Speaking at yesterday’s online event in a webinar called ‘Sports Drink Divorce: A Two-Tier Market Emerges’ – you can watch his presentation here* – Owoc dismissed “old school energy drinks…with sugar, artificial colors, BVO and who knows what else”.
Showing a slide with a cooler full of Vitamin Water on a ’10 for $10’ promotion Owoc slammed the mainstream US market and called for a new means of formulating and marketing beverages.
“Look at these sugar drinks! No-one’s making money, no-one’s having fun, performance isn’t being increased, muscle mass isn’t being enhanced.”
Owoc said VPX/Redline brands Bang and Shotgun 5X fuse three multi-billion dollar categories: Creatine ($6bn), sports drinks ($7.5bn) and energy drinks ($9.4bn in America alone).
'A $15.5bn market? That's chump change!'
“If you could create a hybridized sports drink with an energy component and creatine, you could tap into a $22.9bn market,” he said, dismissing a Mintel August 2014 prediction of the best case growth scenario for sports drinks – growing from a $9.43bn market today into a $15.514bn market by 2019 – as “chump change”, if one could hit this sweet spot.
VPX Bang fuses creatine with BCAAs, CoQ10 (for cell growth and maintenance) and caffeine, ditches sugar for sucralose and contains no artificial flavors, colors or brominated vegetable oil (BVO).
Owoc said the patented drink is first to market and is a “huge success in the marketplace already” – a claim that Nielsen data for the year ending January 18 2014 bears out.
This shows 1,758% y-o-y growth for VPX Bang (then a $465,000+ brand) and Owoc said it had grown exponentially since then; larger VPX brands including Redline ($37.5m sales), VPX Redline Xtreme ($28.2m), VPX Redline Power Rush ($5.7m) and VPX Redline Original ($3.49m) also feature.
“We occupy four spaces in the Nielsen report on nutritional supplements. We’re not a one-hit wonder like some of our competitors. We’re not just talking – what I’m saying is, it’s real,” Owoc said.
Early adoption in US gyms nationwide
VPX’s portfolio sold in places that Red Bull and Gatorade don’t even sell, Owoc added, citing GNCs and hardcore gyms across America as early adopters.
Despite people associating creatine with steroid use Owoc insisted this couldn’t be further from the truth, claiming that 1,300+ studies proved its safety and efficacy.
Creatine increases energy levels, strength and the ability to exercise harder and longer, he said, noting that VPX holds patents for water stable ‘super creatine’ peptides.
Since people lost 1% of bodily muscle annually after the age of 25, Owoc said, creatine was highly effective to rebuild muscle and reverse Sarcopenia (loss of skeletal muscle mass), thus improving health and quality of life.
Owoc said creatine also offered brain performance benefits, and that ‘cognitive creatine’ even had potential to treat Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other forms of dementia.
Future creatine research will look at brain not brawn
“Creatine can make you ripped like Rambo and smart like Picasso. In the future, mark my words, all the research on creatine will be about the brain rather than brawn,” Owoc said.
Asking rhetorically how brands could create a drink, “omnipresent enough to crush Red Bull, Monster and Powerade all at the same time”, Owoc said they had to play a different game.
“When everyone is zigging, you gotta zag! You gotta be that purple cow in that field of lame brown cows!”
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