During the 15-year stretch from 2004 to midway through 2019, the top three brands within the U.S. energy drinks market went unchanged (e.g. Red Bull, Monster Energy, and Rockstar Energy). But then Bang Energy blasted past Rockstar Energy that summer with a staggering 700%+ YoY growth rate…ending the 2019 calendar year at around $1.2 billion in sales. This sent shockwaves across the packaged beverage space for many reasons, but I want to focus on a particular aspect of the “Bang Effect.” It’s time we all give Bang Energy the respect it deserves for what the brand did in the late 2010s to totally disrupt the energy drinks market. A great tasting “carbonated water with sugar or sweetener, flavor, and caffeine” just wasn’t going to be enough anymore…because energy without the “plus” had started looking boring to the market! Bang Energy put Energy+ on the map, which forced Monster and Rockstar into defensive product strategy mode, and at the same time conscious (or subconsciously) inspired many sports nutrition brand entrepreneurs to take the leap from pre-workout powders to energy drinks. While I might be a bit biased considering my professional background, I've always believed the best and brightest sports nutrition brands could compete against any large CPG incumbent when it comes to functional food and beverage. Even if they won’t ever admit it publicly, large energy drinks incumbents are worried about the “often imitated, never duplicated” influential epicenter of the CPG industry…sports nutrition. Why? Well…it reminds me of something I said in a recent piece of content about the sports drinks market. Gatorade had been accustomed to fending off direct attacks from known competitors. However, what happens when the market leader must fend off a rapidly multiplying amount of legitimate indirect attacks from lesser-known competitors? Now…swap Gatorade for Red Bull and Monster Energy. What Red Bull and Monster Energy want is for new categorical entrepreneurs to follow existing energy drink category playbooks (that they created). Following that “build process” within today’s energy drinks market is almost guaranteed to fail because traditional category leaders understand how to compete against it. But now…sports nutrition brands have started to change the game. And the proof is in the pudding for how disruptively successful this “build process” has become within the energy drinks market. If we took the top 10 energy drink brands in 2023, you’d have half that were in one way, or another incubated within the sports nutrition space (e.g. Celsius, GHOST, C4 Energy, Alani Nu, and Bang Energy). If we just take those five “incubated in sports nutrition” market leaders…they generated over $3.6 billion in retail sales in 2023. Finally, consider the strong list of powdered pre-workout energy supplement platforms that are below those Top 10 energy drink brands…and in different phases of beverage commercialization strategies. A collection of names like RYSE Fuel, Bucked Up Energy, G Fuel, Recon1 Energy, and Jocko Go…that’s an aggregate of several hundred million more in energy drink retail sales. And I won’t even go one more a layer deeper because you get the point here…as this “changing of the guard” within the energy drinks space is only getting started.

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