Where Is Final Straw From Shark Tank Today?

Recently, sipping on soda has become a somewhat more complicated situation. Before, you may have stuck a straw into the mouth of your bubbling beverage can with reckless abandon, but nowadays, you need to be aware of the straw's material before you start sipping.

In response to growing concerns about the alarming amount of plastic pollution that has amassed in the ocean, a number of companies have stopped offering customers plastic straws, per NBC. The next time you're washing down a Big Mac with Diet Coke, you might be drinking through a hole in the soda cup's lid, as McDonald's may soon be free of plastic straws. Several years ago, the city of Chicago also jumped on the anti-plastic straw movement. If you routinely find yourself dining at ecologically conscious eateries, and don't want to sip directly from the glass, "Shark Tank" alumnus Final Straw creates the exact product you need.

Constantly carrying around a reusable straw would eventually get old. In order to capitalize on the demand for a practical alternative in an increasingly strawless world, business partners Emma Cohen and Miles Pepper created Final Straw (per Joe Pardo). The Final Straw has a stainless steel body with soft tips on both ends. Perhaps most importantly, it's multi-jointed, like a tentpole, so it can be folded down to a more portable size.

When Cohen and Pepper appeared on "Shark Tank," they asked the sharks for a whopping $625,000 investment, and only paired the pitch with a 5% stake in the company. Lori Greiner voiced her concern that the Final Straw wasn't a novel enough invention, noting that she had already seen variations of the product. Kevin O'Leary offered the full $625,000 but demanded 25% equity and a $2 royalty on each straw sold until Final Straw hit the $1.8 million sales mark. Cohen rejected the royalty proposition, and O'Leary rescinded his offer. Mark Cuban made the same offer, sans royalty stipulation, but Final Straw declined, and ultimately left the show without an investment.

As it turns out, Lori Greiner was actually foreshadowing the future of Final Straw when she lamented the reusable straw's replicability (via Joe Pardo). According to CNBC, the product's profitability was immediately affected by the emergence of knockoff straws — one brand was even so brazen as to directly steal the Final Straw brand imagery.

Final Straw has had the accounts of several thousand different illegal impersonators removed from online marketplaces, per Inc. Magazine. However, that isn't the only hurdle the company has had to overcome in the wake of its "Shark Tank" appearance. Cohen and Pepper ended their business relationship, and Pepper left the company altogether, with the intention of pursuing another venture in the plastic alternatives space.

Nevertheless, the Gazette Review tells us that Final Straw, which is now branded as simply Final, makes an annual revenue of around $7 million. Final offers a range of products that go far beyond the company's trademark reusable straw, and $7 million a year doesn't sound so bad to us.