The clue is not in the corner office. It is in a laundry room, somewhere between a scale, a row of bottles and a founder following his nose. Long after OLIPOP had become the sort of company whose valuation required ten digits, Ben Goodwin was still doing the work that gave the business its first reason to exist: making flavors. A professional flavor chemist might have found his setup bewildering. Goodwin considered it sufficient. He had his senses, a private method and two decades of repetition. For him, taste was not a department. It was authorship.
This makes his August 2026 decision easier to understand. Goodwin left the chief executive role at the company he co-founded, but did not leave the company. He became executive chairman and head of innovation. Christian Patiño Webb, an operator who had led Electrolit, took over as CEO. Goodwin kept product, brand and product marketing, science, culture, long-range strategy and the board. It was less a farewell than a redrawing of the floor plan.
Founders are often expected to treat the CEO title as a crown: surrender suggests defeat, while keeping it proves devotion. Goodwin treated it more like a tool. He had taken the title at OLIPOP's beginning to protect the mission while the company was young and easily bent. Once the business had crossed the half-billion-dollar sales threshold, the useful question changed. It was no longer whether he could keep the seat. It was where his peculiar attention would be worth the most.
“People would be shocked. Established flavor chemists, if they walked into my little laundry room lab, their heads would explode.”Ben Goodwin on his formulation process
An apprenticeship disguised as wandering
Goodwin was born in San Francisco and grew up in Monterey. His entrepreneurial education began without a syllabus. Right out of high school, he sold young Thai coconuts at a farmers market, buying them by the pallet from a San Jose wholesaler and storing them at a friend's place. The arrangement had the homespun logic of a first business: find something people want, locate supply, borrow a little square footage and show up.
He attended Monterey Peninsula College, then transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied environmental science. At 20 he left. College, in his telling, looked like debt attached to a pace that frustrated him. A book by Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson offered a more kinetic curriculum: build something, learn in public, let commerce carry a point of view. Goodwin wanted direct experience. He also simply wanted to begin.
Beverages became the medium. He spent three years leading formulation and fermentation development at Kombucha Botanica in Santa Cruz, then worked independently on product development. The work suited the two halves of his temperament. There were beakers and measurements, but also aroma, memory and judgment. He had no formal training as a flavor chemist. What he accumulated instead was practice.
Seventeen years, compressed into four cans
The first can was not OLIPOP
The company before OLIPOP was Obi Probiotic Soda. Goodwin developed it with a microbiologist, spending four years on the recipe before it reached Whole Foods, Safeway and Sprouts. Obi passed $1 million in sales in less than two years. It also introduced Goodwin to David Lester, a former Diageo executive who joined as CEO in 2012. Lester knew the machinery of the beverage business. Goodwin knew the liquid. Their complementary skills survived the venture that introduced them.
Both men left Obi in 2016. The ending carried a constraint: Goodwin could not simply go make another probiotic drink. This is the sort of corporate sentence that can sound like a padlock until someone notices it is also an editing note. He and Lester lived off savings, put $100,000 into their next attempt and changed the product logic. The interruption did not erase what they knew about formulation, distribution or each other.
OLIPOP arrived in 2018 with Ginger Lemon, Strawberry Vanilla and Cinnamon Cola, which was later renamed Vintage Cola. The founders went to a small North Bay distributor and pleaded for a chance. Mollie Stone's became the first account. New Leaf Market, Berkeley Bowl and Rainbow Grocery followed. Andronico's felt momentous. Then came a Northern California Whole Foods store and a small mystery: Goodwin walked in to find the shelf bare. The new shipment had sold out in a day.
Retail success tends to be described through expansion maps, but the early evidence is more intimate: one founder looking at an empty shelf and asking his sales representative what happened. Consumers had answered a strategic question without attending the meeting. They wanted more cans.
Scale, with a nose for detail
By 2023, OLIPOP had cleared $200 million in annual sales. The following year it passed $400 million. A $50 million Series C in February 2025 valued the company at $1.85 billion. Its retail presence grew from Northern California independents to more than 65,000 locations nationwide. The cap table collected a curious dinner party of supporters, including former PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi, Mindy Kaling and the Jonas Brothers.
Through this rise, Goodwin kept formulating. His home bench sample would travel to the company's lab, where a technical team tested it and prepared it for manufacturing. He learned to anticipate how a recipe would change on the journey from a small bottle to a production line. The skill is neither pure art nor pure laboratory procedure. It resembles arranging music for a room you cannot visit: knowing which note will bloom, which will flatten and what the audience will remember.
Memory matters because OLIPOP speaks in the language of old soda fountains and childhood refrigerators. Cream Soda, Classic Grape, Cherry Cola and Tropical Punch are not shy abstractions. They announce a reference and then attempt to deliver the pleasure attached to it. Goodwin has talked about studying soda's history and using nostalgia as a bridge to a mass audience. His formulations offer familiarity first. The business model rides in after it.
The same duality appears outside the lab. Goodwin has been DJing for roughly as long as he has been studying beverages. After a two-day leadership retreat in 2025, he took the team to see Underworld, the British electronic group. The following morning, he warned an interviewer that he might lose a little “cognitive altitude.” A very large soda company, in other words, could still be run by someone recovering from a late concert with the staff.
“I liked this idea of taking direct action and learning about life through, like, real experiences.”Goodwin on leaving college at 20
The wisdom of changing jobs
Goodwin's transition to executive chairman completes a circle without closing it. The coconut seller became a formulator. The formulator became a founder. The founder became a chief executive because the young company needed a guardian. Then the executive recruited an operator and returned nearer to product. Each title solved the problem in front of him; none needed to become a permanent identity.
He and Patiño Webb spent six months getting to know each other before the appointment. The new division of labor is explicit. Patiño Webb leads operations, distribution, organizational execution and expansion. Goodwin operates as a strategy co-lead while directly steering innovation, research, brand and product marketing, culture and board management. There was even discussion of a co-CEO arrangement, but Goodwin decided clearer reporting lines would serve the company better.
This matters because succession stories often flatten into melodrama. A founder has either won by remaining indispensable or lost by yielding authority. OLIPOP's version is more practical and more adult. A company can outgrow one job description without outgrowing the person who wrote it. Goodwin did not make himself smaller. He narrowed the aperture around the work where his taste, history and stubbornness are hardest to replace.
He has said he wants OLIPOP to reach $1 billion in sales. The more revealing horizon, however, is measured in years. Goodwin wants the brand to remain relevant a decade or two from now. A valuation is a snapshot; a flavor that earns another purchase is a habit. One impresses a financial headline. The other keeps a company alive.
And so the story returns to the bench. There is a giant national business outside the room, complete with executives, retailers, investors and a new CEO. Inside are bottles, scales and a founder attending to tiny differences. The cans may move by the truckload. The next one still begins one taste at a time.