Darren Rovell's Gatorade blog

Gatorade at the U.S. Open

Gatorade has received great product placement at this year's U.S. Open where huge coolers sit in between the two player chairs on each court. Many players can be seen chugging the sports drink straight from the bottle, but a tremendous amount of players seem to make their own concoctions and load them up in a thermos. I'd love to get the ingredients in some of these creations. Gatorade sells at the stands for $4 per bottle at the United States Tennis Center -- roughly 2.5 times the retail price.

Denmark Government Threatens To Pull POWERade

Gatorade competitor POWERade could soon come down from store shelves in Denmark. The governmental body, dubbed the Veterinary and Food Administration, told officials with the drink's producer, Coca-Cola, that they believe the sports drink is marketed under false pretenses. The administration said it was approved just for use for athletes, but the governmental body is concerned about the drink's sedentary use and believes that Coca-Cola should not be able to sell POWERade alongside the company's other soft drink products. Coca-Cola officials have until next Thursday to convince Denmark officials that their drink belongs on supermarket shelves. Gatorade is also available in the country. It is not clear what the Veterinary and Food Administration thinks of Pepsi's marketing of their sports drink.

Jelly Belly Introduces Sport Beans

Who would have ever thought that the people at Jelly Belly would dream up a way to compare their product to Gatorade? Well, they have. The company has unveiled Sport Beans, jelly beans packed with carbohydrates, electrolytes and vitamins made for athletes. The company sent the first packets of the beans to retailers last week, according to The Journal News. They're also selling them on their Web site, with six 1-ounce serving size bags going for a pricey $5.99 and a 24-pack selling for $22.50. The Sport Beans come in two flavors, lemon-lime and orange. Wonder where they got that from? Their pitch is that they are comparable to sports drinks and carbo gels, but are easier to carry and don't get your hands sticky. Here is the comparison, according to the Jelly Belly Web site:

                                  Sport Beans     Gatorade      PowerGel

Serving Size                      1 oz.              8 oz.           1.4 oz.

Calories                            100                50              110

Sodium (mg)                      60                 110             45

Potassium (mg)                  60                 30               45

Carbohydrates (g)              25                 14               26

Vitamin C (% daily)             20                 0                0

Vitamin E (% daily)             20                 0                0

First In Thirst Preview

In less than a month, Gatorade celebrates its 40th anniversary. It has been an unbelievable run. They still have 80 percent market share and will likely average more than 160 bottles sold per second in 2005. To peak your interest in the Gatorade story I have written about in my book, I'm previewing the introduction of the book today. Enjoy and the please buy the book!

FREE First In Thirst Introduction

Gatorade In Schools

Last week, it appeared as though the soft drink companies, including Coca-Cola and Pepsi, were going to go along with the American Beverage Association's recommendations to not sell soda in elementary schools, while regular soda would only be sold in middle schools after hours.

According to the New York Times, the beverage companies say that the bottles of soft drinks will be replaced by juice drinks, sports drinks and iced tea. So it's clear that kids in schools will now be drinking much more Gatorade and POWERade, which have about half the calories of soda, but obviously include sucrose and fructose syrups as well as salt (Gatorade has 110mg of sodium per 8 ounces, while Sprite has 45mg per sodium for a similar quantity).

"There's no reason for kids to be drinking sports drinks during school when they're not exercising or playing sports," Katherine Tallmadge, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association told the Times.

As I've said many times on this blog, I believe more people are drinking Gatorade while not exercising than people drinking Gatorade while working out -- it has basically just become a soda alternative.

One interesting note, Gatorade All-Stars, the little Gatorades for kids not currently sold in vending machines, have more sugar per 12-ounce serving than a regular Gatorade.

The move was done to in an effort to curb childhood obesity. An estimated nine million schoolchildren ages 6-19 nationwide are overweight, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 1980, the number of overweight children has doubled, and the number of overweight adolescents has tripled, according to the CDC.

 

Butterfly Institute To Gatorade: Sponsor Us!

The McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity is a butterfly haven on the University of Florida campus. Its a $12 million center that was opened last summer and it houses more than 2,000 free-flying butterflies and six million mounted butterflies. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, the adult butterflies drink cocktails of Watermelon Ice Gatorade.

"They live longer when they drink Gatorade," Dr. Tom Emmel, the center's director to the newspaper. "Gatorade ought to sponsor us!" Lest Emmel forget, his own university has made more than $100 million off the sale of Gatorade. The University of Florida owns 20 percent of the Gatorade Trust, which receives money from the royalties associated with the sales of the sports drink. I'm sure they can work out a deal!

Gatorade Teams Still Using Pedialyte

As I explain in my book, Gatorade's new Endurance Formula likely came in direct response to brands like Pedialyte and Rehydralyte, which were being used by college and professional teams because they had more sodium than the everyday Gatorade. Although such brands weren't seen as a direct threat in the marketplace, Gatorade officials saw it as a threat internally because some of its sponsored teams weren't always using their product. Well, even after the introduction of the Endurance Formula, it still looks like teams are using Pedialyte -- even Gatorade-sponsored teams, that is.

Here's what Keith Clements, the head trainer for the University of Tennessee (a sponsored school) tells the Chattanoogan: "During this sort of hot weather, our guys lose a lot of salt. We spend a lot of time replenishing the salt they lose through sweating with things like Gatorade and Pedialyte, which reduces the amount of cramping."

Gatorade officials say their Endurance Formula has a better mix of electrolytes than Pedialyte has.

