A new survey being marketed by consumer trend watchers the NPD group has uncovered the sad little secret of energy drinks — the biggest use isn’t for snowboarding across flaming ski slopes while playing video games and humping everything in our path. It’s for getting enough focus to re-enter the cube and finish up our daily drudgery.

According to the survey, 36 percent of energy drink purchases are work-related; more than travel, school, mealtime and sporting evens combined.

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DETROIT — Authorities said they arrested 13 people and seized more than $500,000 in cash after breaking up a smuggling ring that collected millions of beverage containers in other states and cashed them in for 10 cents apiece in Michigan.

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Word from British tech bloggers is that Coke is developing a bottling and vending machine technology for Sprite bottles — and eventually Coke, Diet Coke, etc. — that will freeze some of the liquid into cubes inside the bottle when the cap opens.

Initial attention is focused on the fact that the drinks won’t be diluted by water. Forget that! Attention should be focused on the fact that doing that would be really, really, really neat. Why give it to the Brits first, though? Isn’t the right to be really neat what we fought the American Revolution for?

We watch a lot of baseball around here, and one of the things we’ve noticed lately is that when players get back to the dugout and pull what are definitely water bottles (i.e. like poland spring) out of the big round cooler, they seem to be filled with something that isn’t, well, water-colored, but is, in fact, orange.

Having heard that different athletic trainers have, on occasion (read: almost always) substituted other products for Gatorade in things like NBA locker rooms, we wondered what that orange liquid might be.
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Here’s an interesting piece on the bottled water industry and the slight problems it is encountering as the nation embraces green chic (embodied by high-end restaurants dropping bottled water from their menus). Key takeaway is this - those same groups whose concerns about clean municipal water supplies led to the mass uptake of bottled water as a reliable source of drinking water have now re-thought that strategy as they come to believe that the buildup of bottles in landfills and the high production cost of those bottles has the potential to be far more damaging.

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Good news for all you fellas (and ladyfellas) who use Gatorade as your top source of everyday hydration: PepsiCo is going to come up with a low-calorie version of the stuff.

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Recently, the American Beverage Association (ABA) said that it is considering a new guideline that will “recommend” that beverage manufacturers put caffeine content on the side of all soft drinks. It is being heralded as a proactive move for the industry, but is it enough?  After all, the ABA is supposed to be the “national voice” for the non-alcoholic beverage industry.

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