Pickle-Free Pickle Juice Wants to Be the Next Big Sports Drink

The Rio Olympics are already two months behind us, but it turns out that the most pressing sports-related issue of 2016 has just begun to emerge: Are the world's athletes going to steadily but surely move away from Gatorade and other sports drinks and towards pickle juice?

Or at least toward a drink called "Pickle Juice" but that's not actually made with pickle juice?

That's what The Pickle Juice Company is hoping. They're betting on the emergence and widespread adaptation of a new sub-category within the already jam-packed sports-drinks sector.

But wait. To reiterate: This is "pickle juice" without the actual pickles.

Filip Keuppens, the VP of global sales and marketing for the company, explained to Beverage Daily: "We call it Pickle Juice because it's a familiar flavor."

Say what?

OK. So this is a drink with ten times the electrolytes found in some sports drinks and a proprietary vinegar formula—reminiscent of pickle juice—that is said to relieve muscle cramps quickly. Aside from the pickle association, if the vinegar part sounds vaguely familiar to you, that's because the drink sounds a lot like a non-sweetened version of switchel, the 17th-century vinegar and water concoction that has recently begun to make a comeback.

For what it's worth, you can think of the "pickle" name as just a suggestion. Keuppens says, "It's a familiar flavor, a lot of people have heard anecdotal stories pertaining to pickle brine. It's a clean ingredient statement, it's a very functional product that doesn't buy into any hype."

Other than the obviously gargantuan pickle hype, that is.

The founders of The Pickle Juice Company say there is science behind their product. It seems to come down to the vinegar. According to Keuppens, after isolating the components of pickle brine, they found that "vinegar was the magic ingredient" and so their new product combines a proprietary vinegar brew with purified water and "extra vitamins and minerals." Again, the same thing has long been said about switchel, and yet you don't see the switchel makers of the world latching onto fermented vegetable mascots.

The company's website refers to a scientific study that showed that athletes who drank pickle brine "stopped complaining of cramping within 85 seconds—about 37 percent faster than the water drinkers and 45 percent faster than when they didn't drink anything at all." This led the lead author of the study to surmise that pickle brine triggered a nerve reaction by sparking some kind of "neutrally mediated reflex."

The results of drinking their beverage, according to the company, will speak for themselves. The company's website says the green-bottled beverages are 100-percent natural, sugar-free, and caffeine free.

And also pickle-free. So there you have it.