by Marion Nestle

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Jan 6 2014

Welcome to 2014: Fun Facts from Advertising Age

Advertising Age has just issued its 2014 Marketing Fact Pack with all kinds of useful tidbits.  Here is a sample:

  • McDonald’s was the highest ranking food advertiser in 2012, meaning the company that spends the most money on “measured media,” the kind that goes through advertising agencies: $1.424 billion, of which $957 million was spent in the U.S.  This doesn’t count marketing that does not go through advertising agencies.
  • The top ten fast food restaurants spent $6.1 billion on advertising, just in the U.S. in 2012.
  • The top ten beverage brands spent $1.77 billion on U.S. advertising in 2012: Coca-Cola $243 million, Pepsi $274 million, Gatorade $101 million, etc.
  • TV is still the largest advertising medium (39%) followed by the Internet (19%), newspapers (15.5%), magazines, radio and outdoor and cinema.  This is the first year that the Internet has surpassed newspapers.
  • The Internet share of advertising is expected to rise to 31% by 2016.
  • Americans spent 271 minutes a day watching TV in 2013 and another 316 minutes on digital media.  Total minutes with any medium: 712 (but some of this is multitasking).
  • Nearly one in six adults watches more than 40 hours of TV a week.
  • Americans spent only 18 minutes a day reading newspapers.
  • The cost of a 30-second TV spot on The Simpsons is $231,532.
  • The cost of a 30-second TV spot on The Biggest Loser is $91,672.
  • The top 20% of Americans earned 51% of all income in 2012.
  • Mean income for all households was $71,274; for the lowest 20% it was $11.490; for the highest 20% $181.905.

Welcome to 2014!

Oct 9 2013

Jocelyn Zuckerman’s interview about Eat, Drink, Vote

Marion Nestle Speaks Out on the Big Business of School Food

By Jocelyn Zuckerman  (published originally by On Earthrepublished by Civil Eats, and now here).

A year ago, when I was working as an editor at the magazine Whole Living, I oversaw a special issue on food featuring “Visionaries”—people making a real difference in the way this country thinks about eating. There was “The Motivated Mayor” (Michael Bloomberg); “The Integrator” (Harlem chef and restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson); and, among several others, there was “The Badass.”

That would be Marion Nestle. The author of a handful of books that examine the intersection of food and politics, Nestle is a public-health nutritionist and a professor at New York University. She is also one of the most outspoken advocates for a national food system that prioritizes health and the environment over corporate profits. (Michael Pollan ranks Nestle the second-most powerful foodie in America, after First Lady Michelle Obama.)

Recently she published her new book, Eat, Drink, Vote, an admirably approachable look at wide-ranging issues such as farm subsidies, obesity, genetically modified foods, and trans fats.

On the eve of its release, Nestle and I sat down over lunch to discuss, among other things, lunch. Ours was fine—Caesar salad for her, Niçoise for me—but the lunches that dominated the conversation weren’t the ones on our plates. Rather, we talked about the meals that our nation’s kids will be loading onto their trays in the new school year.

It’s an issue that Nestle cares deeply about, and for good reason. For starters, school lunches (and breakfasts) tend to represent the lion’s share of the nutrition that a low-income child will get in a day. (For the truly impoverished, they may be the only meals children get.) The food served sets an example to a “large, captive, impressionable audience,” as Nestle puts it in the book, making cafeterias key battlegrounds in the fight against obesity and poor nutrition.

And it’s certainly a fight. Throughout Eat, which features some 250 food-related cartoons by illustrators around the country, Nestle calls out the entrenched powers—namely, our Congressional representatives and the deep-pocketed food and beverage lobbies to whom they seem ever more beholden—working at cross-purposes to the folks fighting for a food policy focused on promoting our own well-being and that of our environment.

Just look at what happened in 2011, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to rate tomato paste based on its true nutritional value. School pizza makers went running to their friends in Congress, who promptly blocked the USDA’s decision. So an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is still credited with as much nutritional value as a half a cup of vegetables. Nestle chose a cartoon that wittily depicts the you-must-be-kidding-me moment (by Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike Peters) for the cover of her book.

