Yet you won't get much pectin in the 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar that's in each can, which contains 0 grams of fiber. Yes, whole apples contain pectin, which is a prebiotic fiber that helps fuel good bacteria. However, there's little evidence that apple cider vinegar is a true prebiotic. Poppi is another sparkling prebiotic soda, but this brand relies on apple cider vinegar as the active ingredient. Nutrition content: 45 calories, 2-5 g sugar, 9 g fiber. The drinks are sweetened with a combination of fruit, cassava syrup and stevia leaf extract. They use a blend of prebiotics, plant fiber and botanicals including Jerusalem artichoke, chicory root, kudzu root, nopal cactus and calendula flower that they say work together to provide the unique gut health benefits.īeyond the classic soda flavors, Olipop is available in cherry vanilla, strawberry vanilla, ginger lemon and a new flavor for summer, orange cream - reminiscent of an orange creamsicle. Lester notes that the research they've conducted on Olipop to demonstrate the effectiveness of the prebiotic-fortified soda to enhance the diversity and balance of bacteria in the microbiome. Of all the functional pop brands, Olipop appears to put a greater emphasis on research and has alliances with multiple scientists. Now they've switched their attention to prebiotics, which they believe is the future of gut health research. Lester and co-founder Ben Goodwin, who is personally passionate about studying the gut microbiome, were previously involved in a business focused on probiotics, or good bacteria. The sodas are positioned as digestive tonics fortified with prebiotics, or the food to fuel good bacteria. Olipop got an early start in the functional pop arena in late 2018 and has seen significant growth since - jumping 1,000% in sales since the start of the pandemic, co-founder David Lester tells me. Here's an overview of some of the largest functional pop brands. Digestive health appears to dominate some of the latest products, with "digestive tonics" fortified with prebiotics or probiotics - including Olipop, Poppi, Booch Pop and Culture Pop.Īdditional functional pop brands are fortified with nootropics, or a set of ingredients that claim to enhance brain health, including memory, clarity and creativity. The next breakout benefit is predicted to be sleep, relaxation, stress relief and focus or cognitive support, Telford says.įunctional pop is playing in many of these categories. He says the largest category is currently hydration and energy, yet there's a second wave of functional beverages quickly gaining steam that focuses on digestive health and immune support. Howard Telford, head of soft drinks at Euromonitor International, recently reviewed the state of functional beverages on a webinar I attended. Lester tells me their most popular flavors are vintage cola, classic root beer and orange squeeze - all iconic and nostalgic soda flavors. Olipop is attempting to offer a soda-like experience with less sugar, a clean ingredient list and a relevant benefit - digestive health. And it is very specific for gold, excluding other chemically similar elements like platinum and palladium.Soda is a familiar and favorite flavor with nearly 100% household penetration, says David Lester, co-founder of Olipop, one of the first and largest brands of functional pop. It turns out, the needles were composed of gold nanowires, leading to the possibility that the process could be repeated, scaled up and produce a method for extracting gold that is cheap, effective and non-toxic. "I wanted to learn more about the composition of these needles." "Initially, I was disappointed when my experiment didn't produce cubes, but when I saw the needles, I got excited," Liu said. But what he ended up getting when he mixed cornstarch, gold and a potassium-bromide compound was needles. Liu was intending to build nanocubes to store gasses and large molecules. Zhichang Liu, a post doctorate at Northwestern University, had just such a moment in the lab when he accidentally discovered a new method for extracting gold in a totally green way.
Soda player extracting additional full#
SALT LAKE CITY - Gold may be beautiful, elegant, and extremely valuable, but the process for extracting it is nasty, poisonous, expensive and inefficient.īut science is full of serendipity, moments of accidental discovery like finding penicillin hiding in plain sight in a petri dish. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use.