Reed's Natural Energy Elixir

Product Type:Functional: Energy Drink: Regular; Container: 10.5 oz can
BevNET Review: If you like ginger beer, then chances are you’ll love Reed’s Natural Energy Elixir. Made with a moderately spicy ginger beer base, this product also has a very nice note of fruit flavor (it’s made with 25 percent juice), including pineapple, acai, lemon, lime, goji, and camu camu (another "superfruit"). The resulting mixture has a full body and a yin and yang contrast of ginger heat and tart and sweet fruit flavors. It’s definitely one of the more unique blends of flavor that we’ve seen in an energy drink – and an enjoyable one as a result. Still, with this much ginger flavor, we think that this product will have appeal mainly with consumers who are already fans of Reed’s products. From a functional point of view, the product has the benefits of ginger (antioxidant, metabolism, and digestion), plus they’ve added green tea (natural caffeine), ginseng, jiaogulan, L-theanine, and B-vitamins. As expected, there wasn’t as much of a caffeine boost from as you’ll get from mainstream energy drinks, but we like the stomach soothing function that’s added by this product’s ginger loaded formulation. Plus, this product can really hold its own as far as flavor is concerned, which is definitely something that can’t be said about many energy drinks out there. On the packaging front, they’ve chosen a 12 oz. slim can that very much feels like an energy drink. However, the placement of the text seems a bit off, with the emphasis on the word “elixir” instead of “energy.” There’s a large list of ingredients on the front, but the product has a somewhat sterile vibe to it compared to other Reed’s products. That’s a bit of an issue for this product, especially since it will likely be on the same shelves as hipper looking competitors. Overall, a sound ginger based product, but we don’t see this as something that’s going to bring that many new customers to the Reed’s brand.Reviewed on: 7/6/2009