Basin Street Beverages, the New Orleans company behind Louie Louie THC seltzers, puts its first soda in stores today.
Louie POP! has no THC. It’s built on four of Louie Louie’s flavors: Blackberry Lemon, Ginger Cucumber, Strawberry Lemon, and Hibiscus Cherry. It sells in Greater New Orleans and online first, with expansion planned across Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida Panhandle through the fall.
The launch comes about two months before a federal rule that strips hemp status from any product over 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, now set for December 11. While it reads as a hedge, co-founder Marie La France describes demand that sat in the brand’s own customer feedback since 2023.
The demand was in the reviews
La France says the regulatory debate set the process in motion. Louie Louie had grown fast enough that nobody had pushed for a second product. “When sales are good, you’re like, sales are good. Why try anything new?” she says. “The regulatory conversation kind of forced us to sit down.”
The team ran a customer survey and a round of interviews with high-value customers. It also asked directly on social, by email, and in person what customers would want next. When they went back through years of reviews, La France says, they found the same request hundreds of times: a Louie Louie without the THC.
“What we heard time and time again, no matter how we asked the question, is that consumers choose a beverage based on flavor,” she says.
That finding shaped the product. Louie POP! keeps the Louie Louie flavor recipes and drops the cannabinoids. It also changes the sweetener, using cane sugar with a little monk fruit to bring total sugar down, and it has no preservatives.
Flavor over function
The team decided early against functional claims. La France says industry contacts and tastemakers told them shoppers are tiring of functional sodas, a crowded set where the value proposition is often unclear. For a brand whose first product has a noticeable effect, adding claims to a soda that doesn’t have one seemed wrong. “We felt like it would be misleading, after selling a product that has such a noticeable effect with THC and CBD, to say that something would have an effect,” she says.
She also points to geography. In the launch release, she says, “Here in the South, people don’t need an excuse to have a soda; they just want something delicious with cleaner ingredients and a more intentional nutritional label.” In her view, the beverage aisle in New Orleans is a different place from the one in Los Angeles or New York, and much of modern soda’s positioning was written for the latter. Louie POP! is betting that its Southern shopper is comparing it with Sprite.
Two brands, one name
Putting a soda anyone can drink under the same name as a 21+ product creates a separation problem. Louie POP! has its own website with no age gate, and it’s sold on Amazon. In stores it sits on a different shelf and in a different pack size: six-packs for the soda, four-packs for the seltzer. “We’re coming at it from the opposite way,” La France says. The work is making sure a product that can appeal to younger people isn’t confused with one meant for adults.
Keeping the name was deliberate. “Because the Louie POP! flavors are essentially the same as our Louie Louie flavors, it didn’t feel authentic to release them under a different name,” La France says. The product came out of feedback from Louie Louie’s most loyal customers, “so it had to speak to them.”
Where the revenue goes
La France expects the soda to become the bigger line. Leaving regulation aside, she sees Louie POP! overtaking Louie Louie in revenue within a few years, “because it can be sold everywhere.” She describes the company as “a beverage company” with two lines that grow together.
She expects the first buyers to be Louie Louie drinkers using the soda to pace between THC drinks on the same night, with it then spreading to other times of day. “Not everybody’s a THC consumer,” she says. “Anybody can have a healthy soda.”
The bar for success is local. There isn’t yet a regional Poppi or Olipop that has broken through, La France says, and the team will judge the launch on “velocity at our key retailers, starting at home.”
For THC beverage brands planning around December 11, the useful exercise is the one Louie Louie ran: go back through your reviews and separate what customers buy for the effect from what they buy for the flavor, the format, or the brand. The second group is the product that can be sold everywhere.
Photo: Kathleen Fitzgerald.
