SunSip

SunSip launched on February 5, 2024, replacing Health-Ade's earlier "Pop" brand following a strategic pivot the kombucha maker made in 2022. The lineup includes four flavors — Cherry Cola, Raspberry Lemonade, Root Beer, and Strawberry Vanilla — sweetened with monk fruit and fruit juice, each containing 5 grams of sugar per 12-ounce can, matching the sugar ceiling used by several of the category's more established players like Poppi and Slice. By March 2025, SunSip had reached more than 5,000 retail doors and sold over 1.8 million cans since launch, a steady growth trajectory for a brand backed by an established kombucha company rather than a beverage-only startup. Notably, Health-Ade switched SunSip from a slim can format to a traditional squat 12-ounce can specifically to better signal a classic soda-drinking occasion to shoppers browsing the CSD aisle — a packaging decision aimed at competing more directly with mainstream soda rather than positioning as a health product first, reflecting lessons learned from the brand's earlier "Pop" iteration before the 2024 relaunch. Independent taste tests have been strongly positive: Sporked scored SunSip's Cherry Cola a perfect 10 out of 10 and Raspberry Lemonade 9 out of 10, some of the highest individual flavor scores of any brand in this list, rivaling even Olipop's top-scoring flavors. Health-Ade's existing credibility in the fermented-beverage space, combined with these taste scores and a steadily expanding retail footprint, makes SunSip a strong but still growing player in the category — one whose kombucha-industry roots give it a different formulation pedigree than the venture-backed startups and legacy-cola entrants that dominate the rest of this list.