He Left FIJI Water to Build a Beer Alternative. Constellation Brands Just Bought It
Jordan Bass spent six years at The Wonderful Company, the privately held owner of FIJI Water, POM Wonderful, Wonderful Citrus, and JUSTIN Vineyards, working his way from an associate manager of strategy up to Head of eCommerce, where he says he helped scale the business into a category leader in CPG e-commerce. Training for his first triathlon, he started cutting back on the double IPAs he’d normally unwind with in the evenings and switched to non-alcoholic beer instead — and found nearly everything on the market was, in his words, loaded with carbs and calories and short on flavor. That gap between what he wanted to drink and what was actually available on shelves became the starting point for HOP WTR.
He left Wonderful in October 2020 and co-founded the company with Nick Taranto, a Marine Corps infantry officer turned Harvard MBA who had already built and sold a company once before: he co-founded the meal-kit startup Plated in 2012, raised roughly $100 million in venture funding, grew it to 1,500 employees, and sold it to Albertsons for more than $200 million in 2017. HOP WTR launched direct-to-consumer first, using online sales to prove there was real demand for a hop-flavored, alcohol-free sparkling water before pitching any retailer — the trendy Los Angeles grocer Erewhon became one of its earliest retail partners once the DTC numbers backed up the pitch.
The product itself is a zero-alcohol, zero-calorie, zero-sugar, zero-carb sparkling water brewed with real hops and blended with a proprietary mix of adaptogens like ashwagandha and nootropics like L-theanine, aimed at replicating the ritual and taste of a beer without the alcohol or the functional letdown of a flat seltzer. The lineup has grown from a single Classic flavor into a full range — Blood Orange, Mango, Lime, Peach, Ruby Red Grapefruit, Double Hopped, Pickle Lemonade, and an iced tea line — with Ruby Red Grapefruit winning BevNET’s Best New Product award in December 2023.
Retail distribution scaled quickly once the product line was proven. HOP WTR reached Target stores in 12 states by April 2023, then entered nearly 2,000 Walmart locations across 47 states in May 2024 — what the company called its largest retail push yet, anchored by the Ruby Red Grapefruit flavor. From there the brand expanded into Whole Foods, H-E-B, Wegmans, Albertsons, Kroger, Harris Teeter, BevMo!, Total Wine, Sprouts, and Trader Joe’s, reaching several thousand stores nationally. Alongside retail, HOP WTR raised outside capital from investors including Brand Foundry Ventures, Btomorrow Ventures (the venture arm of British American Tobacco), Constellation Ventures, Döhler Ventures, and Eastward Capital Partners — reported funding figures range from roughly $14 million to more than $20 million depending on the source, with Constellation’s venture arm notably among the backers well before the company came calling for the whole business.
In January 2025, when wildfires tore through the Los Angeles area, Bass cut his own salary to $1 to redirect resources toward relief efforts. HOP WTR donated 10,000 cans of water to first responders and evacuation centers almost immediately, followed by 50,000 more, reimbursed employees for air purifiers, and partnered with the nonprofit All Hands and Hearts on recovery work. “I just felt like I wanted to do more,” he said at the time. “The quickest way for me to do that was lower my salary” — and he encouraged other CEOs to use their own companies and platforms to help with the recovery rather than treating it as someone else’s problem.
That relationship with Constellation Ventures turned out to matter more than a typical strategic-investor line item. In March 2026, Constellation Brands — the parent company of Modelo and Corona — announced it was acquiring HOP WTR outright, five years after first taking a minority stake in the company, with the deal expected to close in early April 2026. Jim Sabia, president of Constellation’s beer division, said non-alcoholic beverages have become one of the fastest-growing areas of total beverage alcohol and called HOP WTR “a natural addition” to the company’s no- and low-alcohol portfolio. Bass framed it as a continuation rather than an exit: “I’m confident this will help us keep the momentum going,” he said, and he and the HOP WTR team are staying on to run the brand inside Constellation rather than handing it off.
The deal lands at a moment when the category HOP WTR helped define is growing fast. Hop water as a distinct segment traces back commercially to Lagunitas’ Hoppy Refresher, which launched in 2019, and has since drawn in players like Athletic Brewing’s hop-infused seltzer line; off-premise hop water sales were up roughly 20% year over year in the 52 weeks through late December 2024, according to scan data cited in trade coverage of the Constellation deal. That growth sits inside a broader shift in drinking habits: a 2025 Circana survey found nearly half of Americans said they were trying to drink less that year, a 44% jump from 2023, with 30% actively cutting back and three-quarters saying they’d likely try a new beverage aimed at the sober-curious. U.S. non-alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits sales combined rose 26% year over year, and the non-alcoholic beer market alone is projected to roughly double by the mid-2030s. Bass built HOP WTR for a customer who wanted the ritual of a beer without the tradeoffs — and by the time Constellation bought the company, the market had moved decisively in that direction.
In this episode, Jordan talks through leaving a corporate job at FIJI Water’s parent company to bet on hop water, proving demand direct-to-consumer before chasing retail, and what changes — and doesn’t — when a company you built gets bought by one of the biggest beverage alcohol companies in the world.
Listen to the full conversation with Jordan Bass on Apple Podcasts
Make sure to check out HOP WTR at: https://hopwtr.com/
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