What Is Special About Gatorade: 15 Facts To Love It More

, , Leave a comment

800px-Gatorade4products

The Gatorade Company, Inc. is a manufacturer of sports drinks, along with a line of themed food products and other beverages. It was originally introduced on September 9, 1965 and was later undertaken by PepsiCo, today being its 4th largest selling brand, on the basis of global annual retail sales. At present, it’s distributed in more than 80 countries worldwide.

Learn why people are so obsessed about this drink:

  1. Do you know Gatorade was developed for the University of Florida as an energy drink? Also, their football team was called “Gators” and that’s how the name Gatorade came into existence.
  2. Talking about its origin, it was founded by Stokely-Van Camp, and later it was sold to Quaker Oats Company in 1983, and then to PepsiCo in 2001. Today, Gatorade alone accounts for 75% of the market share in sports drink category in the United States.
  3. The first “Gatorade Shower” happened in 1984, after the popular football team New York Giants won, beating the Washington Redskins. In this American sport tradition, a bucket full of Gatorade mixed with ice is dumped over the head of the winning team’s coach or the star player, following a respectful win like the Super Bowl.
  4. Every year, bets are conducted on the color of Gatorade that will hail the winning coach at the Super Bowl. The popular colors used are orange, red, blue, yellow and green.
  5. Gatorade holds a record for being one of the brands to discontinue most number of its flavored drinks. It discontinued 26 of its flavors including “ESPN the flavor”, “Iced Tea Cooler”, and “Frost Alpine Snow”.
  6. Gatorade was initially formulated as a drink to help football players maintain the loss of carbohydrates and electrolytes in their body, while playing. Its key ingredients are water with glucose, salt and monopotassium phosphate. However, the drink doesn’t have kosher certification.
  7. Its competitors are Coca-Cola’s Powerade and Vitaminwater worldwide, and Lucozade Sport in the United Kingdom.
  8. Gatorade’s bottle always shows a “Lightning bolt” image as the symbol of the drink and appears in either red or orange color. Earlier, they used glass bottles, but they shifted to plastic in the year 1988. Also, a sealed bottle easily lasts for 9 months.
  9. What are their best selling flavors? They are Lemon Lime, Orange, and Fruit Punch. On an average, a 20 oz bottle of Gatorade contains 125 calories.
  10. Earlier, Gatorade use to contain cyclamate, a substance 40-50% sweeter than sugar, which was later banned by the FDA. It was basically found to be a form of carcinogen and within a year, it was discontinued from Gatorade.
  11. For 20 long years, Gatorade just had one line of product, available in two flavors: lemon-lime and orange, named Gatorade Thirst Quencher. It came in both liquid and powder form. Later in 1983, another fruit punch flavor was added, and in 1988, a Citrus Cooler flavor was introduced.
  12. The Citrus Cooler became really popular after Michael Jordan (NBA) stated this as his favorite flavor in the early 1990s. Later, it was also incorporated on the packaging as part of a 10-year endorsement deal.
  13. In 2010, Gatorade saw a major re-branding when a number of its popular drinks were relabeled. For example, Original Gatorade was initially relabeled as “Gatorade G”, Gatorade Rain as “No Excuses” and Gatorade AM as “Shine On”.
  14. Interestingly, initial Gatorade advertisements claimed to move throughout the body 12 times sooner than water. Later, researchers found that it was not true and therefore, it was pulled off from its advertisements.
  15. Gatorade is also the official sports drink of many prestigious names like NFL, AFL, NHL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, USA Basketball, Association of Volleyball Professionals, US Soccer Federation, Major League Soccer, High School Sports Teams and many such other esteemed organizations.

Tea Time Quiz

[forminator_poll id="23176"]
 

Leave a Reply