Deep Dive: PRIME Hydration and Energy Drinks

The new drinks on the block are a marvel... of marketing

At the suggestion of a Subsnax reader, today’s Subsnax is a deep dive into PRIME drinks.

What are PRIME drinks?

I first heard of PRIME when I was in our local supermarket with my son and he spotted a display of PRIME hydration drinks. “All my friends are drinking these!” he told me. “Can I please try one?” Because he’s inexplicably sporty and often in need of hydration, I agreed to let him get a bottle. Also, he’s very cute and he asked nicely.

There are two varieties of PRIME: energy drinks (with caffeine) and hydration drinks (no caffeine). The energy drinks come in Blue Raspberry, Orange Mango, Lemon Lime, Tropical Punch, and Strawberry Watermelon flavors. The hydration drinks come in Strawberry Watermelon, Meta Moon (what?!), Ice Pop (okay…), Blue Raspberry, Orange, Tropical Punch, Lemon Lime, and Grape flavors.

I didn’t realize at first that were two varieties of PRIME and the next time I bought some, I accidentally bought the caffeinated version. When my son had some friends over, they all grabbed bottles of PRIME and guzzled them down immediately. I gave a bunch of 12-year-olds the equivalent of Red Bull (actually, PRIME energy drinks have more caffeine than Red Bull). Oops. Sorry, parents of my kid’s friends!

My son is right about one thing. All his friends are drinking PRIME. I didn’t think the world needed yet another brand of sports/energy drinks, but what did I know? Because apparently, to kids, this stuff is the bomb dot com (kids still totally say that, right?).

A primer on PRIME

Two twenty-something YouTubers created PRIME: KSI (Knowledge, Strength, Integrity; real name: Olajide Olatunji, from Hertfordshire in the UK) and Logan Paul (from Ohio). Between these former boxing rivals turned YouTube stars turned drink creators, they have more than 40 million followers. Supposedly, KSI has a net worth of $25 million and Logan Paul has a net worth of $45-50 million.

In the UK, the drinks have been so popular that parents are queuing up (as they say over there) for them at stores; online shops are price gouging; children are extorting other children for sips of PRIME on the playground; and an abduction prevention agency warned parents that predators were using PRIME to lure kids into traps.

My friend Andy, an actual doctor who is also the parent of a PRIME-obsessed child, says of PRIME drinks, “There’s a medical reason why kids are addicted to it. Their sucralose content is so high it tricks the body into thinking it’s getting a sugar load.” Both the hydration and energy PRIME varieties contain sucralose, an artificial sweetener (the most common sucralose-based product is Splenda).

How does it taste?

I decided to try a PRIME drink for myself. As it happened, I opened my refrigerator and found this:

I took a sip.

It tasted grotesquely sweet with a cloying, artificial flavor. I could barely tolerate one sip — no way could I drink an entire bottle of this stuff. I’m not alone in my opinion on this. Celebrity chef and noted crank Gordon Ramsay said he gives PRIME a zero out of ten rating and compared drinking PRIME to “swallowing perfume.” As for “naturally flavored?” In no way does this drink taste anything like an actual orange.

I will not be trying the other varieties of PRIME and I’m definitely staying away from the PRIME energy drinks. I do not need an additional 200 mg of caffeine (the average 8-ounce cup of coffee contains about 80-100 milligrams of caffeine).

Changing tastebuds

I don’t know why kids are so bananas for what seems, to me, to be an overwhelmingly sweet beverage (aside from the marketing of said beverage, which we’ll get to in a moment). I suppose it’s partly a testament to how tastes change from childhood to adulthood.

Children love sweets — one theory is that babies’ tastebuds are developed to align with their need for human breast milk, which is packed with natural fats and sugars (fun fact: there’s another theory that the reason vanilla ice cream is the most popular ice cream is because it’s the closest thing to the taste of human breast milk. Make of that what you will). Many kids avoid bitter and sour tastes, the theory goes, since in nature those types of foods could have been potential poisons. Kids also naturally have more tastebuds in their mouths than adults do. Over time, we lose tastebuds and dull our senses and begin to appreciate the sour, the bitter, and the complex in ways we didn’t in our younger years.

Electro-whats?

For most people, most of the time, water does a fine job of providing all the hydration a human being needs. Sports drinks like Gatorade and PRIME make a big deal out of the fact that they contain electrolytes. But what are electrolytes, exactly, and why does the body need them?

Electrolytes are substances that have a positive or negative electrical charge when dissolved in water. Let’s not forget that the human body is 60% water, so electrolytes help the body regulate chemical reactions and maintain fluid balances. Most people get sufficient electrolytes from the food and drinks they consume. Key electrolytes include sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, chloride, phosphate, and bicarbonate.

Sports drinks were originally designed for serious athletes during periods of intense physical activity. The average person doesn’t need them. And a lot of sports drinks contain plenty of sugar (although PRIME energy drinks have “0 sugar” and the hydration drinks have “zero added sugar”).

It’s all about the marketing

PRIME is a marketing triumph. The “scarcity marketing” tactic — where the sought-after drinks are hard to come by — is a classic marketing scheme (remember the craze for hard-to-find Cabbage Patch Kids dolls? Remember people hoarding toilet paper in the early days of the pandemic and creating a scarcity when there wasn’t necessarily one to begin with?). The perceived shortage creates a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). Plus, PRIME became the “official hydration partner” of Arsenal Football Club in the UK. KSI and Logan Paul spent a lot of time and effort hyping up PRIME on any and all social media channels: YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok (and maybe even Facebook, although that is now officially for The Olds).

So if your kids suddenly seem crazy for PRIME, you should know that this stuff has been marketed to them extensively, through social media campaigns as well as word-of-mouth among the kid/tween/teen set.

In other words, they’ve been primed for PRIME.

Got a new snack you’d like me to write about? Let me know!

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