Can syrup sachets become a cult product? The co-founder of Hims thinks so

In the mid-2010s, Hilary Coles co-founded one of the decade's defining consumer brands. Hims, which launched in 2017 and was started by Coles, Andrew Dudum and Jack Abraham, convinced a generation of men to talk openly about hair loss and erectile dysfunction. Coles left Hims in 2025, started a family and took some time away from the world of consumer brands. But she was still curious about people’s spending habits — in particular, the round-the-block queues she’d see at the cafe that sold matcha lattes near her home.

“Coffee and matcha almost felt like the last acceptable vice,” she says. Despite it now being mainstream behavior to track sleep scores, calories, macros, and step counts, Coles observed that sweet (and expensive) drinks from cafes were still fair game. “It had become an accessory,” she says. “People were lining up for these flavors, matching their outfits with their cups.”

It’s a behavior that’s been seen before. When Starbucks was rapidly expanding in the 1990s, its green-and-white paper cups were a status symbol among busy professionals who knew what “venti” meant. Starbucks itself has fallen in and out of fashion since, but the status beverage has prevailed. And today it comes in shades of pink and green, and with enough sugar to floor you after the spike wears off.

These observations led Coles to develop Poca, a new line of single-serve flavored syrups that launched in March. Co-founded with Emily Boschwitz, former head of marketing at Hims, Poca makes zero-calorie syrup sachets that are small enough to fit in your pocket (hence the name, which is a blend of “pocket” and “cafe”), and designed to be squeezed into coffee, matcha or tea. The flavours mirror the menus of places like Blank Street — whose co-founder is an investor in Poca — and Erewhon: pistachio, strawberry shortcake, cinnamon, and classics like vanilla and caramel.

Coles says she grew up in a household that loved sweet treats, and vanilla lattes became her version of that ritual as an adult. But after having children, the sugar crashes that followed her afternoon pick-me-ups became impractical. “A medium vanilla latte has more sugar than two donuts,” she says. The syrup was the culprit. Poca’s products are sweetened with a combination of allulose, monk fruit and inulin, which the body metabolizes differently than standard sugar. The result, Coles says, is a sweet syrup that doesn’t spike blood glucose levels, or have the bitter aftertaste associated with sweeteners like stevia. Each sachet also contains around 3g of fibre.

Rethinking healthmaxxing

According to the Global Wellness Institute, the “wellness” category was valued at $6.8tn in 2024, having doubled in size since 2013. But signs are emerging that the obsession with optimization is wearing thin among consumers. Food brands are increasingly messaging around indulgence (even when selling a better-for-you option), while trends like “girl dinner” and “boy kibble” suggest people are actively looking for ways to simply enjoy what they’re eating. It’s a shift Coles felt herself in the years after leaving Hims. “The more optimized I became, frankly the more boring I became,” she says. “When you open your phone as a consumer today, there are so many people telling you all the different ways you could be better. And that’s a tough place to be.”

Poca is betting that sweetness is ready for a rebrand. “We have this idea of reclaiming sugar in a moment where it’s become so vilified,” she says. Poca is starting with syrup sachets, but Coles says she sees the brand’s world potentially encompassing all things sugar. “When you start thinking about sugar, you start seeing it everywhere, from individual packets at the diner, to pump bottles at the movie theatre or the coffee shop, to ice cream,” she says. “There’s a lot of nostalgia and emotion in sugar, so what would happen if it was [no longer] villainized? How might that change its role in our culture and conversation?” The idea, essentially, is that sweet things should be enjoyable to eat, and not associated with guilt.

Poca’s sachets are currently sold through its website, but the plan is also to launch partnerships with cafes later this year. The single-serve format is designed to be practical — Coles cites situations like being stuck in an airport with sub-par cafe options, or at the office with a store-brought cold brew, as moments one might reach for a Poca. A packet of 10 sachets costs $19, working out at $1.90 each — far less than the $3 or so one might pay on top of a regular latte for a specialty flavour somewhere like Blank Street (whether cafes will be happy with customers skimping on the syrup and adding one they brought from home, however, remains to be seen).

Early customers seem to be focusing their experiments at home, and Coles says Poca has been tagged in posts of people adding the syrups to yogurt, chia puddings, protein pancakes and, at the more dubious end, plain water. The behaviour that comes up most often, though, is the most obvious: adding them to coffees made at home.

It will take time to know if lightning has struck twice, but Coles is clearly hoping the same instinct that built Hims — that moving early on a cultural shift before it became obvious — can propel Poca, too. Hims was built on the observation that people were spending more on shampoo and jeans than on their own healthcare, making a new model for delivering consumer wellness not only possible but inevitable. Wellness has since outpaced pharmaceuticals as an industry. Now, a decade on, Coles is anticipating that the pendulum is swinging the other way, away from relentless self-improvement and towards products that feel effortlessly good. “You only get one life,” she says. “You deserve to enjoy it.”