There’s no question that school meals are big business. In 2011, the USDA school breakfast program served nearly 12 million children, at a cost of nearly $3 billion, Nestle writes in Eat, while the lunch program served nearly 32 million children, at a cost of $11 billion. The companies involved in providing all that food have a serious interest in holding on to their share of that money, preferably while investing as few resources as possible.

“Any change in the standards means that the products that have been created specifically for school lunches [that pizza, for example] have to meet new standards,” Nestle pointed out over lunch. “And that pisses everybody off”—everybody who’s already making money off school meals, that is.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that those meals have, in fact, gotten better. In December 2010, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The legislation marked the first time in a generation that school lunch regulations had been updated. (One telling example of just how much our dietary landscape has changed over the decades: the previous laws featured minimum calorie levels but no maximums.) The new act gave USDA the power to establish nutrition standards for all of the food sold and served in schools.

In addition to lunches and breakfasts, this includes the so-called “competitive foods” available from vending machines and carts. There are now limits on the levels of saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, and calories, and the standards require that snacks be rich in whole grains and provide nutritional value. Drinks can contain no more than 40 calories per 8 fluid ounces, or 60 calories per 12 fluid ounces—numbers that rule out all regular sodas and Gatorades.

 

Healthier for kids also means healthier for the environment. (Another cartoon in the book, by Joel Pett, aptly illustrates the direct link between “soft-drink pushers” and damage to the natural landscape.) There’s a direct impact on the supply chain when school lunches are heavier on organically grown produce instead of (corn-fed) chicken coated in cornmeal and deep-fried in corn oil, for example.

Given the numbers involved, healthier school lunch standards should ultimately mean a shift in what is being grown and raised in this country. Fewer sodas in vending machines means less demand for high-fructose corn syrup and less acreage devoted to monocultures of corn. Fruit and vegetable salads replacing chicken fingers means less demand for antibiotic-laden factory-farm birds. In a logical world, greater demand for healthy crops to produce federal school lunch meals would translate into more support for them in the next Farm Bill.

There’s more to making school lunches better than just changing the rules, though, Nestle explained. The food has to taste good, too, and the kids have to actually eat it. “I have been in some of the best school lunch programs in the country,” she said, “and the kids weren’t eating.” They may avoid the meals for social reasons, she explained. “It may have a bad reputation. They may not like the way the cafeteria looks. They may not have time to eat.” (She blames the no-time-to-eat problem in part on an educational culture that’s fixated on testing and suggested that programs teaching kids about growing and cooking food can help overcome some of the other barriers.)

I asked Nestle about who’s getting it right, and she replied that the now-somewhat-famous program at the Calhoun School, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, represents “the Platonic ideal” of what a school lunch operation can be. It doesn’t come as a huge shock that children eat well at an educational institution that charges in the neighborhood of $40,000 a year per student, but the man behind the program, French Culinary Institute-trained “Chef Bobo,” doesn’t just cook for rich kids.

He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the country on school lunches and healthy eating, and he regularly brings in cooks from other schools to intern in his kitchen, which features produce and chickens sourced from local vendors and includes a vegan option every day (see one of his recipes to the left). Several of Bobo’s sous chefs have gone on to start similar lunch programs at other schools, including at a public charter school in the Bronx.

Nationwide, Nestle said, there are more farm-to-table programs linking students with local farmers than ever before. Schools in cities and in the countryside are sowing their own kitchen gardens, and the three-year-old Food Corps supports a network of volunteers who work in poor communities to teach kids about healthy food, build school gardens, and help bring better food into public-school cafeterias.

Sure, school lunches still need work—someday that tomato paste will be called out for what it really is—but the fact is, we’ve come a very long way. “Look back ten years!” Nestle said in regard to the overall shift in this country’s dietary landscape. “Healthy food has gone mainstream.” Despite the entrenched interests, she said,changes are happening, in large part because Americans better understand the importance of what they put in their mouths. With Eat, Drink, Vote, the badass lunch lady furthers the cause.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Jocelyn Zuckerman is the former articles editor at OnEarth, the former executive editor of Whole Living and deputy editor of Gourmet, where she won a James Beard Award for feature writing in 2002. She is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Parade, and Plenty.

 

Jul 1 2013

USDA issues rules for competitive school foods. Yes!

