Half the Wellness Drink Shelf Has Never Paid a Creator

Seventy-two companies, nothing on record

We keep a census of 143 wellness and functional beverage companies, every one with a source behind it, covering energy, hydration, greens, adaptogens, enhanced water, ready to drink protein and coffee, functional soda, alcohol free, hemp and THC, sports drinks, and kombucha.

We crossed all 143 against every recorded paid creator video we hold. Seventy-one have at least one. Seventy-two have none.

That is not a small tail of unknown brands either. The list of companies with nothing on record includes Powerade, Pedialyte, Electrolit, Zevia, Core Hydration, Dasani, Bai, Health-Ade, GT's Living Foods, KeVita, Seedlip, Kin Euphorics, Muscle Milk, La Colombe, Chamberlain Coffee, Amazing Grass and Shakeology.

Who says so: our own database of recorded paid YouTube sponsorships, matched by website domain against our 143-company census. The census itself carries a source link per company.

Where the empty space actually sits

Counted by how many companies on each shelf have nothing at all.

Two shelves, energy and greens, hold 9,158 of the 13,782 deals in the whole set. Everything else shares the remaining 4,624.

Who says so: the same database and census. Deal counts run from 30 October 2020 to 7 August 2026.

Four shelves that are effectively unclaimed

Sports drinks. Eight deals, across eight companies, ever. Gatorade has six of them and BodyArmor has the other two. Powerade, Lucozade Sport, Isostar, All Sport, Staminade and BARCODE have none. This is the clearest case in the whole census of a category that spends on athletes and television instead of on creators, so read the eight as a measurement artefact and not as an absence of marketing.

Kombucha and fermented. One deal. Six companies, and the single recorded video belongs to Lifeway Kefir in July 2025. GT's Living Foods started the category and is still the volume leader. Health-Ade is the one spending on fame. Neither has a trackable long-form placement on our books.

Alcohol free. Thirty-four deals across ten companies. Athletic Brewing has eighteen, Little Saints has eight, Ghia has five. Half the shelf has nothing, including Seedlip, Kin Euphorics, De Soi, Partake and Hiyo. This is the shelf getting the most press attention and close to the least trackable creator investment, which is an odd pair of facts to hold at the same time.

Hemp and THC. Fourteen deals across ten companies. Small for a reason worth respecting, since the advertising rules here are genuinely restrictive and platform policy moves without warning.

Who says so: our own database, per company, on the shelves named. Lifeway's single deal is dated 28 July 2025.

The shelves that look busy are usually one brand

Two of the eleven shelves are almost entirely a single company.

Olipop holds 73 of the 75 recorded deals on functional soda. Poppi, the brand PepsiCo bought for 1.95 billion dollars, has two on our record, both from 2023 and 2024, and nothing since.

Magic Mind holds 1,001 of the 1,129 on adaptogen and nootropic. The next brand down, RYZE Superfoods, has 59.

That concentration cuts both ways. It means a new entrant is not bidding against anybody for the same creators, so the price has not been pushed up. It also means the shelf's whole apparent health depends on one company's budget, and Magic Mind cut its recorded output by 72 percent in the last six months we can measure. What that looks like up close is the subject of our post on the adaptogen shelf and its one buyer.

What is genuinely crowded

Three things, and they are worth naming so nobody reads this post as a claim that everything is open.

Hydration and greens powders. AG1, LMNT and Gamer Supps hold 7,672 recorded deals between them. The podcast inventory that made LMNT is now expensive precisely because it worked, and a new entrant is buying into a bidding war rather than an empty room.

Celebrity founded alcohol free drinks. The press coverage here is dense, with Lewis Hamilton's Almave, Tom Holland's BERO and Blake Lively's Betty Buzz among the launches reported in the last two years, and a new one competes with all of them for the same slot in the same article. Notice this sits directly beside a shelf with 34 recorded creator deals, which tells you the money went into famous faces and not into creators.

Creator volume as a strategy on its own. More posts stopped being a plan some time ago. The deal count in this category has gone up every year while the number of creators taking those deals has flattened, which means the same people are being bought more often rather than more people being reached.

Who says so: the deal counts are ours. The celebrity launches are from public trade reporting, not from our database, and we have not independently audited those brands' sales.

What nobody has claimed yet, and these are bets

Everything above is a count. Everything in this section is a judgement, so treat it as an argument rather than a finding.

Night time and sleep. Every other functional need in this category has a drink and a face attached to it. The one thing people complain about most does not.

Women's longevity and menopause. Named repeatedly as a 2026 budget priority in wellness industry commentary, and almost entirely unclaimed in beverage.

Drinks aimed at people on weight loss medication. A large and growing group that eats less and trades up on what it does buy. The claims are a legal minefield, which is exactly why the brand that does it carefully gets a moat instead of a campaign.

The clinician creator tier. A dietitian or a doctor with a real audience carries something a famous face cannot buy in a health category, which is authority that survives a regulator reading the caption. The supply is thin and the price reflects it.

Cans, once somebody solves attribution. Acquirers pay billions for canned drinks, and almost every trackable creator deal we hold sits on a powder, because a powder ships with a code and a can does not. This is the single biggest structural gap in the data and we wrote it up separately in retail attribution for creator campaigns.

What a zero means, and what it does not

Our deals come out of YouTube video descriptions. A placement only exists to us if it carried a link or a promo code.

So a brand running its entire programme on Instagram Reels, TikTok gifting or paid partnership ads reads as a zero here while spending real money. Health-Ade is the honest example to keep in mind, it reads as zero for us and has run publicly reported creator campaigns.

The claim this post can support is that the measurable long-form lane is empty on those shelves. The claim it cannot support is that those brands do nothing.

That difference matters commercially, because an empty lane you can measure is an opportunity and an empty lane that only looks empty is a mistake waiting to happen. Working out which one you have takes about an afternoon of checking the brand's own social feeds against what a code-based search returns, and it is the first thing we do before recommending a category to anybody.

What we would do with this

If you sell on one of the four thin shelves, buy the long-form lane while it is cheap, and attach a code to every placement so your second buy is based on evidence rather than instinct.

If you sell on energy or greens, stop trying to win the auction and go sideways instead, into the creator categories the wellness brands are not searching, which is the subject of our post on who really buys energy drink creator deals.

Either way, get the claims right before the first video goes live. Functional drinks sit in a corner of advertising where the wording is now actively litigated, and a creator improvising a health promise creates a problem that belongs to you and not to them. The rules are in our FTC playbook for 2026.

We keep this census current, we check whether a quiet shelf is quiet or just untracked, and we find, vet and negotiate the placements once the answer is clear. If you want to know what your own shelf looks like on our data, that is the conversation to have.