Just Add Water

Someone is going to look at the product you sell and ask how much of it is water.

Not to be clever.

Just to run the numbers.

If it's a liquid, it's probably 80-95% carrier fluid, aka, water, and the company that removes that carrier first tends to win the category.

The pattern has repeated enough times now that calling it a coincidence is becoming hard work.

The normal story is 'Sustainability.'

That's usually a nicer way to package the fact you pay more, for less.

The actual story seems to be more shaped around format, margin, and what happens to a category when someone gets rid of the water.

The shape of ̶W̶a̶t̶e̶r̶

Athletic Greens didn't sell you vegetables, and they didn't sell you a nice bottled smoothie with bright packaging in a 24 pack.

They sold you a powder that became a greens supplement when you added water. The active ingredients, the spirulina, the adaptogens, the probiotics, fit in a single scoop.

Everything else was already in your tap at home.

AG1 built a business valued above a billion dollars on the premise that daily greens were a powder problem, not a vegetable problem.

Then someone looked at that, and repackaged powder down even further.

Grüns launched in 2023. Same category, same claimed benefits, 60-plus ingredients, no powder, no shaker, no water. Eight gummy bears, individually packed, and you're done.

They shipped ten million gummies a day. Unilever acquired them in April 2026 for approximately $1.2 billion three years after founding.

In less than ten years, the format went from liquid to powder to gummy.

Each step removed a step. Each version made the previous one look slightly overcomplicated.

And the cycle repeats.

Liquid IV noticed that Gatorade was mostly water.

You were buying a bottle that was, generously, five percent electrolytes and ninety-five percent water, and someone was charging you for all of it, including the freight cost of moving two litres of water from a factory to a shelf.

Liquid IV stripped the water out. Sachets. Consumer adds water at home in one of the fifty Stanley or Frank Green bottles they've collected.

The electrolytes still cross the blood barrier. Nothing is lost except the dead weight in the supply chain.

Unilever acquired them. Built on the observation that Powerade was mostly water.

Laundry Loop

Liquid laundry detergent dominated for decades.

Then someone noticed the plastic jug was mostly water and the rest was mostly air, and the active cleaning chemistry was a fraction of what you were shipping.

Tru Earth launched out of British Columbia. Earth Breeze the same year in Oregon. Both selling laundry strips: sheets of concentrated detergent flat enough to ship in a compostable cardboard sleeve.

You can literally snail mail laundry liquid.

Tru Earth has claimed a 94% reduction in transportation fuel versus liquid.

Consumer Reports has been honest about the trade-off. In testing, laundry sheets as a category significantly underperform liquid on heavy staining. Earth Breeze, the top-rated sheet brand, scored 29 out of 100. Tide Original scored 84. For a lightly soiled load, that gap narrows. For the kind of load that actually needs laundering, it's real.

But a lot of the time it's the story, not how it cleans.

Better for the environment, better savings. A format which fits in an envelope now sits next to products requiring their own bag for life just to get home from the supermarket.

The category shifted. The trade-off got priced in. Consumers are making the swap and not going back.

Creatine Things

Creatine had been a powder you mix into water since the early 1990s. Effective, cheap, and genuinely unglamorous, a five-kilogram tub of white powder sitting on a kitchen bench like a small pharmaceutical installation.

And having a moment right now.

Search volume for creatine gummies grew over 1,300% year-on-year in 2024.

Thanks Joe Brogan.

The format expanded from specialist supplement retailers into general wellness almost entirely by removing the mixing step. Casual users who'd never bothered with creatine powder started buying the gummies because the barrier to entry dropped to zero, and every podcast they listened to couldn't stop selling the benefits.

There's an honest caveat.

NOW Foods tested twelve creatine gummy products in late 2024. Six of the twelve contained significantly less creatine than the label claimed. One brand stating five grams per serving contained 0.005 grams, essentially nothing.

The format scaled faster than the supply chain's ability to produce it reliably. That's a real quality problem. But the direction isn't changing.

Creatine didn't change. The shape of it did.

Gummyfication

If the broader trend has a name, it's gummyfication.

Everything is becoming a gummy. Fiber. Magnesium. Probiotics. Prebiotics. Melatonin. Collagen. Vitamin D. Creatine.

The gummy bear has quietly become the default delivery mechanism for anything the supplement industry wants to convince mainstream consumers to take daily.

It won't be long before your doctor is writing scripts for Adderall. Gummy form, obviously.

GLP-1 gummies are already being formulated.

Viagra in fruit punch flavour is probably a board meeting away.

The joke feels obvious right up until you check whether it's already happened.

The gummy format is, in some ways, the end state of the remove-the-carrier thesis.

