Trish McGowan and Greg Odom have been building brands for other people for over 18 years. This spring, they launched their own — and they're making a specific argument about what the functional-beverage category was missing.
Trish and Greg have spent more than 18 years building other people's brands. Greg was a co-founder in Tampa-based haircare brand Not Your Mother's; Trish has worked for Procter & Gamble, Revlon, and Reckitt. Today, through their Tampa consultancy, Inside Brands, they shape how companies show up in market — the packaging decisions, the positioning, the work most consumers never see. This spring, after two years of development, they launched a brand of their own.
Mindstate is a functional sparkling water brand with two lines: Uplift, with hemp-derived THC and CBD, and Reset, non-THC, with L-theanine, magnesium, and Lion's Mane. Both at zero calories and zero sugar. Mindstate was built around the idea that you shouldn't have to choose between feeling good, great taste, and sharing meaningful moments with friends.
Two Years of R&D, One Deliberate Lineup
The two-year arc that produced Mindstate wasn't an accident of slow execution. It was deliberate. The founders worked through multiple formulation passes, multiple flavor systems, and multiple packaging directions before settling on the lineup that launched this spring.
What emerged from that process was a deliberately curated product lineup: two formulas each available in three flavors — Wild Black Cherry, Tropical Mango, and Lemon-Lime Twist. Every can is carbonated, with zero calories and zero sugar, but the choice between Uplift and Reset goes beyond flavor and function. It's about how you want to feel and which Mindstate fits the moment. Different moments call for different Mindstates. Which Mindstate do you reach for?
Uplift: Pure Social Joy
Uplift's most important formulation decision is the kind that doesn't always read on a label: the founders chose isolate over full-spectrum hemp-derived THC, and they did it specifically for flavor.
Some cannabis-adjacent beverages taste, somewhat, of cannabis — that's the cost of going full-spectrum, which preserves more of the source plant's aromatic profile. The Inside Brands team made the opposite bet. They wanted Uplift to drink like a sparkling water with a clean fruit flavor, not like a beverage you'd identify as cannabis-derived before reading the label.
The second deliberate choice was the delivery mechanism. Uplift uses nano-emulsification, which puts onset somewhere around 15 minutes — closer to the timing of a cocktail than the 30-to-120-minute range typical of traditional edibles. That single spec is what allows the brand to position Uplift as a drink, not a dose.
L-theanine and magnesium round out the formula. L-theanine, an amino acid from green tea, promotes relaxation; paired with THC, it's intended to soften the anxious edge some people experience with cannabis. Magnesium adds key electrolytes to keep the body fueled.
The founders see Mindstate as a modern alternative for people who still want the ritual and social ease of having a drink with friends, just without the next-day regret. No hangover, zero sugar, and zero calories. For a Tampa summer — long outdoor evenings, heat that doesn't quit — that's a practical argument, not a marketing claim.
Reset: Refresh Your Mood
Reset is the formula the founders built for the moments Uplift isn't designed for: mornings, workdays, post-workout windows, evenings that should end on a clear head.
The anchor ingredient is Lion's Mane mushroom — a functional mushroom with a growing body of research around cognitive support. The founders chose it as Reset's signature compound because it's explicitly cognitive in intent, not just hydration with a wellness label slapped on. Reset uses a 20:1 full-spectrum extraction of the mushroom's potent fruiting bodies, for a stronger, faster-acting effect. Paired with L-theanine and magnesium, the formula targets the kind of focus that doesn't spike and crash.
What Reset doesn't have is as important as what it does. No THC. No caffeine. No alcohol. No sugar or calories to manage. It sits in the part of the day where you'd otherwise get up for a break or reach for a sparkling water with nothing functional in it, and it adds a specific kind of cognitive support without altering anything else about the moment. It's for the time of day when you need a vibe refresh.
For the founders, that's the gap Reset fills — a sparkling water for a mood refresh, in the daily-use slot, without asking the drinker to commit to a wellness protocol.
Why Both Cans Ship Zero-Zero
One of the more consistent threads through the founders' product brief is the zero-calorie, zero-sugar floor across both cans. That decision wasn't incidental.
Most functional beverages travel with significant caloric or sugar load. Kombucha has sugar. Adaptogen drinks are typically sweetened. CBD-infused waters sometimes carry artificial sweetener aftertastes that linger and complicate an otherwise clean ingredient story. The Inside Brands team made the call that Mindstate's functional argument would only hold if the supporting label stayed clean.
For Uplift specifically, this matters more than usual. Many cannabis-infused beverages on the market are sodas or juices, which adds sugar and calorie variables to an already nuanced dosing conversation. Uplift's sparkling water base keeps the format honest: you know what you're getting, and nothing extra is riding along.
The carbonated format also slots Mindstate into existing drinking routines. The product isn't asking consumers to adopt a fundamentally different habit — it's asking them to swap one sparkling water for another, with active ingredients riding along instead of flavor systems.
Why Tampa Was Always the Origin
Inside Brands has been Tampa-based for years. When the consultancy started developing its own product, the founders never seriously considered formulating it for somewhere else. Tampa wasn't a launch market chosen for strategic optics; it was the market the brief was written against.
Florida's functional-beverage market has grown alongside its wellness culture, but most major sparkling-water and cannabis-adjacent brands are out-of-state companies treating the state as a distribution target. The founders inverted that. Uplift's no-hangover profile addresses the specific misery of a Florida morning-after. Reset's clarity stack addresses the specific need for a functional, professional-context drink in a state where outdoor heat and long workdays demand both.
The HerbanFlow Partnership: The Brand on Shelf
Mindstate's Uplift is available in store at HerbanFlow, a functional and non-alcohol beverage shop with two St. Pete locations. The brand is collaborating for an in-store tasting on Saturday, June 6, at both HerbanFlow locations — Downtown and Tyrone.
A sweepstakes runs alongside. The prize is a pair of VIP tickets to HerbanFlow's High and Dry Festival on July 11, plus a $50 HerbanFlow gift certificate. To enter: follow @drinkmindstate and @herbanflow on Instagram. For a bonus entry, attend the in-store tasting on June 6 and sign up with your email.
For the founders, the HerbanFlow partnership isn't just a launch event — it's a positioning statement. Mindstate is showing up adjacent to local music, outdoor festivals, and Tampa's arts-and-wellness scene rather than on a dispensary shelf or in a supplement aisle. It's a brand built to live in the same space as a Friday afternoon, not a medicine cabinet, and the HerbanFlow collaboration makes that explicit.
Featured partnership.
