Poppi has 250 paid students starting this autumn, part of an ambassador base that now spans more than 150 campuses built up since a smaller pilot in spring 2025, and part of the brief is to find the shops that do not stock it. Ambassadors identify the cafés and study corners where students collect, and those addresses travel onward as prospects, a detail Glossy’s Lexy Lebsack drew out of the executive who runs the programme. The cost sits under marketing. The output is a call list.

Sophia Sesto, Poppi’s VP of culture, described the mechanism without ornament. Students find the hotspots, “and then we’re able to bring those amazing accounts to our sales team to go and try and get Poppi there.” Accounts is a sales word. It has turned up in the middle of a sentence about a marketing programme. Marketing budgets do not usually carry a line item for that.

Applications went from under 300 in spring 2025 to 6,100 last spring and 11,000 this autumn, against 250 places. Poppi pays in free soda, free merchandise and what Glossy calls side-hustle compensation. Sesto’s team jokes that the Ivy League is the easier admission, an acceptance rate under 2 percent, by her account. Run the arithmetic on Poppi’s own numbers, 250 places against 11,000 applicants, and it comes out higher, at 2.3 percent, not lower. The joke does not survive the arithmetic — the applicant pool does.

The queue is the compensation.

The public listing, since expired, puts the role more gently: college ambassadors work with the Poppi team to host campus events and create Poppi content. Accounts appear nowhere in it. The student is recruited into a community and delivers a survey.

PepsiCo paid $1.95 billion for Poppi in May 2025, a deal it billed as accelerating its strategic portfolio transformation, and now has to put the cans somewhere. A national beverage system is built for chains and struggles with the one café that keeps a single cooler by the till. Those are the addresses no route planner holds, and 250 undergraduates walk past them twice a day.

The figure Glossy reported was 19 million, the combined following of the ambassador base as a whole, not verified as this autumn’s 250 alone. It is the easiest thing about the programme to measure and the least valuable thing it produces. Reach is a number a media buyer can produce without leaving a desk. A named list of independent accounts across 150 campuses is not for sale at any price.

Apparel brands run comparable ambassador programmes, and, judging by what those campaigns publish, most keep the wrong half of the return. The roster goes into an advocacy report and the account list goes nowhere; nobody in the building, it seems, is scored on wholesale prospecting. The difference costs nothing to fix and nobody has asked to fix it. Poppi’s advantage is not the students. It is having a sales team that thought to ask them a question.

The ambassadors graduate in the spring. The list does not.