A year and a half ago, two YouTubers and sports stars, Logan Paul and KSI, once rivals in the boxing ring, came together to fight a common enemy: Gatorade. They channeled their energies, and their combined 40 million social media followers, into a rival fruit-flavored sports drink they called Prime Hydration.
Their young fans across the US and UK were captivated. Almost immediately, the drink became a rare commodity, and therefore precious. Young people posted YouTube and TikTok videos of their epic quests through convenience stores to find it, sometimes at ridiculously marked-up prices. They charged each other exorbitant sums in playgrounds for open bottles and amassed collections of all nine flavors. Paul and KSI and their partner, Congo Brands, made a reported $250m from the brand – which does, undeniably, actively target children in its marketing – in 2022. And adults, for the most part, were oblivious.
In January 2023, a year after the debut of Prime Hydration, Paul and KSI expanded into the energy drink business. Prime Energy comes in most of the same super-sweet fruity flavors as Prime Hydration. It derives its power not from sugar but from coconut water and taurine, an energy-producing amino acid, as well as – crucially – 200mg of caffeine per serving. Red Bull, by contrast, has a mere 80mg per serving, while Monster has 160mg, and a cup of coffee has between 100 and 200mg, depending on how it’s brewed (or 300mg if it’s a Starbucks Grande). Comparisons aside, one can of Prime Energy far exceeds the FDA’s recommended daily maximum caffeine dose of 100mg for people between 12 and 17. (The maximum for adults is 400mg; children 11 and younger shouldn’t drink caffeine at all.) By summer, adults had heard of Prime Energy and decided it was time to worry.
In early July, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, urged the FDA to investigate Prime. “One of the summer’s hottest status symbols for kids is not an outfit, or a toy,” he intoned at a press conference. “It’s a beverage – but buyer and parents beware because it’s a serious health concern for the kids it so feverishly targets. Prime is so new that most parents haven’t a clue about it, but it is born from the reels of social media and the enigmatic world of influencers.” In a letter to the FDA he urged the agency to investigate “insufficient warnings about caffeine content” and “to seriously consider Prime’s target market of children as part of any investigation”.
This is far from the first time Americans have been alarmed over kids’ consumption of caffeine. (Schumer himself has previously called for an FDA investigation of caffeinated peanut butter and all-out bans on inhalable and powdered caffeine.) As far back as 1909, officials at the US Department of Agriculture were concerned about excessive amounts in Coca-Cola, which had recently abandoned any pretense of being a headache remedy and was now a soda fountain staple popular with kids as young as four.
It contained roughly 74mg per 8oz serving, and because of kids’ smaller size, they were likely to feel the effects – including anxiety, jitters, dehydration and diarrhea – faster. After a series of lawsuits, the Pure Food and Drug Act was amended in 1912 to add caffeine to the list of “habit-forming” and “deleterious” substances that needed to be identified on food labels, and Coke elected to cut the caffeine per serving by half. Even that was enough to provide an extra burst of energy, and kids found soda a superior alternative to coffee – especially teenagers, who research has found have sleep patterns and biological clocks at odds with society’s need for early risers. In adolescence most people’s body clocks shift, meaning they need to get up later, but school still starts early, resulting in many teenagers being chronically sleep-deprived. Coke was sweeter and could be guzzled instead of sipped so, in theory, one could consume more caffeine more quickly.
The specific category of energy drinks developed later, out of another beverage panic, this time over the excessive quantities of sugar. One of the first, Dr Enuf, was specifically formulated in 1949 to be fizzy and caffeinated like soda, but fortified with vitamins so it wasn’t all just empty calories. The vitamins gave Dr Enuf a veneer of healthfulness, and, as a bonus, meant it could be marketed as a supplement, a strategy that has been adopted by almost every energy drink since. Supplements aren’t as closely regulated as regular foods, allowing a freer rein with both marketing and ingredients.
By the mid-aughts, energy drinks had begun to overtake soda in popularity among kids. Many companies followed the lead of Red Bull, which emerged from Thailand in the 80s and grew into a $18.5bn business, fueled not just by caffeine but also its marketing strategy that mostly avoided conventional advertising in favor of distributing free samples on college campuses, sponsoring extreme sports and, with the rise of social media, targeting potential customers online (where the youngest customers often bump into the brand without the knowledge of their parents).
In 2013, the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation held a hearing at which medical professionals testified that large quantities of caffeine were unhealthy, especially for under 18s. Afterward, members of the American Beverage Association, the trade group that represents many energy drink manufacturers, agreed to include more explicit information about caffeine content on packaging, to stop selling their products in K-12 schools, to stop marketing explicitly to kids 12 and younger, and not to encourage overconsumption or mixing their beverages with alcohol.
It could be argued that Prime Energy follows those rules: the packaging and website state the caffeine content and that the drink is intended for people over 18. Crucially – as Paul recently pointed out in a TikTok post in which he read a statement from his phone, shirtless in a boxing gym, apparently annoyed about the interruption to his workout – Prime Energy and Prime Hydration are different drinks. One comes in a bottle (Hydration), one in a can (Energy). But many would say Prime and other energy drinks don’t go nearly far enough. Both feature sweet flavors and colorful packaging which feel clearly designed to appeal to children, said Frances Fleming-Milici, the director of marketing initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, as does a marketing strategy which centers around influencers beloved of under 18s, YouTube and video games.