Powder still requires water.

A tablet still requires a drink.

A gummy requires nothing except the willingness to eat what is essentially a lolly as part of your morning routine.

The reconstitution step gets handed entirely to your digestive system.

Less packaging, easier habit, same active ingredients.

The format wins.

When It Stalls

Toothpaste tablets have been available for about a decade.

Bite, NOBS, Denttabs and others have sold millions of them to a specific kind of consumer.

They haven't scaled mainstream, at least by my baseline.

My baseline is simple. Do I use it? No? Then it's not mainstream.

Toothpaste is used twice a day by almost everyone alive. The ritual is encoded. The feel of paste on a brush is part of the sensory confirmation that something is working. A tablet crumbles differently, distributes unevenly, doesn't produce the expected foam, plus you feel like you're popping a pill every time you brush your teeth.

That friction in the first five uses is enough for a meaningful percentage of people to put the tube back in the shopping trolley.

The pattern holds when the reconstitution step is invisible or trivial. Add a sachet to water in a bottle: invisible.

Dissolve a powder in a spray bottle before cleaning: trivial. Brush your teeth with a tablet that behaves differently from paste: the whole twice-daily habit is now the product.

Most people don't want to relearn brushing their teeth to reduce packaging.

Remove the water when the consumer doesn't have to think about the removal. The moment removing the water also changes the experience, you've made a different product, not a better format.

NZ Proofed

Cleanery won the Excellence in Innovation award at the 2025 New Zealand International Business Awards. They also won the Kiwibank Most Innovative Hi-Tech Solution for a More Sustainable Future at the 2025 Hi-Tech Awards.

Two national awards in one year. The product: household cleaning delivered as a powder you dissolve in water at home, in a reusable bottle, with a refill that ships as a small sachet.

Their tagline is, and I'm not making this up, "Just Add Water."

The kind of thing you go, "I had that idea in 1995."

The NZ context makes the economics particularly sharp. Freight costs on heavy liquids in a small island market are brutal. Shipping water from a factory to a distribution centre to a store to a house covers real distance and costs real money, all of which sits inside the retail price.

Strip the water out and those logistics costs compress dramatically.

Cleanery has picked up retail placement in the United States.

The usual route of contract manufacturing can be skipped because you're not freighting thousands of kilograms of water.

You freight thousands of kilograms of powder, at a much better margin. The format that made sense in Auckland also makes sense in Portland.

And on the homegrown tangent, we can’t forget the legends at Ethique who’s founder, at the time a second-year science student, noticed that shampoo and conditioner are 60-95% water.

Solid bars.

No water in the formula.

No plastic bottles.

No need to ship what's already in your shower. The brand has saved over 25 million plastic bottles from landfill, sells in more than 20 countries, and was valued at over $100 million before she exited.

A NZ biochemist in a flat in Christchurch asked why shampoo needed to be liquid.

You Subtract, The Customer Adds

Format subtraction works in categories that share a few things, and none of this is a universal rule.

High frequency comes first. People use the product often enough that a new ritual can be established. If you only buy it once every eighteen months, the habit switching cost is a different problem.

The carrier has to be genuinely inert at point of use. The water in an electrolyte sachet doesn't do anything once it's in the drink bottle. The water in a laundry sheet doesn't do anything once it hits the washing machine. Remove it.

If the carrier is part of the product experience, the slip of shampoo, the lather of foam, removing it changes what you've built, not how it's packaged.

The active ingredients need to be stable in concentrated form. This isn't always straightforward and sometimes requires real formulation work.

Creatine gummies had a documented quality problem because concentration and gummy matrix don't interact cleanly without proper manufacturing controls. Solvable, but not trivial.

Find the product that's mostly water.

Find the one where removing the water doesn't change what it does.

Find the habit that's frequent enough to survive a format switch.

So What.

Grüns didn't exist four years ago.

Liquid IV didn't exist fifteen years ago.

Tru Earth started in a garage in British Columbia in 2019.

Ethique started in a student flat in Christchurch in 2012.

Each of them made money on a question someone had probably asked before: why are we shipping water?

The format shift isn't finished. It's in the supplements aisle, the laundry aisle, the household cleaning aisle. It's beginning in the outdoor cleaning aisle. It'll show up somewhere else next year that isn't obvious today, if you don't know to look for it.

The useful habit isn't watching these launches after the fact.

It's asking the question before the launch.

What percentage of what you're buying is water?

What happens to the category when someone removes it?

Shout out to all the legends I've ripped info from for this piece: Unilever / Grüns | Wikipedia / Grüns | Nutraceuticals World | Consumer Reports | Cleanery | Ethique | NZ Herald / Brianne West