Exclusive Interview with Michael Phelps

If you are a sports fan, you've certainly heard of Michael Phelps. In the Athens Olympics, the American swimmer tied the record for most medals at a single games with eight (six were gold). I've always watched Olympic swimming, but I've never been so as mesmerized as I was last year watching Phelps. After collecting five gold medals and a silver at the recent world championships in Montreal, the 20-year-old (who shares the same birthday with me) flew to China to fulfill his obligations with an endorsement deal with the Chinese electronics company Matsunichi.

In the introduction of my book, I talk about Michael being an extreme lover of Gatorade, so much so that when he bought his mother Debbie a new Mercedes, he told her it was "for all the Gatorade you bought me." Michael and I recently had an e-mail conversation over his love for the brand. If there's any deal Gatorade has to do now, just for authenticity sake, it's with this guy!

DR: How did you get introduced to Gatorade?

MP: My mom used to buy it for me after practice. I liked the taste, and then saw how it helped my performance.

DR: What is your favorite flavor and why?

MP: My favorite flavor is orange. It's simple, tastes good, and is refreshing.

DR: When you are training, how many bottles of Gatorade do you drink in a day?

MP: At practice, I drink two bottles, and then another 3-5 bottles throughout the day.

DR: How does it help you swim better?

MP: It helps replenish electrolytes during my workouts, which gives me more energy.

DR: How important are sports drinks to swimmers?

MP: They're big to any athlete.

DR: If so, why do you feel there are so few endorsement deals for sports drinks and swimmers?

MP: That's a great question! I wish I knew the answer.

DR: How much do you think liking a product should count in today's world of sports endorsements?

MP: It's simple. If you don't like something, you can't really endorse it.

DR: I know you are a big fan of Michael Jordan. What did you think of his Gatorade "Be Like Mike" commercial?

MP: One of the biggest things I remember about that is the ending and his hand on the bottle of Gatorade. I remember as a kid going to the grocery store and trying to reach my hands around the bottles of Gatorade to "Be Like Mike."

As you can see, Phelps is the real deal. And it's rare in this day and age to get a guy to say he loves a product so much because big time athletes often fear that if they say something, they'll compromise their situation with perhaps doing a deal with a rival company. LeBron James was like that with me at the Gatorade High School Athlete Awards in 2003 in Los Angeles. I wanted him to tell me how much he liked Gatorade, but he wouldn't do it. I believe it was partly because he was also negotiating with Coca-Cola, which makes rival POWERade, and he didn't want me to throw it back in his face if he signed with them -- which he eventually did. Phelps obviously has no intention of signing with POWERade. So will Gatorade sign him? I think they should.

Special thanks to Kathy Connors, who manages PR at Octagon (Phelps' management company) and Michael's agent Peter Carlisle. These two are truly the cream of the crop in the business.

Tiger Woods and Gatorade

It's quite amazing that the world's best golfer, Tiger Woods, makes $90 million a year in endorsements and doesn't have a beverage deal. It might as well have been Gatorade on Sunday, as Woods was caught on camera on the practice tee at Baltusrol before the final round of the PGA Championship chugging down a fruit punch Gatorade for a good three seconds. Sometimes moments like these are better than advertisements themselves because they are so genuine. As for what the fans did to combat the 100 degree heat? According to the New York Times, a burly fan named Donovan Newman watched all day from the first tee and drank five Gatorades.

"First in Thirst" Profiled

My book, "First In Thirst" and the Gatorade story was profiled in the Orlando Sentinel by Mike McLeod. Mike really spent some good time with me to make for an interesting read (Link: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/orl-gatorade14081405aug14,0,1188811.story?coll=orl-shopping-headlines).

One of the most intriguing parts for readers will undoubtedly be the story about how in the 1966 season, Gatorade headed on a truck to the Georgia game was sabotaged by Georgia fans. Cade told me this elaborate story, which by the way is vividly recalled in his unpublished biography, that while the student trainers were driving the truck, a bunch of Georgia thugs -- knowing that this was the Gators advantage -- pushed the truck off the side of the road and started to dump out all the cartons of Gatorade. Of course, as I researched, and as McLeod points out, the story kept changing from Cade. First, it disappeared from a cooler at the university's field house, then the trucks were driven off the side of the road, then the truck was stolen and so on. As a journalist, something just seemed so wrong to me. So upon pressing Dr. Dana Shires, one of Cade's right hand men, he told me that Cade admitted to him that he dumped out the Gatorade, presumably because Georgia was so good he wanted the Gators to keep winning with their magic potion (The Gators at the time were 7-0).

So it comes as no shock to me that Cade once again tells the tale to McLeod and responds to the story I tell in the book about him doing the sabotaging: "I'm not that devious," Cade tells McLeod. "It basically happened the way I always said, in a little town on the way to Jacksonville. We had loaded a pickup truck with the Gatorade for the game, and two student trainers took off with it about dark on a Friday evening. And a truck forced them off the road and [the attackers] threw the cartons on the ground and started stomping on them. We ran off a new batch the next day and took it up to Jacksonville with a police escort, with the siren and everything, but we didn't get there until the third quarter."

This is what would have to happen in order for this to really be true. Some Georgia fans decided they would spend their Friday night trying to sabotage the Gatorade. And they were so good that they found the truck with Gatorade -- a non-descript truck with no Gators logos on them -- and drove it off the side of the road. Still, really hard to believe for me.