Have you heard of Prime? Not the number. Not the TV station. But the drink.
Ask your resident eight-year-old boy. It's like the holy grail of the playground. All the rage.
Prime is a range of drinks promoted by YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI that was recently rolled out in Australian supermarkets.
Logan Paul and KSI may be white noise for anyone over the age of 30 but the pair wield a fair amount of influence. Like, are actual influencers. Logan Paul has 23.6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel; KSI has 24.1 million subscribers.
They launched the Prime Hydration drink last year. That was followed by Prime Energy Drink. Prime is also the official drink of UFC which promotes mixed martial arts.
And kids are losing their minds over the drinks. Why? I have no idea. The MMA connection? The Logan Paul/KSI endorsement? The confected rarity of the product? But if one kid gets their hands on a bottle they must immediately tell everyone they know.
Teenagers just this week stormed a Perth supermarket trying to get their hands on a bottle. Some schools in Australia have already banned Prime. Woolworths stocks Prime in Australia and regularly sells out, despite a five-bottle limit per transaction.
But there is a difference in the drinks.
Prime Energy, with 200mg of caffeine per can, is supposed to be limited to people aged over 18. Food Standards Australia New Zealand says that adults can consume a maximum of 400mg of caffeine per day.
Children, on the other hand, should be having no more than 3mg of caffeine per kilo of weight. So a 40-kilogram child should not consume more than 120mg of caffeine a day.
So Woolies is selling only Prime Hydration which has no caffeine.
All this I have learned after running around to four different supermarkets last weekend looking for Prime for my son. Who is eight.
At the first Woolies, I made the mistake of asking if they had the "Prime energy drink", unaware there was a difference. The shop assistant looked at me as if I had asked for a bag of cocaine. "We will never be selling the energy drink," she said to me, sternly.
With the prodding of my son, I asked, how about Prime Hydration? "Oh yes, that's on a stand down near the freezers," she said, brightly.
So we raced down to the freezers. Nothing.
Next supermarket. "We are all sold out and the warehouse has sold out as well."
Another supermarket. Nup.
The fourth supermarket. My son's face lit up and he walked-ran to the stand full of bottles, not wanting to believe it was true. "Prime," he said, eyes shining, the angels in heaven singing.
One bottle cost $4.50. We got lemon and lime. He had a sip in the car. And tried to disguise the disgust on his face. "It kind of tastes like Mountain Dew," he said. I had a sip. "Mmm, maybe closer to liquified plastic?"
And so the bottle of Prime has stayed in the fridge ever since. My son has taken a couple of tiny sips in the meantime, not wanting to believe Prime actually tastes like crap.
Brisbane radio host Matty Acton nails the sensation in his online videos, mimicking his own eight-year-old son "flexing" to his friends about landing a bottle.
Someone commented on one of the videos: "I've never heard of it until the other night when a kid brought into work a piece of the drinks' carton he got from Woolies with the word 'Prime' on it. He was showing all the kids and they wanted a piece of it".
Hilarious. Kids wanting to get their hands on anything connected to Prime.
My son's school this week reminded students no energy drinks were allowed and discouraged kids from using empty Prime containers as drink bottles.
And that's the nub of it. It's a craze. No one cares what's in the bottle. They just want the bottle. To buy into the hype.
Prime is this moment in time's yo-yo, Rubik's cube, even Cabbage Patch Kid. The kids will all move onto something else soon enough.
In the meantime, Canberra nutritionist and founder of The Healthy Eating Clinic founder Kate Freeman says the hydration version of Prime won't hurt kids "but is completely unnecessary, even for active kids".
"Regular meals and snacks plus water will replace electrolytes and provide them with adequate protein and micronutrients. I'm glad the energy drink is not easily accessible by kids - this amount of caffeine would be very damaging," she said.
"It just goes to show how powerful influencer marketing is, especially for young people. With more and more kids on social media, which is largely unregulated, we're going to have to be very careful. Otherwise, all the progress we've made with limiting advertising to children on things like alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, other energy drinks, goes out the window.
"Lots of hard work has been done in this space with kids' television, radio, sport and so on. Social media flips all that on it's head with kids being exposed to all sorts of products and information."