“It’s under the radar of parents and adults,” Fleming-Milici said. “If companies wanted to do the right thing, wouldn’t they change the way they market their products?” She pointed out that they could change the way the drinks are sold, too: “Some energy drinks explicitly state the drink is intended for adults 18 years or older on the can. If this is the case, wouldn’t it make sense to have a policy in place to look at a purchaser’s ID when it’s being sold?”
But regulation of energy drinks is an uphill battle. Of all the efforts to ban selling energy drinks to kids – there have been many over the past 15 years, in more than a dozen states – the only one that was successful concerned alcoholic energy drinks, after several college students were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning after drinking Four Loko.
The FDA still hasn’t imposed any specific regulations on nonalcoholic energy drinks. While people have been hospitalized after consuming too many energy drinks, and some have even died, it’s hard to pinpoint energy drinks as the immediate culprit. When Davis Cripe, a 16-year-old from Chapin, South Carolina, died of a heart attack in 2017 after downing a McDonald’s latte, a large Mountain Dew and an unspecified energy drink in the span of about two and a half hours, the county coroner told newspapers that it wasn’t necessarily the caffeine that was to blame but the fact that Cripe had consumed it so quickly.
It has yet to be scientifically proven exactly how bad energy drinks are for kids, and if they are any worse than caffeinated soda or coffee. There have been plenty of scientific studies of the effects of caffeine, both good (increased alertness, better athletic performance) and bad (increased stress and aggressive behavior, high blood pressure, poor sleep, stomach irritation), but very few have been exclusively concerned with energy drinks, or the interactions between caffeine and other commonly found ingredients such as yerba mate, guarana or taurine.
The kids I spoke to, though, said they weren’t interested in the Prime brand for the caffeine but for the association with Paul and KSI. “It feels special because I’ve watched this YouTuber for a long time, so it feels like a connection,” said Shayden Belgard, 16, of Portland, Oregon, who, like Paul, drinks Prime Hydration at the gym. They are also drinking it because all the other kids are drinking it, a marketing strategy since time immemorial. “Kids at school had it and I just tried it,” says Wilder Chehak, 12, of Milwaukee. “The first time, I didn’t really like it. I got used to the taste and started liking it, but I think Gatorade’s better.” That hasn’t stopped Wilder from obsessively collecting all the flavors of Prime Hydration the way earlier generations obsessively collected Beanie Babies or Matchbox cars; he keeps them on the dresser in his bedroom unopened, in rainbow order.
Prime Energy is so new, there’s very little meaningful sales data, so it’s hard to say definitively whether kids are drinking it as much as the original hydration drink. If TikTok is any indication, most of the obsession still seems to center around the non-caffeinated original. Both Shayden and Wilder said they preferred Prime Hydration to Energy, and so did most of the kids they know. This isn’t just because of the taste, though Wilder said he didn’t like Energy when he tried it. It’s because Hydration is harder to find, and therefore more of a prize. (There’s a subset of videos on YouTube and TikTok in which users, mostly older teens and adults, compare the two, with mixed results. One pair of teenage testers pronounced Energy “not as unique” and said they didn’t think they would become addicted.)
Many parents who are worried about Prime may well be unaware that only one drink is caffeinated; Schumer didn’t help matters by conflating both variants. But, as sociologists have long observed, moral panics are excellent for getting politicians’ names in the news, and diverting attention from more pressing issues. It’s much easier for a politician to call for an investigation of one energy drink, which can easily be removed from store shelves (Prime Energy has already been banned in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa has banned all Prime drinks and Denmark has banned Prime Energy and is demanding changes to Prime Hydration) than it is to try to regulate the entire caffeinated drinks industry. Moral panics also serve as an excellent marketing strategy for brands courting young people – the news provides plenty of free publicity and warning labels often make kids want to try something.
It’s also easier to call a press conference to condemn a drink than to monitor what one kid is looking at on social media. And, in the case of Prime, social media, and not caffeine, may be the true source of the moral panic. How was this trend able to grow so quickly among kids without their parents’ knowledge?
Fleming-Milici thinks fighting social media’s influence is a losing battle, and there’s no point in blaming parents. The best way to keep kids away from energy drinks, she believes, is to make them less appealing. She’s thinking specifically of flavored e-cigarettes, which attracted more teen smokers; some studies show that after they were banned, fewer teens started smoking.
There are many kids like Wilder, who lied about his age and downloaded TikTok without his mother’s knowledge or permission. He first heard about Prime from kids at school, but now he can learn about whatever’s coming next on his own – totally below the radar of the adults in his life. As his mother, Erika Browne, explained: “At this age, it’s really hard not to have your kids to have something like [TikTok]. They’re all on it. They feel left out if they’re not. It’s been a contentious subject in our house.”
