From his home in Hermosa Beach, Dan Morad is concocting what he hopes will be the newest sports drink craze: Invigorade.
The fruity beverage contains a little-known amino acid designed to reduce fatigue during intense exercise. Morad had the idea for the drink while training for a marathon and quit his job at Johnson & Johnson a couple years ago to focus on the venture.
Now, after two years of planning and building a grassroots following at local bike shops and gyms, Invigorade is starting to find its way to larger store shelves. In February, the startup secured distribution in Fresh & Easy stores, followed by deals with Bristol Farms in March and Gelson’s last month. Morad is hoping to continue expanding into grocers such as Whole Foods and Ralphs.
“We’re really in scale mode right now,” Morad said. “We want to make the South Bay our home base and get the community behind us, then organically grow the brand throughout Southern California and the Southwest, and maybe in the coming years, nationally.”
In doing so, he is taking on the long odds of the beverage business and an increasingly competitive market targeting athletes. It’s an industry where promising ideas can flame out quickly if the product isn’t rolled out to near perfection, due to the high costs of the business, said Tom Pirko, president at beverage consulting firm Bevmark in Buellton.
“There are tremendous risks to distribution,” Pirko said. “The products that show promise have to do it fast and have funding. If it doesn’t blossom quickly, they don’t stay around.”
In its distribution deals, Invigorade sells wholesale to grocers, who in turn price the drink at their discretion. The drink sells for $2.29 at Fresh & Easy, for example. Under its current distribution deals, Invigorade is available in stores in California, Nevada and Arizona.
The drink comes in three flavors: orange mango, coconut and fruit punch. With its blend of pure cane sugar, maltodextrin and dextrose, the drink is less sweet and has fewer grams of sugar than other sports drinks, Morad said, and the blend is designed to be easily digestible, since endurance athletes can have gastrointestinal problems.
But Morad believes the secret to the drink’s success could be a little-known ingredient scarcely available to many consumers: the amino acid beta-alanine.
It is advertised to fitness gurus as a buffer against muscle burn and fatigue and has previously been available as a powdered supplement. But making the ingredient available in a packaged drink is new, said Leslie Bonci, director of sports nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh Medical College’s Center for Sports Medicine, and could appeal to endurance athletes looking for variety.
“It’s innovative at this point to put it into a drink,” she said. “For an endurance athlete, when you’re training for six hours a day, you want variety. If you’re going to be out there for 13 hours, you say ‘Oh good lord, I need something else … It probably would be a nice variety. The flavor profile is different.”
Morad had the idea to bottle the stuff as he was training for a marathon and was disappointed with the existing sports drinks on the market. He left his job in March 2013 and used his experience working on formulation and manufacturing for brands such as Neutrogena at Johnson & Johnson to develop the drink.
He raised money at first from family and friends and worked with a third-party beverage company to develop the taste and ingredients. He selected the three initial flavors based on feedback from focus groups of friend, family and strangers.
He said the drink received Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) certification. There are 500 milligrams of beta-alanine in a 16 ounce bottle of the beverage. At larger doses, the amino acid can bring about a tingling of the skin, or “flushing” effect, where skin on the face, scalp or ears can turn red. Morad said the calories in Invigorade mitigate that effect, as would taking the amino acid with food.
Morad runs the company as a near one-man-show from a small space on the ground floor of his home with walls covered by large whiteboards full of scribblings. The office connects to a garage full of Invigorade pallets and workout gear. The drink is manufactured in Santa Cruz, and warehoused both there and in Anaheim.
Morad promotes the drink at a dizzying number of events throughout Southern California. He estimated that Invigorade is involved in about 300 community and sporting events a year. The company sponsors endurance athletes such as cyclist Rob Dollar and triathlete Ella Elser.
Pirko, the consultant, said Morad faces a steep challenge in marketing the product to more run-of-the-mill consumers, since they are likely not familiar with the nutritional components of the drink, and have other drinks to choose from that also claim to boost performance.
“The whole trend is ‘functionality.’ The drinks have to do something. They have to perform beyond hydration and lifestyle value,” Pirko said. “In this new paradigm of functionality, it’s difficult to differentiate yourself when you have competitors telling the same story and (you’re) using ingredients the average consumer doesn’t know about.”
What’s more, some people are more receptive to beta-alanine than others, said Bonci, the sports nutritionist. She said it is likely that an athlete would need to drink beta-alanine for two to four weeks before feeling anything noticeable. The amino acid can work for a first-time user, but it may not be noticeable, Bonci said.
As he expands distribution, Morad is working on new packaging for the beverage to give it a new look for store shelves. The beverage’s current packaging only advertises that its beta-alanine “delays fatigue,” but provides little other information on the amino acid.
Morad plans to continue building the company by hiring staff and raising more funding. He’s also testing out some new flavors such as grape and mixed berries, which could be introduced at a later date. He said the drink has been selling well in stores and he’s approaching new retailers confident of his pitch.
“The product is moving well,” he said. “You’re presenting to them the first ever option for an endurance drink for their stores.”
