PopSips Reached 2,000 Stores Without a Single Walmart.com Listing

PopSips, a spiked prebiotic soda at 6 percent ABV, said on June 18, 2026 that it has reached more than 2,000 stores nationwide across 18 states, the brand’s largest retail expansion to date. The release names Target, Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, HEB, and Sprouts among the banners carrying it. The four flavors, Ginger Lime, Raspberry Rose, Strawberry Lemon, and Berry, ship in a 7.5 ounce can at 90 calories, 1 gram of sugar, and 2 grams of chicory root fiber, sold as a variety 8-pack and single-flavor 4-packs.

The commercial specifics matter here, and several of them are checkable. Total Wine lists the variety 8-pack at $17.99 with an in-store aisle and shelf location, which puts the per-can price near $2.25. Target lists the 4-packs and the 8-pack at 7.5 fluid ounces, and Instacart carries single cans. Walmart is the one that does not check out. A site-scoped search of Walmart.com for PopSips returns no PopSips listing at all, only Poppi, the unrelated non-alcoholic prebiotic soda that PepsiCo now owns. That absence is not evidence the brand is missing from Walmart shelves, since alcohol is frequently not transactable on Walmart.com and is gated state by state. It does mean the Walmart placement rests on the company’s own announcement, which gave no Walmart-specific store count, and could not be confirmed through a listing. PopSips is not SNAP EBT eligible, because alcohol never is. Even the brand’s direct-to-consumer checkout runs through a third-party licensed network called YouBooze rather than a first-party store, which tells you the company has built its online sales around the same regulatory walls that keep it off Walmart.com.

Three best friends who wanted the mixer to be the drink

PopSips was founded in San Diego by Garrett Olsen, Jake Ryder, and Andy Kuklock, who the brand describes as three best friends. The origin story they tell is a category observation. People had already started using better-for-you sodas like Poppi and Olipop as mixers, pouring spirits into prebiotic soda because it felt like a cleaner way to drink. PopSips collapsed that two-step into one can. The alcohol comes from cold-fermented cane sugar rather than added spirits, and the can carries the same apple cider vinegar, chicory root fiber, and real fruit juice cues that the non-alcoholic prebiotic sodas trained a generation to look for. The brand launched in late 2024 in Target stores across five states.

That launch detail is worth holding onto, because the company has been telling a fast-growth story for a while. An October 2025 release put PopSips at 10 states and on track for 1,000 stores by year-end. A December 2025 release announced an H-E-B statewide rollout in Texas, run through a partner called Dynamo Distribution. The June 2026 announcement roughly doubles the fall figure to 2,000 stores and 18 states, with Sprouts joining in June across Arizona, Georgia, Texas, and Washington, and Minnesota, a founder’s home state, becoming the 18th. The milestone is genuinely new, not recirculated, but the narrative has run since last fall, and the performance markers inside it, including the 55,000 social followers the brand cites, are the company’s own figures rather than independently verified ones. There is also no disclosed outside funding. PopSips has no Crunchbase profile and no announced round, which means a brand at 2,000 doors appears to have scaled without a publicly visible war chest.

The distribution moat is the whole story, and it is rented

What makes PopSips instructive for a Walmart supplier audience is how it got onto shelves. The brand is distributed primarily through the Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors independent wholesaler networks, the same trucks that already stop at every chain it wants to reach. Olsen, the CEO, has said securing motivated distribution partners state by state is “what makes a national rollout like this possible.” For a tiny brand with no disclosed funding, that is the difference between pitching 2,000 stores one buyer at a time and riding routes that are already running. It is the most efficient path a small alcohol brand has to mass retail.

It is also rented infrastructure, and that is the honest caveat. The beer-distributor networks are partnerships, not ownership, and not an investor stake. No major owns PopSips, which keeps it squarely a challenger. But a brand whose reach depends on wholesaler enthusiasm holds less of its own destiny than one that controls its route to shelf, and those networks also carry much larger competitors for the same coolers. Hard soda is a volatile category, the kind where a slow stretch makes a distributor quick to reallocate space. Boston Beer’s Hard Mtn Dew and Sun Cruiser sit in adjacent sets, and Cutwater, part of Anheuser-Busch’s Beyond Beer platform, grew revenue in the triple digits last year. Some of the brands competing hardest for that cooler space are owned by the same companies whose networks move PopSips, which means a challenger riding those rails is competing for attention inside the house that ships it. Heritage names are crowding in too, with the Popsicle brand announcing a licensed spiked drink this spring through a partnership with Tilray, a nostalgia play rather than a better-for-you one. For incumbent flavored-malt and hard-soda suppliers on Walmart’s set, that convergence is the signal to watch.

There is a channel point a supplier should not miss. PopSips reaching Walmart, if it holds, is an in-store, distributor-fed placement, not a first-party or Marketplace e-commerce one. For most challenger brands, the Walmart conversation is a 1P versus 3P question routed through Walmart.com and WFS. PopSips is a clean example of where that framework breaks: the shelf is the channel, the distributor is the gatekeeper, and the website may never carry the product at all.

So the real question is not whether PopSips can grow. It is whether a footprint built on someone else’s trucks turns into the kind of sell-through that makes a wholesaler protect its cooler space. Distributors open doors on momentum and keep products on the shelf on velocity, and the summer marketing push is the brand’s wager that the two will line up. If they do not, what is the plan for a challenger whose reach lives on networks it does not own?

Winning With Walmart

Winning With Walmart is an independent platform for suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts.

Articles are developed by staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners.

Some are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools and are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by Winning With Walmart editors before publication.

Editorial judgment, sourcing decisions, and final approval rest with the publication's human editors in every case.

We are committed to accuracy and fairness. If you believe this article contains an error, we welcome your feedback.