The Missing Ingredient
Let's begin this review with a question: have you tasted Gatorade lately? And if not, have you ever wondered why that might be? If you're anything like me it's because, for a while now, Gatorade hasn't tasted like the sports drink that I grew up with in the 70s through the aughts; the thirst quencher with the magically slippery texture. This magic sensation that came from quaffing Gatorade, this sense that you were drinking something wetter than wet, more penetrating than mere water, was a key selling point for most of its history. Those ridiculously hokey computer simulations in their advertisements where the parched and pixelated thermal image of an athlete, an overheated orange and red through and through, held a Gatorade to his lips and transformed to a healthy hydrated green, were absurd on a rational level. Yet they seemed entirely plausible based on how the drink made you feel. Back then, Gatorade seemed to sprint down the gullet, barreling down like quicksilver into the gut, distributing throughout the body, replenishing energy and lost liquids.
Magic and Chemicals
That greased-lightning, super-wet sensation was, of course no accident, but the result of chemical engineering, specifically the inclusion of two emulsifiers: ester of wood rosin and brominated vegetable oil. I don't honestly know if they were even intended to create the distinctive Gatorade texture and mouthfeel (throatfeel?) because their ultimate purpose is more practical than that. The citrus oils that were used in the original lemon-lime flavor, crafted in 1965 by University of Florida researchers for the use of Florida Gator athletes, hence the name, didn't properly mix unaided. As with any combination of oil and water, the natural inclination of citrus oils held in suspension with water was to separate, resulting in the citrus oils forming a slick top layer floating above the water layer. But if you blend the citrus oil with brominated vegetable oil and aid the emulsifying process with a wood-rosin derivative, the flavoring oils will mix seamlessly with water in an emulsion. And a water-oil emulsion, to the delight and gratitude of generations of athletes and other thirsty people everywhere, tastes just like one might imagine -- as wet as water but as slick as oil.
Let's begin this review with a question: have you tasted Gatorade lately? And if not, have you ever wondered why that might be? If you're anything like me it's because, for a while now, Gatorade hasn't tasted like the sports drink that I grew up with in the 70s through the aughts; the thirst quencher with the magically slippery texture. This magic sensation that came from quaffing Gatorade, this sense that you were drinking something wetter than wet, more penetrating than mere water, was a key selling point for most of its history. Those ridiculously hokey computer simulations in their advertisements where the parched and pixelated thermal image of an athlete, an overheated orange and red through and through, held a Gatorade to his lips and transformed to a healthy hydrated green, were absurd on a rational level. Yet they seemed entirely plausible based on how the drink made you feel. Back then, Gatorade seemed to sprint down the gullet, barreling down like quicksilver into the gut, distributing throughout the body, replenishing energy and lost liquids.
Magic and Chemicals
That greased-lightning, super-wet sensation was, of course no accident, but the result of chemical engineering, specifically the inclusion of two emulsifiers: ester of wood rosin and brominated vegetable oil. I don't honestly know if they were even intended to create the distinctive Gatorade texture and mouthfeel (throatfeel?) because their ultimate purpose is more practical than that. The citrus oils that were used in the original lemon-lime flavor, crafted in 1965 by University of Florida researchers for the use of Florida Gator athletes, hence the name, didn't properly mix unaided. As with any combination of oil and water, the natural inclination of citrus oils held in suspension with water was to separate, resulting in the citrus oils forming a slick top layer floating above the water layer. But if you blend the citrus oil with brominated vegetable oil and aid the emulsifying process with a wood-rosin derivative, the flavoring oils will mix seamlessly with water in an emulsion. And a water-oil emulsion, to the delight and gratitude of generations of athletes and other thirsty people everywhere, tastes just like one might imagine -- as wet as water but as slick as oil.
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| Stripped of their magic formula, the people at Gatorade have had to resort to other means to keep the product interesting, like designing flavors based on weather patterns. Their newest creation, Summit Storm, available exclusively at 7-11, tastes like a combination of grape and melon. |
Paradise Lost
It was in 2014 that Gatorade stopped being the product we all knew and loved. A Mississippi teenager started a petition campaign through Change.org to remove the brominated vegetable oil (BVO) from the formula. One objection was that BVO was a flame retardant, which seems a non sequitur to me, and also that Japan and the European Union had not approved its use, although the FDA did and still does consider it safe for human consumption. There is evidence that BVO is harmful if taken in excess, as one man who consumed a vast quantity of a BVO-containing beverage found out. To quote the Wikipedia article on the subject "[o]ne case reported that a man who consumed two-to-four liters of a soda containing BVO on a daily basis (emphasis mine) experienced memory loss, tremors, fatigue, loss of muscle coordination, headache, and ptosis of the right eyelid, as well as elevated serum chloride and...also lost the ability to walk."
Such a horrific episode is not to be minimized, but it seems to me the rarity of this result, one unheard of among the millions who have enjoyed Gatorade over the years, should be instructive. Be that as it may, BVO was removed. Ester of wood rosin was retained, but given the more euphemistic name "glycerol ester of rosin". It seems to get the job of emulsification done on its own, but the slippery feel of the original is much diminished. An echo of it remains but Gatorade is now much more of a mere flavored sugar water, with none of the mystique that has sustained it as a market leader for decades.
Enter the Summit Storm
Somewhat hamstrung, the Gatorade brand has nonetheless limped along, trying to gin up excitement with new and novel flavors and flavor lines like their "Gatorade Frost" line, whose flavors are not named after fruits but rather forces of nature like "Arctic Blitz", "Icy Charge", "Glacier Freeze" and now "Summit Storm". "Summit Storm" was recently on offer, exclusively at 7-11 for the bargain price of two 28 oz bottles for $3 and I was thereby induced to pay my old friend Gatorade a visit.
Fortunately for our taste buds, these winter-hardship based flavors aren't actually intended to simulate the taste of weather events. If they were, Summit Storm would taste like a murky blend of mineral-rich ice crystals and airborne particulate sediment. Instead, these flavors are a blend of anonymous fruits with austere, spartan flavor profiles. Summit Storm seems to be some combination of grape and melon, pleasingly semi-sweet with a semi-medicinal or vegetal kelpish note.
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| A view into the cloudy, purple, eye of the summit storm. Another side effect of the chemical emulsifier glycerol ester of rosin is a bit of cloudiness, which Gatorade has decided to leverage by attaching cloud-based imagery to it. |
A Ray of Light Through the Clouds
Apart from the novel grape-melon-vegetable flavor, I did notice something else while drinking my two tall bottles of Summit Storm: some of the slipperiness seems to have found its way back into the mix. I'm not sure of the cause - perhaps they've added more citrus or other oils, albeit not brominated, and added more ester of rosin to increase the oil content without the aid of bromination. Whatever they've done, it hasn't quite brought back the original slick sensation, but Gatorade is once more something greater than a mere flavored fruit drink. We can still mourn for what has been lost; we can still resent the transient fireball of activism that killed a great product for the silent majority of innocent bystanders. But food chemistry and the competitive marketplace continue on apace and the creativity with which industry meets the desires of the public continues to impress and amaze.
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| If you had examined this ingredient list prior to 2014, brominated vegetable oil would have been included. Now there are fewer ingredients not normally seen in nature, though glycerol ester of rosin should still pull some readers up short. Also of note is the natural coloring "purple sweet potato juice." I suppose it must be an Andean summit storm at that. |
