A young woman is at a diner with friends, being stared down by a waitress with frosted lipstick and no time to waste. What she wants is a soda—but for whatever reason, she can’t bring herself to have one. Same with the girl at the pool party, and the one at the drive-through, and the one sitting in what looks like a sorority house, and the guy at the convenience store. Their brows are furrowed, their mouths are pouty, their faces are twisted into ever-more over-the-top expressions of longing and ambivalence. Their friends are getting so annoyed with them. Eventually, the solution to a problem invented within the space of 40 seconds: “Stop spiraling! Get a Poppi!”
I’ve now watched this ad, which ran during this year’s Super Bowl, six times, and I still cannot say I fully understand it. Its premise is that people are somehow tortured, or embarrassed, by the idea of drinking soda—something that the president, Dua Lipa, and millions of Americans do regularly, seemingly without great turmoil. The solution, the ad argues, is Poppi, which is largely indistinguishable from soda, the very thing that was supposedly shameful in the first place: It’s a carbonated, sweetened, canned beverage, available in flavors including root beer, cherry cola, and grape—the type of drink that, despite years of anti-soda rhetoric and Poppi’s vision of collective psychosis, Americans simply cannot quit. In an interview, Neal Baer, a pediatrician who has taught a class called “Soda Politics” at Yale’s School of Public Health, was frank: “It’s old soda in new cans.”
Poppi contains significantly less sugar than standard sodas—five grams, or about a teaspoon, per can, compared with Coke’s 39—as well as stevia, a calorie-free, plant-based sweetener, and inulin, a type of soluble fiber derived, in this case, from agave. This is what allows Poppi to sell itself as a healthier, anxiety-free kind of not-soda soda, and what makes it the perfect beverage for a country that loves talking about how bad soda is almost as much as we love drinking it. In 2024, the company sold more than half a billion dollars’ worth of Poppis. Last week, it was acquired by PepsiCo (notably a soda company) for just under $2 billion.
For much of the past two decades, soda was—if not the kind of thing you’d hide in the bottom of your recycling bin, as one particularly confusing piece of Poppi marketing copy puts it—suffering a bit of a reputation problem. This is because soda is really not good for you: It generally contains a ton of sugar and no vitamins, and also the bubbles are bad for your teeth. So it was shunned, taxed, and villainized, likened to cigarettes and made a synecdoche for America’s broken food system, in which empty calories are easier and cheaper to obtain than nutritionally dense foods. School districts banned its sale. Television stations ran PSAs against it. The nutritionist Marion Nestle wrote an entire book about it, Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning).
The coalition of nutritionists, public-health experts, legislators, and consumer advocates who took on Big Soda did win—to some degree. After climbing steadily starting in the 1960s, sales of full-calorie soda decreased by about 25 percent from 1995 to 2015. But in gross terms, Americans were still consuming a lot of sugary drinks: They may have been turning away from traditional soda, but they were turning toward sweetened coffee and tea, energy drinks, sports drinks, dirty soda, and boba. From 2011 to 2014, roughly half of American adults and 63 percent of American teens were drinking a sugary drink on any given day. By 2017, consumption had plateaued. Last year, both Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper sold more cans of soda than they had the year before.
Now the second-wave sodas have come for us. In November, Walmart announced an entirely new category: “modern soda,” which is distinct from traditional soda and usually more expensive. It includes drinks such as Poppi, as well as its biggest competitor, Olipop, which, like Poppi, comes in spunky, modern-looking cans and a variety of nostalgic and new flavors, and which also contains inulin and less sugar. Coca-Cola, looking to compete, recently started selling its own version of second-wave soda, called Simply Pop.
These drinks are, without question, “far healthier than regular, full-sugar sodas,” Caitlin Dow, a senior nutrition scientist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told me in an email. They’re also probably better than many diet sodas, which are typically made with possibly carcinogenic sweeteners such as aspartame. But, Baer told me, they’re still what nutritionists call sugar-sweetened beverages. “That is not good for you.”
And the science on inulin, Poppi and Olipop’s other big sell, is “pretty meh,” Dow told me: These fibers do increase one specific kind of bacteria in the gut, she wrote, though there’s no strong evidence that doing that “actually translates to better gut health … or any other kind of health. But the evidence is VERY clear that inulin makes people gassy. (Shockingly, companies don’t seem to brag about that finding.)” In May, Poppi settled for nearly $9 million a class-action lawsuit brought by a California woman who objected to the company’s health claims; Poppi did not acknowledge any fault, liability, or wrongdoing. Ultimately, Dow wrote, the claims made by Poppi and the like are “largely a marketing ploy” designed to “separate health-conscious consumers from their money.”
In this sense, these drinks really are like soda, which is, and always has been, a miracle of marketing. “It’s an amazing story,” Baer told me—a remarkably unhealthy, nutritionally inessential product that costs pennies to make but has nonetheless spawned a billion-dollar industry. Coca-Cola started as a brand-new category of drink with dubious health benefits, spent much of the past century blanketing the world in nonsense advertising slogans such as “Open Happiness,” and is now available in almost every country on Earth. Red Bull threw vitamin B, an amino acid, and some caffeine into soda and told people it would give them energy. Vitaminwater has managed to make liquid sugar sound virtuous. Now Poppi and its ilk have capitalized on ambient concerns about gut health and sugar to sell a new kind of flavored fizzy water, one that signals something about the person drinking it. “It says you’re sophisticated,” Stephen Zagor, who teaches food entrepreneurship at Columbia University, told me: You’re not drinking the same soda as your parents. “It’s this sort of more informed consumer who can read a label,” Andrea Hernández, a trend forecaster who runs a Substack newsletter about packaged foods, told me: “Let’s replace all these things that we like and try to make sure that they’re not killing us.” But, Hernández said, none of this is a real challenge to traditional soda—it’s an endorsement of it: “If it wasn’t for the nostalgia of actual sodas, there would be no Olipop or Poppi.”
Until last week, I had never tried either—not because I’m ashamed to drink soda, but because I have been so devoted to Diet Coke for so long that anything else makes my tongue feel sweaty and disoriented. I bought a can of wild-berry Poppi at my local corner store for $2.99, which is significantly more than the $1.25 I spend on my usual tallboy of aspartame juice. It was cute and, sure, vaguely reminiscent of wild berries. I’m not sure what else to say: It tasted like soda.
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