Page 10 - Food & Drink Magazine April 2019

✷ RISING STAR
Innovative
sports drink
makes a splash
The first significant advance in hydration since sports drinks were invented 50 years ago is making a strong market debut. Samantha Schelling spoke to the business behind this beverage innovation.
COLLABORATION, innovation and thorough research in every aspect, are behind the market- launch success of PREPD.
The two-step hydration system, which is the first significant advance in sports drinks since their invention, was launched in November last year.
Behind it is more than two decades of medical research at both South Australia’s (SA) Flinders University and American Ivy League research university, Yale, and four years of solid product development and market testing in Australia.
PREPD was launched by Preserve Health with two ready-to-drink products: Prime and Recover, each available in mango and passionfruit, plus strawberry and kiwi flavours.
CEO David Vincent says, “In January we saw 134 per cent growth on December, and then in February we saw a 45 per cent growth online again. It’s early days, but it’s heading in an exciting direction.”
Vincent is a co-founder
of Preserve Health, along
with researcher Professor Graeme Young. Professor Young developed PREPD in collaboration with three other inventors. In February 2017, the team felt it had prototype drinks that were good enough to market test.
Vincent, who was a senior associate with Flinders Uni’s academic research and intellectual property commercialisation agent, Flinders Partners, came onto
the project full time with the task of developing commercial opportunities.
After securing $142,000 of SA government innovation funding, they spun out Preserve Health as a company in July 2017.
COLLABORATION IS KEY
Preserve Health has a very small team of just over two full-time staff, however, its networks and partnerships give it wide expertise and capabilities to draw on when needed.
Vincent said, “Our structure is a joint venture, and one of our shareholders is Steric Trading, who make Staminade. I manage sales, marketing and strategy internally, and then we work very closely with Steric in terms of manufacturing. The R&D team worked on new product development, and across packaging, logistics, compliance and operations.
We also have an advisor who works closely with us, who sold a successful beverage company fairly recently. So we have a much bigger virtual team outside Preserve Health.”
Vincent says the partnership with Steric has been critical. “We came to them in 2015
and formalised a partnership for them to take what was really a proof-of-concept formulation. The active ingredients haven’t changed, but there was no food technology or beverage development behind it from the clinical trial we’d done with an AFL team. Steric has really put in a lot of in-kind support to develop products to market-
ready stage, and they’ve continued to provide product- development support, along with those other areas. So they’ve really been critical to be able to launch this product.
“We’ve also worked with some great marketing partners – Frame Creative and Showpony – to help tell our unique story.”
TARGETS PLANNED
TO GROW
PREPD’s initial target market is elite, semi-pro, serious endurance sport and recreational consumers.
“It’s what we consider the ‘pointy end of the adoption curve’. They’re athletes driven
by performance, who probably train for at least 10 hours a week.”
The broader opportunity, as Preserve Health builds awareness of PREPD, is much larger.
“It’s really anyone who is competing in team or individual sport that lasts for at least an hour, and who is typically losing enough fluid that their performance will deteriorate, and therefore they will benefit from reducing dehydration with PREPD.”
Excitingly, Preserve Health is in the early stages of exploring several other markets where dehydration is also a big problem, including defence, mining and emergency services.
10 | Food&Drink business | April 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au