It’s unbelievable how the $50 billion beverage industry keeps coming up with new products and inventions to entice consumers with. The fastest growing segment in the past few years has been energy drinks, but it’s beginning to flatten. Will relaxation soft drinks, the new up and coming niche, prove successful?
Most likely yes. Sadly.
But before you run off to unwire with a “vacation in a bottle”, we want you to take a look at a sample product, Purple Stuff, with us.
What you need to know:
Note: If one of you dear readers has found this product, please send us a picture of the ingredient list, as we haven’t seen this drink at the local Safeway. The manufacturer, Funktional Beverages, doesn’t list the ingredients on its website.
However, it does share the nutrition panel. We found a few irritating pieces of information:
The product is designed as a large can, 16 oz to be exact. The serving size is 8oz, exactly one half. What is a person to do with the can after drinking half of it? It’s not even a resealable package like some oversized bottles. Obviously this is a product meant for drinking as a single serving.
Each 8oz half serving is 50 calories, and includes 13 grams of sugar. That’s a tad more than 3 teaspoons. If you’re about to down an entire can, that’s 26 grams of sugar, almost 7 teaspoons worth. Don’t know about you, but sugar is an upper, not a downer no?
The active ingredient is an amino acid called L-theanine …
…which is found in green tea and thought to have calming properties… Japanese researchers isolated theanine about 60 years ago, and a company called Taiyo Kagaku soon began manufacturing it commercially. Introduced to the United States in dietary supplements about a decade ago, theanine got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration for use in food and beverages in 2006.
read more in the Washington Post…
What to do at the supermarket:
How about getting your L-theanine from green tea without adding crazy amounts of sugar?
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