Why OLIPOP Believes Soda Can Change The World’s Digestive Health – Forbes
David Lester and Ben Goodwin, co-founders of OLIPOP, want to use soda as a force of good.
Olipo
On any given day in the U.S., 50% of adults drink at least one glass of soda. And despite soda’s heritage as a product sold in pharmacies, today it is b…….
David Lester and Ben Goodwin, co-founders of OLIPOP, want to use soda as a force of good.
Olipo
On any given day in the U.S., 50% of adults drink at least one glass of soda. And despite soda’s heritage as a product sold in pharmacies, today it is best known as a sugar-laden beverage linked to weight-gain and obesity. David Lester and Ben Goodwin, cofounders of OLIPOP, want to change that and use soda as a force of good. I sat down with the two of them to learn more about OLIPOP, what goes into the business of a functional beverage, and why they picked soda as the way to change digestive health.
Dave Knox: What is the founding story of OLIPOP?
Ben Goodwin: I have been a product developer for 15 years and during that time, I have been involved with the launching of three different beverage companies with OLIPOP being my third. My goal has always been to find a mass scale vehicle to benefit microbiome and digestive health. The driver for that is because microbiome health has such a systemic impact on overall human health, and specifically there’s a function called the brain-gut axis, through which you produce the majority of your neurotransmitters in the microbiome. I have been on a very long journey to try to help people get to healthier microbiomes, healthier digestive systems, better functioning brains,, and finding the optimal vehicle to propagate that. Eight years ago, I started working with David on our last venture. We sold that in late 2016. And then in reviewing the science, I realized there were new approaches to microbiome and digestive health that were similar to things I’d done in the past, but also meaningfully different. And that became the basis for OLIPOP, which you could say is a 15-year overnight success story.
Knox: How has OLIPOP grown since launch?
David Lester: It has been a fast journey on this one. We launched into market about two and a half years ago with OLIPOP, but the journey started nearly a decade ago from when we first met. The success we are seeing now is based on the failures that we made first time around with our first venture. In the interim period between Obi and OLIPOP, we were thinking about what we were going to do and if we were going to come back into this space again? We decided we were only going to do it if we can do it 10 times better. Ben went and did a lot of the research on that and we saw this change in the market in the science and microbiology with people switching their focus from probiotics to …….
