Spade Bet That Soda Doesn’t Need a Health Claim. Walmart Gave It the Shelf.

Spade reached Walmart in January, when the San Diego soda brand’s zero-sugar line entered 245 California stores in the retailer’s Modern Soda set, in three flavors: Yuzu Lime, Kiwi Strawberry, and Guava. For a brand that launched in 2023, earning a merchant-led spot in that set is the win, and it came with a twist worth studying. While the brands that defined the set lean on prebiotics, adaptogens, and gut-health claims, Spade makes no functional promise. It leads with taste, a six-ingredient recipe, and added electrolytes.

Co-founder and CEO Blake Berman has cast the Walmart move as scale for the mission rather than a turn away from it, calling Walmart a key partner in bringing better-for-you soda to a mainstream audience and saying the brand was “grateful” to earn its place in the Modern Soda set. That set is the one Walmart created in 2024 to group better-for-you carbonated drinks, anchored early by Poppi, Olipop, Culture Pop, and Zevia.

Two Cousins Made the First Batch With a Borrowed SodaStream

Spade began as a workaround. Cousins Blake and Jake Berman, who started the brand with a longtime friend, grew up on soda, then moved into healthier, more active routines, and kept hitting the same wall at bars and parties: nothing to mix that was not loaded with sugar, sparkling water too plain, diet sodas carrying the artificial sweeteners they were trying to avoid. The question that started the company, as Berman has told it, was whether a soda could be as clean as a sparkling water and still taste like a soda. The founders began researching natural sweeteners, ordered ingredients online, and used a home SodaStream to mix early batches until, in Berman’s words, the kitchen “became a makeshift soda research facility.” Blake, who came in from an engineering background, took the brand through the Founders Institute, a pre-seed accelerator, and launched Spade in 2023 around an all-natural, zero-sugar formula sweetened with stevia, under a plain tagline: soda, but better for you.

The Bet Is That Taste, Not Function, Carries the Set

That positioning is a deliberate contrast with where the category has gone. As the Modern Soda set filled with functional entrants, better-for-you credentials stopped being a differentiator and became, in the words of The Culinary Edge strategy director Betty Kaufman to BeverageDaily in March, “table stakes.” Spade went the other direction, competing on flavor and an everyday, no-claims promise rather than a benefit printed on the can. The company, citing NielsenIQ figures, says Spade ranks among the highest-velocity brands in better-for-you soda across U.S. grocery, and the brand built its shelf presence the patient way, moving from natural retailers like Fresh Thyme, Bristol Farms, and Foodland into conventional grocery through Albertsons banners such as United and Market Street before reaching Walmart. In a June feature, BevNET reported that landing Walmart validated Spade’s thesis that functional claims are not essential to the category. Along the way the brand collected the 2025 Mindful Awards “Soda Product of the Year,” a KeHE OnTrend award, and a place in UNFI’s UpNext program, and it ties its aluminum packaging to a CleanHub partnership aimed at ocean-bound plastic.

For Walmart suppliers, the part worth studying is how Spade sits in the system. An in-store Modern Soda set placement is a first-party, merchant-led buy, the kind of physical-shelf win that is hard for a young brand to earn and the real prize in the January news. Online the picture differs. Spade’s Walmart.com listing runs about $29.99 for a 12-pack and shows the item sold by the brand and fulfilled by Walmart, a third-party Marketplace and WFS arrangement rather than a first-party grocery item. The two can run in parallel, but they are not the same relationship, and the premium online price is a reminder that Spade is still a premium soda rather than a value-tier staple.

Spade remains founder-led and independent, with no large parent folding it into a portfolio, and its California run is a regional proof point rather than a national one. The question it has placed on Walmart’s shelf is whether a soda that sells on taste alone, with no claim on the can, can hold its velocity in a set the category built on function, and whether 245 stores in one state turn out to be the first chapter of a national rollout or the high-water mark.

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