Liquid Death IPO: The Readiness Gap Nobody's Pricing In

Every few months, someone asks whether Liquid Death is finally going public. The Liquid Death IPO has been "coming soon" since the company hired Goldman Sachs back in 2023, yet three years later there's still no filing, no ticker, and no confirmed timeline. That gap between expectation and reality is worth studying, not because Liquid Death is a bad brand, but because it's a near-perfect case study in the difference between being famous and being exit-ready.

At Izba, we work with founders who are scaling toward a sale, a raise, or a public listing. The pattern we see over and over is this: marketing heat gets a company noticed by bankers. Operational maturity is what actually gets a deal done. Liquid Death is currently living in the gap between those two things.

Is a Liquid Death IPO actually coming?

Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario has been consistently vague on the question, telling reporters the company isn't "focused on a specific exit strategy right now" and will "weigh an IPO or a merger when the time is right." That's a carefully hedged answer from a company that hired an investment bank specifically to prepare for one.

The signals point toward eventual action: a $67 million raise in 2024 valued the business at $1.4 billion, up from $700 million in 2022, and the company has spent two years stacking executive hires that typically precede a public offering. But "preparing for an IPO" and "ready for an IPO" are not the same sentence, and the three-year gap between hiring Goldman Sachs and actually filing tells you which one is true today.

Why doesn't hiring Goldman Sachs mean Liquid Death is ready?

Hiring a bank signals intent, not readiness. Goldman Sachs can build a compelling growth story around a brand's cultural relevance: Liquid Death's Live Nation partnership, its celebrity investor list, its 2023 UK retail placements at Tesco, Iceland, and Co-op. What a bank can't manufacture is the operational track record public-market investors and auditors actually diligence: consistent margins, supply chain reliability, predictable demand planning, and a finance function that can withstand quarterly scrutiny.

We see this same mismatch with private clients constantly. A brand can look "IPO-ready" from a marketing deck (strong social following, retail distribution, a recognizable founder story) and still be nowhere close operationally. Revenue growth without repeatable systems isn't a growth story. It's a liability waiting for due diligence to find it.

What does the UK exit reveal that the marketing coverage doesn't?

This is the part of the story that gets skipped in most of the IPO speculation. Liquid Death entered the UK in 2023 with major retail placements and real buzz. By February 2025, it had quietly pulled out, framing the withdrawal as "temporarily pausing international efforts" after shifting manufacturing from Europe to the U.S. in mid-2024.

The company's own numbers tell the harder version of that story: UK sales came in at just £2.0 million for the year ending September 2024, a fraction of what the retail rollout and marketing spend implied. A brand doesn't walk away from Tesco and Co-op shelf space because things are going well. It walks away because supply chain and production capacity weren't built to support the expansion the marketing had already promised.

That's a textbook operational readiness gap: the demand-generation engine outran the supply chain's ability to fulfill it internationally. For a company positioning itself for public-market scrutiny, an unresolved international retreat is exactly the kind of detail that shows up in an S-1 risk factors section, and exactly the kind of detail that doesn't show up in press coverage of the next celebrity investor.

What does the PepsiCo CFO hire really signal?

In October 2025, Liquid Death named Ricky Khetarpaul, a 20-year beverage finance veteran who led reporting, forecasting, and planning for a $5 billion PepsiCo beverage portfolio and most recently served as CFO of Health-Ade through its acquisition, as its new Chief Financial Officer. CEO Mike Cessario tied the hire directly to Liquid Death's move into the $23 billion energy drink category in 2026.

This is a meaningfully different signal than the Goldman Sachs hire. Bringing in a CFO with large-company financial infrastructure experience is what a business does when it's trying to build the systems an IPO actually requires: audited reporting, category-level forecasting, and finance operations that scale beyond a single hero product. It's a genuine step toward readiness. But a new CFO also needs time to build those systems before they're tested by public markets, which is itself a reason an imminent filing is unlikely.

What's the real readiness gap here?

Line up the four signals (the Goldman Sachs retainer, the UK retreat, the new CFO, and the still-vague timeline) and a consistent picture emerges: Liquid Death has brand heat that most CPG companies would kill for, and an operational foundation that's still catching up to it. That's not a criticism of the brand. It's the normal order of operations for a company built on marketing-led growth, and it's exactly the gap that has to close before an exit, whether IPO, acquisition, or otherwise, can actually happen on good terms.

We tell founders the same thing regardless of category: an exit process doesn't start when you hire a banker. It starts when your operations can survive the scrutiny a banker's process invites. Brand equity gets you the meeting. Supply chain discipline, financial systems, and repeatable demand planning get you the deal.

FAQ

Is the Liquid Death IPO happening? Liquid Death has not filed for an IPO as of this writing. The company hired Goldman Sachs in 2023 to explore a public listing, but CEO Mike Cessario has declined to confirm a timeline, saying the company will pursue an IPO or a merger "when the time is right."

Why did Liquid Death leave the UK market? Liquid Death withdrew from the UK in February 2025, citing a loss of international production capacity after shifting manufacturing from Europe to the United States in 2024. The company's UK sales had also fallen to roughly £2.0 million for the year ending September 2024.

Who is Liquid Death's CFO? Ricky Khetarpaul was named Liquid Death's CFO in October 2025. He previously served as CFO of Health-Ade and held senior finance roles at PepsiCo, where he oversaw reporting and forecasting for a beverage portfolio exceeding $5 billion in revenue.

Preparing your own brand for a sale, raise, or exit? Izba helps scaling companies close the gap between brand momentum and operational readiness. Read more about our Exit services or get in touch.