At long last the USDA released Interim Final Rules for competitive foods—the snacks and sodas sold from vending machines and carts outside of federally supported school lunches.

They were worth the wait.

The new  standards are tough and will change the food landscape in schools much for the better.  They are summarized in a handy flier.   The new rules require:

  • Snacks to be rich in whole grains, have real food as a first ingredient, and provide nutritional value.
  • Drinking water to be available to all students at no cost.
  • Other drinks to contain no more than 40 calories per 8 fl oz, or 60 calories per 12 fl oz.  This excludes all regular sodas, even Gatorade. 

USDA summarizes the changes in its Smart Snacks in School Infographic:

Competitive foods have long been a bone of contention.  They compete for kids’ food money with the school meals.  Although USDA regulates where and when they can be sold, schools routinely violate such rules.  I’ve seen for myself  how many schools allow vending machines to be open during lunch periods.

The USDA issued nutrition standards for school meals early in 2012, but it’s taken this long to issue the ones for competitive foods, no doubt because of the expected uproar from food and drink producers whose products will now be excluded.

To back up the rules, the USDA has produced a vast array of materials and documents.

One web page is devoted to a toolkit of materials for “the healthier school day.”

A separate web page links to all of the legislative and other documents, videos, issue briefs, Q and A’s, statement from First Lady Michele Obama, and other items of technical assistance to the new “smart snacks in schools” program and rules.

Also see:

But note: the rule is “interim” because the 120-day comment period is now open.  USDA can still make plenty of changes.  Schools will have a year to implement the final standards.

Watch the lobbying begin.

You think there won’t be opposition?  Think again.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just released a report recommending that USDA ease off on restricting the amount of meat and grains allowed in the school meal standards that went into effect this year.   Apparently, USDA agrees.  GAO reports are usually requested by members of Congress and this one is no exception.  Guess which party these particular requesters belong to, and who funds their election campaigns.

USDA deserves much applause and support for its courage in issuing rules for competitive foods that might actually help kids stay healthier.

Jan 29 2013

Brominated Vegetable Oil: R.I.P. (let’s hope)

I’m teaching a course on food advocacy this semester at NYU and am always looking for instructive examples.  Here’s a good one.

PepsiCo announced that it would remove Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO) from Gatorade and replace it with something less potentially harmful.

BVO, a flame retardant, keeps keep flavor oils in suspension and prevents a cloudy appearance in soft drinks.

According to the account in the New York Times, PepsiCo’s action followed soon after a 15-year-old activist in Mississippi, Sarah Kavanagh, filed a petition on Change.org to remove BVO.

The petition attracted more than 200,000 signatures, and this week, Ms. Kavanagh was in New York City to tape a segment for “The Dr. Oz Show.” She visited The New York Times on Wednesday and while there said, “I just don’t understand why they can’t use something else instead of B.V.O.”

…a spokesman for PepsiCo…said in an e-mail, “We appreciate Sarah as a fan of Gatorade, and her concern has been heard.”

…”Kudos to PepsiCo for doing the responsible thing on its own and not waiting for the F.D.A. to force it to,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest [CSPI].

Mr. Jacobson has championed the removal of brominated vegetable oil from foods and beverages for the last several decades, but the F.D.A. has left it in a sort of limbo, citing budgetary constraints that it says keep it from going through the process needed to formally ban the chemical or declare it safe once and for all.

I love Ms. Kavanagh’s response to BVO’s removal, as quoted in Beverage Daily:

I thought I might get a lot of support because no-one wants to gulp down flame retardant, especially from a drink they associate with being healthy. But with Gatorade being as big as they are, sometimes it was hard to know if we’d ever win. This is so, so awesome.

A teenager with social media skills accomplished what CSPI has been trying to do for decades. 

The FDA removed BVO from its list of ingredients Generally Recognized As Safe in 1970, but in 1977 allowed companies to use it on an “interim” basis.  It says getting rid of it is “not a priority.”

Animal studies show it causes lesions in the liver and impairs growth and behavior.   The medical literature contains occasional case reports of bromine toxicity in individuals who abuse brominated cola drinks.

Getting rid of it is good news.

