On Dakota Johnson’s first day on set to film her directorial debut Loser Baby, she grabbed a can of Celsius and started drinking. She said she spent much of the rest of the shoot with a Celsius in her hand. She recalled feeling exhilarated, and though she also found it hard to sleep, surely that was just inspiration from the creative process flowing through her body.
Then her costume designer let her in on a secret: Celsius is an energy drink that contains 200mg of caffeine per can. That’s why she was staying awake all night.
“On the back it’s just like, ‘B12, Vitamin A’. I thought it was vitamins,” Johnson later admitted to Variety. “I didn’t realize I was basically just overdosing on caffeine.”
Johnson is not the only person to confuse Celsius for a health drink based on its packaging.
Celsius bills itself as a workout supplement free of sugar and artificial preservatives. Drink one and, according to the label, you’ll get an “essential energy” boost that “accelerates metabolism” and “burns body fat”.
But turn the can around, and in fine print you’ll see that it has 200mg of caffeine. That’s equivalent to two cups of coffee, or nearly six cans of Coke. It’s on par with Prime energy drink, which was subject to Chuck Schumer’s ire last year: in a letter to the FDA, the New York senator demanded an investigation into Prime’s “eye-popping” level of caffeine.
“I didn’t know it was like Red Bull,” Johnson said. “I thought it was a natural drink.”
If Red Bull is shorthand for Formula 1 racing teams and hard-partying college students, and Prime is associated with man-child YouTubers hawking caffeine to pubescent boys, Celsius hits with a different group – and Johnson may be its avatar.
How Celsius won over women
For decades, energy drinks like Monster, Red Bull and the caffeinated and alcoholic Four Loko aligned themselves with the interests of young men.
“These drinks were associated with energy, extreme sports, girls in bikinis,” said Frances Fleming-Milici, who studies the marketing of energy drinks at University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for food policy and health. One 2015 study found that men who valued masculine ideals tended to believe that consuming energy drinks made them more macho.
Celsius follows that playbook – to an extent. The brand has worked with the YouTuber and professional boxer Jake Paul (a pointed choice given that his brother, Logan Paul, puts his name on Prime), Nascar drivers and college football stars (this, despite the NCAA’s ban on high levels of stimulants including guarana, a plant extract present in Celsius and other energy drinks). But it seems Celsius wants clout outside of man caves and sporting events. How did it win over women? By softening up its image and tapping into the billion-dollar wellness industry.
Skinny white cans of Celsius feature cheerful images of fresh fruit, graphics of people working out and the inspirational slogan “Live Fit” – nothing like the warring bulls or grisly claw marks on Red Bull and Monster cans. There’s no mention of caffeine on the front of the can, and instead of “energy drink”, Celsius uses the gentler phrase “essential energy”.
On TikTok, most of the drink’s vocal fans are young women in expensive athleisure wear who love to work out. They say Celsius helps power their gym days or perk up their 3pm corporate-afternoon slogs. The brand’s Instagram feed shows the DJ and Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Xandra Pohl drinking Celsius in a pool, and the Olympic track and field champion Tara Davis-Woodhall taking sips from a can in between reps.
“The slim can, the color choices on the bottle and the influencers they chose to promote it reflect that there’s this halo of health around it,” Fleming-Milici said, “which I think is troubling, because it makes people unaware of how much caffeine they are consuming.”
Representatives for Celsius did not respond to a request for comment.
In a Fortune interview, John Fieldly, Celsius’s CEO, credited the brand’s success – last year, it made $1.3bn – to this switch in marketing strategy. At first, Celsius leaned into “being more scientific”, touting itself as a “thermogenic” drink with a “negative-calorie” effect. But during the pandemic, the company zeroed in on fitness and lifestyle branding, posting with gym franchises such as Barry’s Bootcamp and working with first responders like nurses and police officers.
“The liquid has to be more than the ingredients in the can,” Fieldly said. “We want Celsius to be like the Apple logo, or Starbucks logo, or the iconic Monster Energy claw.”
