Celebrities Have An Unquenchable Thirst For Beverage Startups

If you’re thirsty, you could drink plain water. It’s got zero calories, quenches your thirst, and keeps you hydrated.

But what would be the fun in that? And who would it impress?

No. You need a drink that’s iconic and offbeat. Something with the status that only a celebrity backer can confer.

This seems to be the predominant branding strategy among beverage startups. An analysis of Crunchbase data revealed drinks are an unusually star-studded category for venture investment.

From Beyoncé to Naomi Osaka to Leonardo DiCaprio, a high proportion of the more heavily funded beverage startups have one or more famous names among their investors. Such startups are also heavily clustered in the celebrity-dense Los Angeles area.

To illustrate the nexus of celebrity investors and hydration-focused companies, we put together a list of 10 venture-backed brands, including their famous backers.

Sure looks healthy

Perhaps it says something about our era that A-list celebrities have chosen to offer their names and cash in support of a pretty healthy assortment of drinks.

They’re not marketing alcoholic beverages, or even stuff that’s high in sugar and calories. In fact, two of them — Liquid Death and ZenWTR — are best known for plain water.

Others are on the nonalcoholic beverage bandwagon. The best-known name here is nonalcoholic craft beer maker Athletic Brewing, which has raised the most venture funding of any company on our list. A distant second is De Soi, a maker of alcohol-free aperitifs that counts pop star Katy Perry as a co-founder.

In fact, the only one that could generate a buzz is Cann, a maker of bubbly drinks containing THC and CBD distillate. Even Cann’s founders, however, add a wholesome angle to their pitch, touting organic agave used in place of sugar and the drink’s ability to aid in “rising above the stress of daily life.”

Why do drinks need celebrity endorsers?

While we’ve grown accustomed to the concept of celebrity-endorsed drinks, at root there’s still something odd about the strong tie between branding and quenching our thirst. After all, most Americans have tap water that can be safely consumed or easily filtered.

Even so, much of our disposable income still goes to beverages. Last year, U.S. retail sales of nonalcoholic packaged beverages topped $246 billion, up 7.5% year over year, per Beverage Marketing Corp. data. That tallies out to over $700 per American annually.

By volume, meanwhile, the most popular packaged drink by far is plain old water, which could explain why we’ve seen marketing-savvy celebrities including Travis Kelce and Beyoncé dipping a toe into the space. It’s not a new phenomenon either, with BMC estimating that water has outsold carbonated soft drinks by volume for at least the past eight years.

Personally, I’ll admit to being reeled in by many of the celebrity-endorsed beverage choices. While filtered tap water may be the cheaper, more practical go-to, it’s hard to compete in a world that also features fizzy, low-cal, probiotic, heavily advertised options all artfully packaged and chilled just right.