But, as CSPI’s Michael Jacobson points out:

Gatorade without BVO is nutritionally no better than with it.  A typical 20oz (591ml) bottle has 130 calories, all from its 34 g of refined sugars.

Dec 18 2012

Let’s Ask Marion: Beyoncé’s Bubbly Branding Falls Flat

It’s been awhile since Kerry Trueman posed an “Ask Marion” question, but here’s her latest Q and my A  as posted on Civil Eats.

By  on 
Q. From the moment Beyoncé strapped on those silly stilettos to bounce around in the “Move Your Body” video, she’s been a wobbly spokesperson for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move Campaign.” Now she’s signed a $50 million dollar deal with Pepsi, which will presumably entail her exhorting her millions of young fans to baste their bodies in bubbly high fructose corn syrup.

Apparently, she didn’t get the childhood obesity/diabetes epidemic memo. Do celebrities with Beyoncé’s massive influence on young kids have a moral obligation to consider the horrendous impact of excessive soda consumption in our culture when they mull over megabuck branding opportunities?

A.  From my privileged position as a tenured, full-salaried faculty member at NYU, the answer is an unambiguous yes. Beyoncé will now be marketing sugar-sweetened beverages, products increasingly linked to childhood obesity, especially among minority children.

This linkage is not a coincidence. Pepsi and other makers of sugary sodas deliberately and systematically market their products to low-income, minority children.

Beyoncé will now be part of that targeted marketing campaign.

If Beyoncé’s mission is to inspire young people of any color to look gorgeous and rise to the top, as she has done, she is now telling them that the way to get there—and to get rich—is to drink Pepsi. This untrue suggestion is, on its own, unethical.

Pepsi must think that getting this message out, and putting Beyoncé’s photo on its soda cans, is well worth $50 million.

For PepsiCo, $50 million is trivial. According to Advertising Age (June 2012), PepsiCo sold $66.5 billion worth of products in 2011, for a profit of $6.4 billion. Pepsi sales in the U.S. accounted for $22 billion of that.

PepsiCo’s total advertising budget funneled through advertising agencies, and therefore reportable, was $944 million. Of that amount, $196 million was used to market Pepsi alone. The rest went for Gatorade ($105 million), Mountain Dew ($23 million) and PepsiCo’s many other Quaker and Frito-Lay products.

One other relevant point: half of PepsiCo’s annual sales are outside the United States. Like other multinational food companies, it is focusing marketing efforts on emerging economies. This means that Beyoncé will also be pushing sugary drinks on people in developing countries. PepsiCo just spent $72 million to sponsor cricket tournaments in India, for example.

Fifty million dollars seems like an unimaginable amount of money to me. If PepsiCo offered it to me, I would have to turn it down on the grounds of conflict of interest. But this is easy for me to say, because the scenario is so unlikely.

What $50 million means for Beyoncé I cannot know. Some sources estimate her net worth at $300 million. If so, $50 million adds a substantial percentage. And the Pepsi deal will give her phenomenal exposure.

But from where I sit, Beyoncé has crossed an ethical line. She is now pushing soft drinks on the very kids whose health is most at risk. And her partnership with Pepsi will make public health measures to counter obesity even more difficult.

This is a clear win for Pepsi. And a clear loss for public health.

Beyoncé has now become the world’s most prominent spokesperson for poor diets, obesity and its health consequences, and marketing targeted to the most vulnerable populations.

Sad.

Nov 16 2012

Chicago emulates New York’s public health policies? Not quite.

Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not exactly Michael Bloomberg when it comes to public health approaches to obesity and chronic disease prevention.

In October, he announced that he’d gotten Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper Snapple to agree to post calorie information on vending machines in Chicago government buildings (something that they will have to do anyway whenever the FDA ever gets around to issuing final rules for menu labeling).

At the same time, he announced a health competition between Chicago city workers and those in San Antonio with rewards paid by the American Beverage Association through a $5 million gift.  This partnership was widely interpreted as a ploy to stave off the kind of soda tax and cap initiatives proposed by the Bloomberg administration in New York City.

And now, in yet another deal with soda companies, Mayor Emanuel has accepted a $3 million grant from Coca-Cola to pay for a park district program “to fight obesity and diabetes by offering nutrition education as well as exercise classes run by armed forces veterans.”

