The Gatorade Company
P.O. Box 049003
Chicago, IL

Re: Big sports drink problems in Japan.

Dear Sirs,

I'm writing to tell you that you need to step up your market presence in Japan, and the sooner the better. If you're unaware of the dire sports drink situation over here, allow me to fill you in.

It all started 10 years ago when I first arrived in Japan, and it has been bugging me ever since. Why is it that there are a whole slew of companies over here that all sell the exact same sports drink? How stupid is that? Is it a good flavour one might ask? Actually no, it kind of sucks. You see, the only flavour the Japanese seem to know or care about is a cloudy, whitish, slightly grapefruity flavour that after 10 years, is simply starting to make me gag. Yes I know gatorade is slightly represented over here, and you recently released an orange 'coloured' drink, but it's not the same as the 'real' orange gatorade I get back home. YOU NEED TO CHANGE THIS! I need orange, cherry and grape gatorade stat!!

Best Regards,

Michael Beddall

P.S. Want a little more web exposure? Feel free to send me gatorade anytime!

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There are other offenders, but in a simple trip to a couple of vending machines, I easily found four of the most boring sports drinks in the universe: The infamous Pocari Sweat, Aquarius, Kirin Loves Sports and Dakara. Not an ounce of creativity among them.

What are the chances that a bunch of companies independently discovered and released a sports drink with the exact same colour, consistency and flavour? I suppose stranger things are possible in this universe. Quantum mechanics states that at the smallest level of matter, it is possible for fundamental particles to simply blip in and out of existence, move right through solid matter, and other crazy stuff. Of course the chances of this happening on a macro scale are impossibly small, but there is still a miniscule chance that over an infinite period of time of trying to walk through a wall, you could suddenly succeed.
If so, then more than one company making the same product seems pretty darn credible.

However Occam's razor does state that the simplest explanation is usually correct. Most likely there just one big vat of the stuff that every company uses at the same time. Or maybe there's just one big 'overlord' company that sells this cloudy, white, grapefruity, sports drink stuff to all the others? But who cares? What it really comes down to is that having only one flavour of sports drink to choose from seriously pisses me off!

It's a conspiracy. All these companies are trying to make us believe that their drink is slightly different somehow, and better than the others even though we subconciously know they're not. Coke and Pepsi managed to do it, why not a cloudy, white, slightly grapefruity sports drink?
Either that or it's just pure laziness. None of the companies can be bothered to mix up their own flavour, they just buy the recipe from another company.
There's one more possiblity. Could it be that, *gasp* the Japanese don't want, or like, or need another flavour??

How can this be when there are like 100 flavours of Kit Kat, new flavours of Pepsi and Coke coming out all the time, a different beer every week of the year.... How did sports drinks get shunted off to the flavour sidelines? It makes no sense and I want some answers! (And a bottle of grape gatorade if you can spare it.)

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