Gatorade Sweats the Competition | Be Like Mike
3/4/202635 min
It’s the early 1970s, and Gatorade isn’t just the leader in sports hydration — it is sports hydration. No other competing brand comes close. But that dominance won’t last forever. Soon, Gatorade must fend off challenges from soft-drink giants Coke and Pepsi. Will enlisting the world’s greatest athlete and spokesperson keep them ahead of the game?
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Brown· Host0:00
[dramatic music] It's 1972, and nearly five dozen people are dialing into the same conference call. They're the members of the Gatorade Trust, a group formed by Gatorade's original inventors and early backers. What started as just nine people has since grown to forty-six members, and each of them receives a percentage of the royalties from every gallon of Gatorade sold. By now, this adds up to real money. But on this call, the trust faces an uncomfortable decision, whether to accept a settlement that gives part of these royalties to the University of Florida. No one on the line is happy about this possibility because years earlier, the university had its chance and passed. When Gatorade's primary inventor, Dr. Robert Cade, first approached the school about helping develop Gatorade as a business, the university said no. So Cade and his team of researchers took the formula elsewhere, eventually partnering with the food and beverage company Stokely-Van Camp, and Stokely ran with it. They launched Gatorade as a supplier and sponsor for sports teams around the country and then pushed it into supermarkets nationwide. By 1972, Cade estimates that the trust is earning somewhere between twenty-five thousand dollars and two and a half million dollars