If the idea of soda companies funding anti-obesity campaigns strikes you as ironic—don’t sodas have something to do with obesity in the first place?— you need to understand Mayor Emanuel’s point of view.

His stated philosophy is that it’s better “to give people personal responsibility and the information necessary to make the right choices about their health than it is to legislate their behavior.”

Maybe so, but when faced with today’s “eat more” food environment, personal responsibility doesn’t stand a chance.

But wait: Isn’t Chicago making an important environmental change?  Its public schools are banning energy drinks.

Well, almost.

The new policy sets nutrition standards for all vending machine food and a la carte items sold in cafeterias and excludes energy drinks—with one exception: Gatorade, a PepsiCo product, “can only be used after students have engaged in a school sports activity.”

Are public health partnerships with soda companies a good idea?  The money is nice and undoubtedly badly needed, but worth the price?  Mayor Emanuel thinks so.

I’m dubious.

Jan 23 2012

Catching up with items about beverage marketing

I’ve been saving up items about beverages, mostly having to do with marketing:

Soda companies vs. civic public health campaigns: In strategies reminiscent of those used by tobacco companies, soda companies are filing suit to obtain documents from public agencies all over the country.  Digging them up takes staff time and effort and slows down the real work of these agencies—the point of this approach.

Sonic’s marketing campaign, Limeades for Learning (“when you sip, kids learn”) encourages purchasers of its high-calorie drinks (620 for a medium, 950 for a large) to vote for school projects.

Dr Pepper Snapple’s diet—oops, low-calorie—10-calorie Dr Pepper Ten is aimed at men.  Men, it seems, like low-calorie sodas but squirm at the notion of diet sodas.

Coke covers both bases.  Diet Coke targets women and Coke Zero targets men in an “it’s not for women” campaign.   Is this ad offensive?  It not only excludes half the market, says Food Navigator’s Carolyn Scott-Thomas, but is

patronizing to both men and women in its reinforcement of what I had (perhaps naively) hoped were outdated stereotypes….It deliberately picks at the edges of our comfort zones.  Is it OK to be sexist if it’s done with irony?…Provocation is a blunt instrument.  It may prove effective for sales—perhaps as effective as sexually explicit marketing—but it is still crude and obtuse.”

She asks: “Would this ad be offensive if it involved a bunch of redneck clichés and proclaimed ‘it’s not for blacks’?  You bet it would.”

Coca-Cola has launched a global music effort to connect with teens.  Coke CEO Muhtar Kent says:

Our success in growing our sparkling category today depends on our ability to grow and connect with teens, the generation of tomorrow.

Pepsi, not to be outdone, has invented a social marketing vending machine for the digital age.  Buy a drink and you now have the opportunity to send one as a gift to a friend or a random stranger.

The Committee on Nutrition, American Academy of Pediatrics weighs in on sports and energy drinks.  Its tough report begins with the statement that “Sports and energy drinks are being marketed to children and adolescents for a variety of inappropriate uses.”

Sports drinks…may contain carbohydrates, minerals, electrolytes, and flavoring and are intended to replenish water and electrolytes lost through sweating during exercise.

In contrast…energy drinks also contain substances that act as nonnutritive stimulants, such as caffeine, guarana, taurine, ginseng, l-carnitine, creatine, and/or glucuronolactone, with purported ergogenic or performance-enhancing effects.

The report ends with this unambiguous conclusion:

the use of sports drinks in place of water on the sports field or in the school lunchroom is generally unnecessary. Stimulant containing energy drinks have no place in the diets of children or adolescents.

In response, Red Bull says it is not marketing to children.  Instead, it says, the company totally follows the “agreed codes of practice for the marketing and labelling of energy drinks.”

Just for fun I looked up some advertising budgets reported in Advertising Age. For 2010, Coca-Cola spent $267 million just to advertise Coke, Pepsi spent $154 million just to advertise Pepsi and another $113 million for Gatorade, and Dr. Pepper spent a mere $22 million for Snapple.

These expenses are just for those individual products and just for campaigns run through advertising agencies.  Pepsi’s total advertising budget that year was $1.01 billion.

Water, anyone?

 

 

 

Sep 25 2011

Energy shots: what will marketers dream up next?