It’s well on its way: Celsius is now the third-largest energy drink company in the US. And a cult behind the drink has emerged among wellness-minded women. For them, Celsius serves as an essential accessory for cool girls with packed schedules. The it-girl hosts of the anti-woke podcast Red Scare even jokingly referred to it as a cocaine alternative on a recent episode.
‘Celsius drinkers are y’all okay?’
Jill Lewis, a 58-year-old publicist who lives in Toronto, calls herself a “reformed Celsius junkie”. She’s been off the stuff for about a month, after drinking five or six cans a day for two or three years.
“If I was hungry, instead of having a snack I’d have a Celsius and feel full,” Lewis said.
Lewis started drinking Celsius because the label promised to boost her metabolism and provide an energy kick. “I work out all the time, and I’m always looking for hacks,” she said. It wasn’t until one of Lewis’s adult children told her to stop drinking the beverage that she realized it wasn’t as healthy as she initially thought.
One doctor told the New York Post that energy drinks like Celsius may speed up your metabolism in the short term but are unlikely to provide lasting results; experts also say energy drinks have a limited, if any, effect on weight loss – but might be slightly more effective when combined with exercise. (The six studies Celsius published on its website backing up its claims of metabolism-boosting and calorie-burning effects were funded by the brand.) This did not stop a TikTok rumor from making the rounds last year alleging that Celsius, which retails for around $3 a can, contained semaglutide, the active ingredient in the expensive diabetes drug Ozempic.
This summer, the Wall Street Journal published a report on young women with eating disorders who drank Celsius to feel full without having to eat proper meals. The head of adolescent medicine at the Cleveland Clinic told the Journal that a third of the hospital’s eating-disorder patients consume energy drinks. (Celsius declined to comment for that piece; the drink does not market itself as a meal replacement.)
Online, some Celsius drinkers say the product’s high caffeine level does not make them feel good. “Celsius drinkers are y’all ok,” one woman posted on TikTok. “I just took my first sip ever and it sent my body into a state of shock.” In other videos posted on the app, people reported feeling fatigued and experiencing headaches and heart palpitations when they tried to stop drinking Celsius.
Dr Siyab Panhwar, an interventional cardiologist at the Sanford Bemidji Medical Center in Minnesota, said that it’s possible these are symptoms of caffeine withdrawal.
Stimulants such as caffeine increase a person’s blood pressure and adrenaline levels. Other ingredients such as taurine and guarana extract – both present in Celsius – can enhance the effects of caffeine. “It sends you into that sort of fight-or-flight mode, and that’s when people feel more wired and activated,” Panhwar said.
The FDA says it’s safe for the average healthy person to consume around 400mg of caffeine a day, which is about four cups of coffee. “Imagine if one or two cups of coffee makes you jittery,” Panhwar added. “Having an energy drink is going to be a lot worse, and consuming multiple cans of a drink a day for a long period of time is potentially very problematic.” The makers of Celsius advise consumers not to have more than two cans in a day.
The FDA does not place a limit on caffeine in energy drinks because it considers them dietary supplements. The only such limit exists for cola-type beverages such as Coke or Pepsi. Jennifer L Temple, director of the nutrition and health research laboratory at the University at Buffalo, believes that’s a problem.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that the FDA says the upper limit for caffeine in Coke is 71mg per 12 ounces, but there is no upper limit for a drink like Celsius, Red Bull or Prime,” Temple said.
As for whether Celsius is the vitamin-rich drink Johnson thought it was: the beverage does contain vitamins C and B12. However, customers settled a class-action lawsuit against the brand last year, alleging that the label misled them as it said the drink contained “no preservatives” when it did contain citric acid. (Celsius countered that the citric acid was added for flavor.)
Lewis kicked her Celsius habit right before going on a detox trip to a spa. It wasn’t difficult to do. “I’m good at going cold turkey. I did that with smoking after university,” Lewis said. “You just ignore the symptoms.”
Still, when she visits New York for work, sometimes she’ll pop into a corner store, see rows of Celsius drinks for sale, and feel a pang of desire. “I do think: ‘Should I get one?’” she said. “Damn it, I wish they were good for me.”
