Since launching in the UK in October, the energy drink Prime has gone viral and made headlines across the country for its popularity and scarcity, leading to a flourishing black market trade for the beverage and early morning queues of children with begrudging parents outside ASDA stores. Intrigued and slightly bemused by the Prime Hydration phenomenon, I went to three ASDA superstores in the Bristol area to see if I could catch sight, and maybe even taste, the holy grail of energy drinks.
The supermarket chain, like its parent company Walmart in the US, has an exclusive agreement to distribute the drink in the UK. Naively assuming it can’t be that hard to track down a bottle of one of the brand’s six flavours, I plotted a store crawl of three Bristol ASDAs, travelling north to south and taking in Cribbs Causeway, Filton and Bedminster.
Despite the ambitious goal, I was optimistic that the only obstacles that could possibly thwart this energy drink odyssey were the cold November rain and Bristol’s patchy bus service. How wrong I was.
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Prime Hydration is the brain-child of social media celebrities, and former amateur boxing rivals Logan Paul and KSI, alongside businessman Max Clemons. The drink’s popularity, particularly amongst teens, has been driven partly by the celebrity duo’s sustained endorsement to their vast social media fan base, including 70 million YouTube subscribers, rather than its taste.
Though, by all accounts, the taste isn’t unpleasant. It’s available in five flavours - Blue Raspberry, Grape, Ice Pop, Lemon Lime, Orange and Tropical Punch - as well as limited-edition Meta Moon, which according to Prime, is “a flavour so good, we can’t even describe it”. The zero-calorie drink’s ingredients include 10 per cent coconut water, natural flavourings, muscle-building BCAAs, antioxidants, electrolytes, and zinc.
Arriving at Cribbs Causeway, I was unable even to find a space on the shelf for the drinks and was informed by a member of staff with a polite look of pity that there was none available today, but that sometimes it’s a good idea to check the little fridges near the tills. So after diligently rummaging around every drinks bottle in the store, I threw the towel in and headed south.
I had high hopes for Filton as I strode past stacks of energy drinks with similarly monosyllabic monikers like Reign and Fuel. But this time, despite labels on the shelf, it was bare.
A customer service representative confirmed my fears that there wasn’t a single bottle in store and rebuffed my questions about how frequently deliveries come in, saying, “They don’t tell us; it seems to come in first thing in the morning.” I asked if they’d ever tried Prime, to which they responded with a flat no and a “not interested”.
Feeling deflated and, ironically, lacking in energy, I started to wonder if any drink could possibly be worth travelling across Bristol for in the morning when a security guard casually mentioned he tried it a few times before, nonchalantly telling me that “it’s actually quite nice, it tastes like coconut water".
'It got heated in the aisles'
Buoyed by an encounter with someone who’d tasted Prime, I headed toward Bedminster with a renewed sense of purpose, only to be told by a staff member that there would be no stock on the shelves for two to three weeks as part of an effort to curb some of the hysteria surrounding the drink. They said: “We need the pressure to go down because demand is high, very, very high.”
We also heard reports of customers arguing with staff over how many units they could purchase and even with each other. The same staff member told us: ”It got heated in the aisles, even in the pandemic, with toilet paper; I never saw it this bad.”
'Production issues'
However, a spokesperson for ASDA told Bristol Live that suggestions the product was being withheld to drive down some of the frenzy surrounding it were inaccurate, saying: “All of our stores that are selling this product are receiving deliveries; however, production issues mean that these aren’t as regular as we would like.” They also said that they had not seen any evidence of violence from Prime fans at the Bedminster store.
My Prime journey may have ended with failure, but for those committed to hunting down the drink, when it is in store at Bedminster, I’m told it would be found behind the customer services desk, where shoppers will be restricted to just three bottles and watched over by an eagle-eyed security guard.
Asked what they thought might be driving such an insatiable desire for Prime that requires so much regulation, one staff member told me: “The kids are going mad; somebody’s playing with their minds, you know, it’s just squash!” Disappointed and dehydrated in the face of defeat, I treated myself to a Ribena and headed home.
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