Popular soda company Coca-Cola has recently taken it upon themselves to completely buy out the well-known sports drink giant, BodyArmor. BodyArmor was initially founded back in 2011 by a local Queens, New York man, Mike Repole, who started the business from scratch after he worked years as a salesman at the minute company, Mystic Beverage. He ventured off into beginning his first company in the early 1990s, Glaceau, which would later turn into becoming the official birthplace of both highly-admired brands, Vitaminwater and Smartwater. Coca-Cola had already owned a remotely large portion of BodyArmor, 15%, before purchasing the remaining 85% this past week; the company sold the original 15% of themselves to Coca-Cola back in 2018 for a whopping $300 million, boosting the franchise to reach a new high of approximately $2 billion.
BodyArmor received its first big investment after it was discovered by the late Los Angeles Lakers star, Kobe Bryant. Kobe was a big personal supporter of BodyArmor while also being a key investor after putting over $6 million towards the business in 2013, in return for a full 10% of the overall company. At the time, this purchase propelled the now posthumous athlete to becoming to corporation’s “fourth-largest shareholder,” in a statement given to the public by a representative at Fox Business. However, Coca-Cola has now put themselves at the top of the food chain with this buy-out, being that the agency has just made the “largest tradeoff with another beverage brand,” according to inside representatives at the corporation.
The man behind the curtain, Mike Repole, coincidentally called where his business would be in a previous statement that he made back in 2014. “Building brands and building teams are a lot of fun,” he stated during the beginning stages of his journey. “Gatorade has been the number one sports drink for 50 years, but in 10 years, I want BodyArmor to be the number one sports drink in the United States. In 15 years, I want BodyArmor to be the number one sports drink globally.” Currently in 2021, just seven years later, BodyArmor has already managed to rank itself as the number three sports drink in America, directly behind Gatorade and Powerade. And now that Coca-Cola will clearly be taking over the operation, it will be interesting to see if the brand is still able to maintain its current stature in the sports beverage industry.