09/27/2023
Over the past few decades, what Americans want out of their beverages has swung wildly between two extremes. In the 1990s, sweet drinks were all the rage. Soda sales were on what seemed like a limitless upward trajectory. Quaker bought the then-ascendant Snapple brand for $1.7 billion in cash, a sum that made me actually snort when I read it in the harsh light of 2023. Gimmicky drinks such as Surge, Orbitz, and SoBe “elixirs” crowded grocery-store shelves. As a middle schooler in the late ’90s, my consumption patterns were practically a case study in the era’s marketing magic. I’m not sure a single drop of plain water ever touched my lips outside of soccer practice.Toward the end of that decade, the first evidence of the coming reversal was already visible. Skepticism (most of it warranted, though some of it not) toward sugar and artificial sweeteners steadily grew. The soda giants, reading the room, began marketing their own bottled-water brands to compete with the more fashionable likes of Evian and Perrier. Dasani and Aquafina came right on time: As soda sales faltered, bottled-water sales took off. In 2016, the Beverage Marketing Corporation estimated that, for the first time, Americans consumed more bottled water—almost 40 gallons per capita on average—than carbonated beverages. Tap water, too, has found a new home in an ever-increasing number of reusable water bottles. New Stanley cup, anyone?Americans, in short, got sold on hydration. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu recently wrote, how much water any particular person needs to drink to maintain a healthy baseline is still the subject of significant disagreement among experts. But in the absence of clear guidance—and with plenty of encouragement from the health-and-wellness industry—many people seem to have simply decided that more is more, and they shoot for as much as a gallon a day.That isn’t to say that everyone likes drinking all this water. As the nation has disciplined itself to refill its glasses, Americans have been forced to confront the inconvenient reality that drinking plain water day in and day out can be kind of a chore. To choke it all down, they’ve returned to powders and concentrated syrups designed to make water more palatable, more healthful, or both. Sweet drinks are back again, albeit in a different form. Enter the water enhancer.Today, products meant to gussy up your water are everywhere at grocery and convenience stores. They come in little brightly colored squeeze bottles or
Just add stuff to it.