 A few months ago, the Committee on Nutrition of the American Academy of Pediatrics published  a position paper on sports and energy drinks in the diets of children and adolescents.

The committee distinguished sports from energy drinks:

Sports drinks: beverages that may contain carbohydrates, minerals, electrolytes, and flavoring and are intended to replenish water and electrolytes lost through sweating during exercise.

Energy drinks: also contain substances that act as nonnutritive stimulants, such as caffeine, guarana, taurine, ginseng, l-carnitine, creatine, and/or glucuronolactone, with purported ergogenic or performance-enhancing effects.

The operative word is “purported.”  The committee’s tough conclusion: 

The use of sports drinks in place of water on the sports field or in the school lunchroom is generally unnecessary.

Stimulant-containing energy drinks have no place in the diets of children or adolescents.

For the record, PepsiCo spent $113 million to market Gatorade in 2010 (says Advertising Age). 

The committee was concerned about the effects of high-dose caffeine on kids.  Although its report did not distinguish energy drinks from energy shots, its conclusion undoubtedly applies to those too.  Energy shots are more concentrated versions of energy drinks.

This is a big issue because pediatricians are concerned about the marketing of all of these caffeine-laden drinks to kids.   Marketers, the Nutrition Committee says, are pushing energy drinks to kids as low-calorie “healthier” alternatives.

BeverageDaily.com asked Red Bull, the leading energy shot seller, about its marketing practices.  The company denies marketing its shots to kids.

We do not market our product to children and other caffeine sensitive people…The authors of this report seem to be unaware that the American Beverage Association (ABA) and also the European Beverage Association (UNESDA) have already agreed codes of practice for the marketing and labelling of energy drinks.

Maybe, but energy shots are the new hot product, so hot that FoodNavigator-USA.com has just devoted a special report to them.  Sales are booming.  The only concern?  Can they continue?  Or, will they be replaced by the even hotter new thing: energy strips?

 Energy shots special edition: Flash in the pan or the runaway success story of the decade?  Cynics said they would never catch on. Who would cough up $2.99 for a mouthful of caffeine, taurine and vitamins when you can enjoy a coffee and a snack – or a whole can of your favourite energy drink – for the same price?.. Read 

Energy shot market still has significant growth potential, say researchers: While it might not be able to sustain its early “meteoric” growth rates, the energy shots market still has significant growth potential and can potentially target a far wider audience than energy drinks, market researchers have predicted… Read 

5-hour Energy increases grip on energy shots market: 5-hour Energy’s grip on the US energy shot market has tightened further in the past year, with the brand now accounting for nine out of every $10 spent in the burgeoning category… Read

 Hain Celestial scores industry first with refrigerated energy shot: Hain Celestial will break new ground in the burgeoning shots market this fall with the launch of the first refrigerated energy shot… Read 

Does the energy shot market have room for a new player?  A David vs Goliath battle is set to be waged in the US energy shots sector as two ex-Marines seek to carve out a niche in a market so competitive that even Red Bull has thrown in the towel and made a sharp exit… Read 

5-Hour Energy ramps up from seven to nine million bottles a week: 5-Hour Energy is now selling nine million bottles of its energy shots a week compared with seven million last year, a 28% rise in volume, the firm has revealed… Read 

Monster Energy maker: Continued growth of energy drinks ‘remarkable’: The US energy drinks sector is continuing to generate “quite remarkable” growth despite the depressing economic climate and high gas prices, according to the owner of Monster Energy drinks and Worx Energy shots… Read 

Red Bull cans energy shots and Cola in US (but not Europe): Global energy drink leader Red Bull has taken a rare step back by withdrawing Red Bull Cola and Red Bull Energy Shots from the US market – but says it has no plans to withdraw the products from the other 20 markets where they are sold… Read 

Entrepreneur: Energy strips could be worth $1bn in 3-5 years: The entrepreneur behind Sheets Energy Strips – novel dissolvable strips delivering an instant hit of caffeine and B vitamins – says the category could be worth $1bn in the next three-to-five years… Read

These products are about making a fortune selling potentially harmful beverages under the guide of “healthy” to anyone wanting a quick caffeine fix.

They are about marketing, not health.

Water anyone?