A brewing family’s son and a business partner start a sparkling juice.

Izze began in Boulder, Colorado, in 2002. English Wikipedia dates the start to February that year and names the founders as Greg Stroh and Todd Woloson; The Denver Post, reporting the company’s sale in September 2006, gave the same founding year and pair, and called Woloson Izze’s co-founder and chief executive. The same report gave the story behind the name: the company was named for Woloson’s daughter, Isabelle.

Stroh came to the business from beer. Forbes described him in July 2014 as a fifth-generation member of the family that owned the Stroh Brewery of Detroit; he joined the brewery’s sales department in 1992 and, after the family sold its brands in 1999, moved to Colorado, where he co-founded Izze with Woloson. In a Denver Post interview in March 2008, Stroh said the brewery had once made a product called Sundance, a sparkling fruit juice similar to Izze, and that “this was my inspiration for IZZE.” He described the aim of the new company as a natural alternative to the carbonated soft drinks and juices then on the market.

Izze’s own account today is lighter in tone. Its website says the brand “was born in blue-sky Boulder, Colorado,” when its two founders, Todd Woloson and Greg Stroh, were “taking a break, having a beverage” and letting life’s questions “bubble up.” A 2012 press release from the Izze Beverage Company described the founders simply as two friends who set out to create a distinctive natural beverage, and gave Boulder as the company’s base.

The drink launched in four flavours. English Wikipedia lists them as Blackberry, Grapefruit, Lemon and Pear, and the company’s May 2012 release, marking its tenth birthday, said Lemon had been one of the original flavours when Izze came to market in 2002 and brought it back for a summer at Whole Foods Market. In the 2008 interview Stroh said the brand had grown through placement with large retailers, naming King Soopers, Whole Foods, Target and Starbucks.

PepsiCo buys a Boulder brand and keeps it in Colorado.

On 26 September 2006 The Denver Post reported that PepsiCo had bought the Boulder-based Izze Beverage Co., a maker of natural sparkling fruit juices; the purchase price was not disclosed. The paper reported that the company and its staff would stay in Colorado and that a Pepsi executive was expected to move to the area to help market and distribute the drinks. Izze was already sold through chains including Starbucks, Target, Safeway, Whole Foods and Wild Oats, the paper said.

The same report quoted Dawn Hudson, then president and chief executive of Pepsi-Cola North America, speaking in Boulder: with Izze, “our mission is to not mess with it and keep it growing.” Hudson said the two sides had been in talks for about eighteen months. Woloson told the paper that keeping the Izze brand and image as a small natural-beverage company had been the subject of much debate during the negotiations, and that “the ownership structure shouldn’t have an impact on the integrity of the brand.” Forbes reported in 2014 that Pepsi had acquired Izze in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. Stroh told The Denver Post in 2008 that he had gone on to found a separate company, Mix1, in mid-2006.

PepsiCo has owned Izze since 2006, and the brand has been extended under it. The 2012 release listed Izze Fortified, the lower-calorie Izze esque and an Izze Sparkling Natural Soda alongside the original sparkling juices; it carried a dateline of Monrovia, California, while still describing the company as based in Boulder. English Wikipedia says that, as of 2024, Izze was sold in cans and bottles, in flavours such as Clementine, Blackberry and Cherry Lime, and that the company also markets the drink as a mixer.

In March 2017 PepsiCo launched Izze Fusions, which its release called “sorta juice, sorta soda, sorta sparkling water,” in cans and three flavours. Marketing director Rosemarie Iannucci said the launch aimed to capture teenagers “living in the ‘undefined,’” and the brand hosted a free event, Camp IZZE, with the singer Shawn Mendes at Duggal Greenhouse in New York on 8 April 2017, backed by the hashtag #ITJUSTIZ.

Cans, bottles and labels on the cooler shelf.

Ready-to-drink tea, flavored water, sports drinks and craft soda share a cooler shelf, but their packaging asks different things of a label. A tea can or tall glass bottle is often read from several feet away, so the name, the flavor and a colour cue have to work together at a glance, while the back of the pack carries ingredients, nutrition panels and the legal small print that every drink must show.

Flavored-water and sports-drink bottles tend to lean on colour coding, since a shopper picking one flavor from a long row is often matching a hue rather than reading a word. Craft-soda labels sit at the other end: many use illustration, hand lettering or a story on the bottle to suggest a small maker, even when the brand has since become part of a much larger drinks company.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its labels, logos and bottles have been described in dated sources, and it marks plainly where a statement rests only on what the company says about itself. The colours and type shown are our own unofficial interpretation.

A short name set in capital letters.

The name is short and is printed in capitals. English Wikipedia notes that Izze is stylised in all caps, and the company’s 2012 release and PepsiCo’s 2017 release both set it as IZZE, with a registered-trademark sign in the earlier one. The Denver Post report of 2006 ties the four letters to a person: Woloson’s daughter Isabelle.

The brand’s voice leans on fizz. The current website opens with the repeated line “All the fizz. All the flavor,” calls the drink “fizzing awesome,” and describes it as real fruit juice with a splash of sparkling water, with an asterisk that labels it a juice beverage blend. The 2017 Fusions campaign played on the brand name with #ITJUSTIZ and on the idea of a drink that sits between categories, which the release put as “sorta juice, sorta soda, sorta sparkling water.”

The flavours are named for fruit. English Wikipedia lists the launch range as Blackberry, Grapefruit, Lemon and Pear, and later names in its 2024 list include Clementine, Peach and Cherry Lime. The brand has also tied itself to causes: the 2012 release said Izze’s philanthropic focus was education and literacy, and English Wikipedia says the company partners with the founders’ Global Education Fund nonprofit.

The founders’ names remain part of the brand’s own telling. Izze’s website names Woloson and Stroh and places the start in Boulder, and the 2012 birthday release marked ten years by bringing back Lemon, one of the original flavours. When PepsiCo bought the company in 2006, The Denver Post reported Hudson’s promise “to not mess with it,” and Woloson’s view that ownership should not affect the brand’s integrity.

For a design guide, Izze shows how a short, personal name and plain fruit flavour names can carry a brand through a sale to a much larger owner. Compare bubly, another PepsiCo sparkling drink, and Nantucket Nectars. For this guide we use a berry plum, a grapefruit pink and a clementine orange with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Izze’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.