A coffee shop meeting. A microbiologist's notebook. And a failed soda.
Around 2013, David Lester sat across from Ben Goodwin in a Palo Alto coffee shop. Goodwin had been quietly building a probiotic soda formula since 2008, spending $300,000 of his own savings in a makeshift lab with a microbiologist. Five years of obsessive R&D, and still no product on shelves. Lester - then a decade into global brand marketing at Diageo, working with Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker across Sydney and São Paulo - saw something most people would have missed: a founder who'd already done the hard part.
They launched Obi Probiotic Soda together. It didn't work. In 2016, they sold it for an undisclosed sum - walking away with $100,000 between them. Most people would have considered that a loss. They considered it tuition.
Two years later, with that exact $100,000, they launched OLIPOP.
"You love soda. We love soda, too; just try this one instead."- David Lester, on OLIPOP's value proposition
OLIPOP's founding premise was deceptively simple: people aren't going to give up soda. Stop asking them to. Instead, give them a soda that happens to be good for them. Three launch flavors - ginger lemon, strawberry vanilla, cinnamon cola - hit 40 Northern California grocery stores in 2019. First-year revenue: $852,000. Not a fortune. Not nothing. A foothold.
Science in a can. Nostalgia on the label.
Lester's background at Diageo taught him that premium brands win on story first, product second - in spirits, you're mostly selling the mythology of Scotland or Kentucky, not the liquid itself. OLIPOP inverted that entirely. Ben Goodwin's formulations - plant-based prebiotic fiber, botanical extracts, nine grams of fiber per can, two to five grams of sugar - were the story. The flavors (cherry cola, classic root beer, orange squeeze) were the permission slip to buy it.
Lester's job was to make the science feel like joy. He identified a target audience he called "Happy Seekers" - health-conscious consumers who'd refused to accept that wellness had to mean joyless. OLIPOP wasn't pitched as a supplement or a diet drink. It was positioned as a better soda. That's it. The simplicity of that message took years of discipline to arrive at.
Getting there required rewriting OLIPOP's messaging more than once. Early on, the brand tried leading with its ingredient stack - fiber, prebiotics, botanicals. Lester eventually concluded that "marketing doesn't matter until you're at $100M in sales" - not because communication is irrelevant, but because the product and distribution have to do the work first. Once the market validates the product, then the story accelerates everything.
Three continents. Iconic brands. And a quiet exit.
David Lester studied Management Studies and Spanish at Nottingham University Business School, graduating in 2003. He joined Diageo - the world's largest global spirits company - and spent the better part of a decade learning how to build brands that last. Not small brands. Smirnoff. Gordon's Gin. Johnnie Walker. The kind of brands that mean something in 180 countries simultaneously.
He worked in Sydney. He worked in São Paulo. International stints that trained him in brand universality - how the same emotional core has to translate across wildly different cultural contexts. That discipline later shaped OLIPOP's deliberate decision not to make the brand too local, too niche, or too earnestly wellness-coded to appeal broadly.
He left Diageo for Northern California and the startup world. What he carried with him was an understanding that consumer brands are built on clarity and consistency over years - not campaigns. That a logo is a promise. That the fastest way to kill a brand is to confuse people about what it stands for.
Outrageous or invisible. No middle ground.
"You have to do something outrageous or else it's just not going to cut through." Lester said this on a podcast, and it sounds like standard startup bravado until you trace OLIPOP's actual marketing moves. Early activations at Grand Central Market. A content strategy that treated soda as a lifestyle rather than a product. Partnerships with creators who genuinely drank the thing. An organic social presence that Ad Age called the blueprint for making soda feel modern again - earning OLIPOP the #5 spot on Ad Age's 2023 Best Marketers list.
"Mastery of the platform is more important than the platform itself."
"An exceptional brand has to start with an exceptional product."
"Humility and vulnerability are two things that always give me a return."
"We haven't really found the edge of this brand yet."
The "Happy Seekers" framing wasn't just a marketing persona - it was a business strategy. OLIPOP wasn't going after people who already bought kombucha. It was going after the 90% of Americans who still reach for a Coke and feel mild guilt about it. That's a bigger market. And it required a different kind of permission slip: nostalgia, flavor, the crack of a carbonated can. OLIPOP provided all of that. The fiber just came along for the ride.
95% satisfaction rate. B Corp score of 91. Not by accident.
OLIPOP earned B Corp certification in July 2023 with a score of 91. The median for ordinary businesses is 50.9. The company pays living wages, offers flexible arrangements, and sources a majority of its inputs nationally to support domestic supply chains. Over 95% of employees report satisfaction. These aren't the numbers of a company that treats culture as a press release.
Lester talks about leadership in direct, accountable terms. He credits David Goggins' "Accountability Mirror" framework for his management approach - asking hard questions like "Who owns what - by name?" Not as an interrogation technique, but as a clarity tool. Accountability without blame. Ownership without ambiguity.
He also sets personal limits publicly. Laptop down at 5 PM. Exercise non-negotiable. Family time protected. He says modeling healthy habits is essential for company culture - that founders who operate in perpetual crisis mode create companies that run the same way. OLIPOP's 95% satisfaction rate suggests the approach works.
"Humility and vulnerability are two things that always give me a return."- David Lester
$1.85 billion. And a graceful step back.
In February 2025, OLIPOP announced a $50 million Series C led by J.P. Morgan Private Capital's Growth Equity Partners, valuing the company at $1.85 billion. Total funding reached $92.6 million across all rounds. The company had already hit profitability - a milestone that separates high-revenue consumer brands from durable businesses.
With the Series C came a leadership transition. Mel Landis, a former Coca-Cola executive, joined as President. David Lester stepped from his operating role into an advisory seat on the board. Not a forced exit - a deliberate handoff. The kind of transition that founders who care about the company they built, rather than the title they hold, engineer thoughtfully.
At 65,000+ retail doors, with 87% of functional soda category sales, OLIPOP is no longer a startup. It's an institution. The category it invented now has copycats and competitors. That's what winning looks like in consumer goods.
Lester's own assessment of what's left: "We haven't really found the edge of this brand yet." Seven years in, at $1.85 billion, still looking for the ceiling. That's either delusion or vision. Given the trajectory, the smart bet is on the latter.
From Nottingham to Piedmont.
The record.
- Grew OLIPOP from a $100,000 investment to a $1.85 billion valuation in under seven years
- Built OLIPOP to $425M+ annual revenue - #3 top-selling soda at major US retailers
- 87% share of the functional soda category (a category OLIPOP essentially created)
- 65,000+ retail locations including Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, and Costco
- Named Ad Age Breakout Brand Leader 2023
- Led OLIPOP to B Corp certification with a score of 91 (vs. median of 50.9)
- 95%+ employee satisfaction rate across a 450-person team
- OLIPOP achieved profitability in 2024 - rare for a venture-backed CPG brand at this scale
- Nearly a decade of brand leadership at Diageo across three continents