callers arrived, Goodwin sounded most credible when he resisted the glamorous founder answer. A ghee snack founder wanted to educate shoppers about clarified butter. Goodwin and Raz steered him back to the brutal supermarket basics: taste first, then price, then health comparison, then the deeper ingredient story for people who read the back of the bag like it’s scripture.

A gluten-free baker wanted to scale fresh, never-frozen goods without taking debt. Goodwin did not give her a vision-board pep talk. He told her the next step probably required real money, not another tiny grant, and that she had to decide what kind of stress she wanted: being overworked or being financially exposed. Grim? Yes. Useful? Also yes.

you’re gonna trade the stress of being overworked which you’re still gonna be by the way you can just trade the stress on the financial side

That’s the part of Ben Goodwin that makes the big Olipop claim more believable. He is a mission guy, but not a fairy-dust guy. He talks about blood sugar and Ayurvedic ghee history, then snaps back to distribution, front-of-pack hierarchy, and the depressing fact that a commercial kitchen costs real money.

His most revealing business belief came before the callers, when Raz asked him what common advice he rejects. Goodwin went after the phrase every founder hears when someone wants them to accept worse terms, lower quality, or a compromise dressed up as realism: that something is simply “market.”

the second you tell me that something is market is the second i know that we have to do better than that

There’s the operating system. Don’t accept the market. Bend it. Which sounds obnoxious until the cans start doing half a billion dollars.