Gatorade - History

History

The first iteration of Gatorade was formulated in 1965 by a team of researchers at the University of Florida College of Medicine, including Robert Cade, Dana Shires, Harry James Free, and Alejandro de Quesada. It was created following a request from Florida Gators football head coach Ray Graves to aid athletes by acting as a hydrating replacement for body fluids lost during physical exertion in hot weather. The earliest versions of the beverage consisted of a mixture of water, sodium, sugar, potassium, phosphate, and lemon juice. Ten players on the University of Florida football team tested the first version of Gatorade during practices and games in 1965, and the tests were deemed successful. The football team credited Gatorade as having contributed to their first Orange Bowl win over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in 1967, at which point the drink gained traction within the athletic community. Yellow Jackets coach Bobby Dodd, when asked why his team lost, replied: "We didn't have Gatorade. That made the difference."

Shortly after the 1967 Orange Bowl, Robert Cade entered into an agreement providing Stokely-Van Camp, Inc. (S-VC), a canned-food packaging company, with the U.S. rights to production and sale of Gatorade as a commercial product. In the same year, a licensing arrangement made Gatorade the official sports drink of the National Football League, representing the first in a history of professional sports sponsorship for the Gatorade brand. A year after its commercial introduction, S-VC tested multiple variations of the original Gatorade recipe, finally settling on more palatable variants in lemon-lime and orange flavors. This reformulation also removed the sweetener cyclamate-which was banned by the FDA in 1969-replacing it with additional fructose. In the early 1970s, legal questions arose regarding whether or not the researchers who invented Gatorade were entitled to ownership of its rights, since they were working under a federal government grant that provided stipends at the time. The University of Florida also claimed partial rights ownership, which was brought to resolution in 1973 in the form of a settlement awarding the university with a 20 percent share of Gatorade royalties, totaling $100 million as of 2004.

The Quaker Oats Company purchased S-VC and Gatorade in 1983 for a sum of $220 million, following a bidding war with rival Pillsbury. In its first two decades of production, Gatorade was primarily sold and distributed within the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, then-parent Quaker Oats Company began to work at expanding distribution of Gatorade beyond the United States, venturing into Canada in 1984, regions of Asia in 1987, South America and parts of Europe in 1988, and Australia in 1993. International expansion came at the cost of $20 million in 1996 alone; however the resulting efforts produced worldwide sales of $283 million in more than 45 nations during the same year. In 1997, distribution of Gatorade in an additional 10 countries prompted an 18.7 percent growth in annual sales.

In 2001, the multinational food and beverage company PepsiCo acquired Gatorade's parent company, the Quaker Oats Company, for $13 billion in order to add Gatorade to its portfolio of food and beverage brands. PepsiCo had also recently developed All Sport, which it divested of shortly following the Quaker acquisition to satisfy antitrust regulations. Worldwide development of Gatorade continued into the 2000s, including expansion into India in 2004 and the U.K. and Ireland in 2008. As of 2010, Gatorade products were made available for sale in more than 80 countries. As the number one sports drink by annual retail sales in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Indonesia and the Philippines, Gatorade is also among the leading sports drink brands in Korea and Australia.

As distribution of Gatorade expanded outside of the U.S., localized flavors were introduced to conform to regional tastes and cultural preferences, among other factors. For example, Blueberry is available in Colombia, and in Brazil a Pineapple flavor of Gatorade is sold. Rainbow has been a flavor sold in Russia, and in Australia, flavors include Antarctic Freeze and Wild Water Rush. Some flavors that have been discontinued in the U.S., such as Alpine Snow and Starfruit, have since been made available in other countries.

In 2011, Gatorade was reintroduced to New Zealand by Bluebird Foods, a Pepsico subsidiary in New Zealand. The product is made in Australia by Schweppes Australia and imported to New Zealand and distributed along with Bluebird potato chips.