The Red Bull generation: How energy drinks became the fuel for a fast-paced society
These products, which originated in Thailand amidst labor exploitation, first won over young men through advertising. Now, they are spreading to the rest of society
Energy drinks aren’t consumed for pleasure. They aren’t served in a glass with ice and a straw, nor are they sipped with blissful leisure. In the public imagination, they’re drunk straight from the can, in front of a computer, while doing something else.
More than just a beverage, an energy drink is a potion — a concoction promising to transform us into faster, more efficient versions of ourselves. They feature chemical flavors and absurd names like NOCCO Focus Passionate, Monster Energy Absolutely Zero, or the limited-edition Lando Norris Zero Sugar gold can. For years, they’ve been a massive hit among young men, and now, they’re beginning to break through to the rest of society.
“Energy drink” is a marketing term. The technical description would be “high-caffeine beverage.” But, naturally, that doesn’t sell nearly as well. This detail illustrates how our perception of these drinks is shaped by marketing. In part, this is because their origin story isn’t particularly appealing.
Energy drinks emerged from the exploitation of workers. In the late-1970s, in Bangkok, the owner of a local pharmaceutical company created a concoction designed to keep laborers awake and working through the night. He named it “Krating Daeng,” or “Red Bull” in English. “[The brand] arrived in Europe in 1987, when Red Bull production began in Austria,” Ana Teijeira, a specialist in preventive medicine and public health, who has studied the product’s expansion and effects. “However, the popularity [of energy drinks] among teenagers didn’t take off in the United States until 1997… 10 years later.”
The initial target audience consisted of athletes. But when the company noticed that the drinks were gaining more traction among teenage males, it recalibrated its strategy. Red Bull succeeded by positioning its products as fuel for major male pastimes: playing video games, hitting the gym, and getting drunk. And the firm went all out. Energy drinks became the most-advertised food product on streaming platforms. Red Bull began sponsoring sporting events, associating their products with values such as energy, performance, adventure and adrenaline.
A 2015 study published in the journal Health Psychology analyzed why these drinks were so popular among men. Researchers found that the more a man embraced ideals of masculinity, the more he believed that consuming these drinks made him manly. And, the more he consumed them, the less he slept.
Just as this demographic has kept growing, energy drinks have continued to adapt. In recent years, the companies read the signs of the times and began marketing their products as as tools for efficiency. They expanded their niche to include women, partnering with celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. They swapped packaging that featured dark colors with neon accents for cute pastel shades. And the drinks were marketed — with little scientific evidence — as tonics to improve the appearance of skin and hair. In doing so, the drink manufacturers began preparing to make the leap to all population groups.
“Energy drinks are to the 21st century what Coca-Cola was to the 20th,” explains Carles Feixa Pàmpols, an anthropologist specializing in youth culture. “If the brand behind the famous secret formula was the symbol of industrial capitalism, energy drink brands (whose formula we also know nothing about, even though it is pure chemistry) are the symbol of postindustrial capitalism.”
Energy drinks don’t just speak to young people. Feixa Pàmpols understands the leap that these companies are making and, he observes, it’s not the first time this has happened. “In [the cases of both Coca-Cola and energy drinks], new generations served as guinea pigs to lend prestige to its consumption and spread it among the general population.”
In his book, Aceleración. Una crítica social de los tiempos (Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity), sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains that we live in a state of “dynamic stabilization” that compels us to run faster and produce more (even at the cost of social alienation), in order to prevent the system from collapsing. In this context, energy drinks become a magic potion (like the Super Star in Mario Bros.) promising to accelerate us, so that we can keep up, perform at a high level and synchronize with a frenetic world.
But all of this comes at a cost. Energy drinks are unhealthy products. They can cause arrhythmias, high blood pressure, insomnia and nervousness. They also increase the risk of developing diabetes, due to their extremely high concentrations of caffeine (a single serving may contain as much as two strong coffees) and sugar (which can account for 10% of daily caloric intake in just one can).
“To date, 60% of countries worldwide have implemented some form of regulation of energy drinks,” explains Teijeira, who analyzed this in a study conducted at the University of Santiago de Compostela. “The most common measures include advertising restrictions, bans on the sale of these drinks to minors, as well as limits on caffeine content.” In Spain, the region of Galicia banned energy drinks for those under the age of 18 some time ago. However, while the federal government in Madrid has announced its intention to do the same, the move doesn’t appear to have much support.
Yet, even with bans or restrictions, it seems unlikely that anything will dislodge energy drinks from the position that they’ve secured in the collective imagination of young people, let alone from supermarket shelves. “Drugs, whether legal or illegal, have always been a rite of passage into adulthood,” Feixa Pàmpols reflects. “In the information age, traditional drugs — such as tobacco and wine — are becoming unfashionable, due to health-related or generational arguments (as they’re often consumed by parents and grandparents). And they’re being replaced by more modern, trendy and seemingly harmless products, like vapes and energy drinks. These products offer higher profit margins for the multinational corporations that market them, while the companies downplay or ignore their side effects.”
The data seem to support this. Alcohol consumption among young people has dropped by three to five percentage points over the last decade, while energy drink consumption has surged by 13%. The products represent almost-opposing cultural values. Alcohol seeks disengagement, letting go and a loss of control, while energy drinks belong to a culture of self-optimization and efficiency. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that a substitution is occurring (since many people mix energy drinks with alcohol), yet a paradigm shift is clearly taking place.
Energy drinks perfectly capture the spirit of the times. As Feixa Pàmpols puts it, “they reflect the schizophrenia projected onto today’s youth: healthy living, hygiene and puritanism on the one hand, versus the cult of excess, competition and productivity on the other.”
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