New soft drinks aim to calm the stressed-out

Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, or so the laws of physics say. Push and pull. Proton and electron. Gravity and levity.

And now, Red Bull and Drank.

Drank falls in an emerging category of “relaxation beverages,” concocted to soothe the overextended, overbooked and overworked masses that have been hopped up on energy drinks for the past decade. Drank’s slogan? “Slow your roll.”

“I wasn’t the only person speaking 50 miles per hour,” said Peter Bianchi, who invented Drank. “It was my personal quest to relax the world.”

Drank and similar nonalcoholic beverages are hitting the market just as Americans are being beaten down by the longest recession since World War II, and industry marketers have seized on the drinks’ purported calming properties as the antidote for a stressed-out society. Vacation in a Bottle calls itself “the happy relaxation drink.” For Superliminal Purple Stuff Pro-Relaxation Formula, the name says it all. And iChill, a relaxation shot, urges users to “unwind from the grind.”

“You guys in Washington can affect the relaxation-drink market when you get the economy back on track,” said George Smart, founder of the company behind calming beverage Blue Cow.

Relaxation drinks are still only a drop in the bucket of what research firm Mintel estimates is a $50 billion market for nonalcoholic beverages. Soda remains the liquid staple of our diets, commanding about $13.1 billion in sales for 2008. Energy drinks are the fastest-growing sector by far, accounting for about $896 million in sales. But sales are starting to level off after years of triple-digit percentage growth earlier this decade. Consumers have been overwhelmed by the number of new brands — more than 300 energy drinks appeared on store shelves between 2003 and 2008.

“There is room for so much diversification within the beverage market,” said Harry Balzer, an analyst with consumer research firm NPD Group. “The one thing we do like as humans is new things.”

That’s what prompted Funktional Beverages, based near Houston, to heed this Business 101 lesson: Go where they ain’t.

The company, founded last year, contemplated launching with an energy drink called Red Stuff, said Tim Lucas, chief marketing officer. But they worried that the beverage would struggle to stand out in a crowded market. Instead, Funktional Beverages created Purple Stuff, packed with herbs and amino acids that supposedly calm the mind and body, and aimed it squarely at the urban 18- to 35-year-old males who once pledged their loyalty to amped-up energy drinks.

To win over this crowd, the company had to make relaxation seem edgy, less yoga studio and more skateboard park, which is exactly where Funktional Beverages handed out free bottles of Purple Stuff. For today’s youths, Lucas explained, relaxation means surfing, water-skiing and cage fighting.

Cage fighting?

“We’re about not being nervous as we jump out of a plane,” Lucas clarified.

Controversy over the beverage is bubbling, because, along with Drank, the name Purple Stuff resembles slang for the dangerous cocktail of cough syrup and soda referenced in hip-hop music. The companies maintain that the resemblance is unintentional and that, if anything, their products are actually good for you.

Many of the relaxation beverages contain the amino acid L- theanine, which is found in green tea and thought to have calming properties, the companies say. (Drank does not include the ingredient.) Japanese researchers isolated theanine about 60 years ago. 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.