Hydration Beyond the Drink: The Sweets Taking On the Sports Drink
Every new brand that popped up seemed to be doing the same thing. Adding something to water. Which, for the innovators out there, began to raise an obvious question: what if you could skip the drink entirely?
News Flash! The electrolytes have escaped the water bottle.
Somewhere in the last few years, hydration became the biggest health trend going. The Stanley cup, #WaterTok, and somewhere along the way, electrolytes, previously only used by endurance athletes or people suffering from a dodgy stomach, became the new must-have item in your cupboard.
As we all quietly accepted that plain water might not be cutting it, we began buying the powders, the sachets, the tubs, the little fizzy tablets, stocking our cupboards with flavours to make our water yummy again.
But every new brand that popped up seemed to be doing the same thing. Adding something to water. Which, for the innovators out there, began to raise an obvious question: what if you could skip the drink entirely?
That's exactly what a new wave of startups is betting on. Their answer, of all things: sweets.
Hydration, hold the water
The idea sounds odd for about five seconds, then very obvious. Hydration used to mean sport. Now it means hangovers, flights, festivals, sickbeds and heatwaves, and a bottle of sports drink suits none of those situations as well as something you can keep in a pocket.
It's the gummy vitamin playbook applied to hydration: if wellness tastes like candy, people actually take it, and the big brands have noticed. When Liquid I.V., one of the biggest names in powder hydration, starts making gummies, you know the startups have stumbled into a format the giants now want in on.
Give it a year and there'll be electrolyte lollies on the counter of every corner shop, somewhere between the Chupa Chups and the chewing gum. You'll grab one without a second thought.
Startups we're watching in this space
VYVE is the lollipop for people who take their hydration seriously. All six essential electrolytes, completely sugar-free, formulated in California and now selling in the UK too. A supplement that happens to come on a stick.
The pitch is aimed squarely at the electrolyte powder aisle: no chalky powders, no mixing, just unwrap one at your desk. The whole trend in one sentence, which is why VYVE leads this list.
VYVE LolliesLe Lick comes at the same idea from the opposite end. Where VYVE is a supplement dressed as a sweet, Le Lick is proudly, openly candy: real organic cane sugar and honey, flavours like salted honey and chocolate milk, and the electrolyte doses printed on the wrapper (180mg sodium, 170mg potassium, 30mg magnesium, 30mg calcium per pop).
The positioning is disarmingly honest: hydration meets oral fixation, a tiny ritual with benefits. And the retail strategy matches, selling wholesale through Faire and built for the checkout counter, exactly where impulse candy has always lived. If VYVE is replacing your powder, Le Lick is replacing your pick 'n' mix. Same minerals, opposite philosophies.
LeLick - Flavour RangeAnd then there's the version of this trend that might actually save lives.
When design engineer Lewis Hornby's grandma Pat was rushed to hospital, his family was told to expect the worst. The culprit turned out to be dehydration: her dementia meant she simply no longer felt thirsty. After a day on fluids she bounced back, and Lewis went looking for a fix, moving into her care home for a month to understand the problem properly.
The answer was a sweet. Jelly Drops are teardrop-shaped jellies that are 95% water, sugar-free, and boosted with electrolytes and vitamins, designed so that someone with dementia will happily reach for them in a way they'd never reach for a glass of water. When Pat tried the prototype, she ate seven in ten minutes. The video of her doing it went viral, 100 million views, and Jelly Drops had a 50,000-person waiting list before it had a product.
Today the London-based company is backed by the Alzheimer's Society, gives 1% of profits to dementia research, and has helped more than 80,000 people living with dementia. For someone who can't remember to drink, hydration that looks like a sweet isn't a gimmick. It's the product working.
Jelly DropsSame minerals across all three. Completely different lives: desk, checkout, care home.
The economics
The numbers say this is more than a novelty. Hydration searches grew 363.8% year on year to July 2025, with another near-doubling forecast into 2026. Electrolyte gummies are growing at 11.8% a year, roughly double the rate of electrolyte drinks, and chewable hydration overall is projected to nearly double to $10.1bn by 2036. The wider hydration supplement market is heading from around $41.8bn today towards $89.4bn over the next decade.
And the venture money agrees, though look where it's going. Almost every big cheque in hydration this year went to something you drink. The waterless format, the bit growing fastest, has barely been touched.
Where the hydration money went
| Date | Company | Format | Round | Lead / notable investors | Source |
|---|
| May 2026 | waterdrop (Vienna) | Dissolvable cubes | €100M+ | Aspeya, Atlantic Grupa; Temasek, Döhler, Bitburger following | FinSMEs |
| Apr 2026 | Leisure Hydration (US) | Powder | Oversubscribed Series A | Midnight Venture Partners | BevNET |
| 2026 | Cirkul (US) | Bottle + flavour cartridges | $70M Series C at a $1bn valuation | SC Holdings | Gunderson Dettmer |
| 2026 | air up (Munich) | Scent-based bottle | €40M+ | Five Seasons Ventures, co-led by PepsiCo | Silicon Canals |
| 2026 | Epicore Biosystems (US) | Sweat-sensing wearable | Series B expanded to $32M | Steele Foundation for Hope, Alumni Ventures, Joyance Partners | PR Newswire |
| Apr 2023 | Cure Hydration (US) | Powder | $5.6M Series A | Lerer Hippeau | PR Newswire |
| 2019 | Jelly Drops (UK) | Water sweets | £100k R&D investment | Alzheimer's Society Accelerator | NutritionInvestor |
The exits tell the same story: Unilever bought Liquid I.V. and took it past $1bn in retail sales, before US sales plateaued in 2025. Nestlé bought Nuun. Coca-Cola bought BodyArmor. Everyone bought a drink. Nobody has bought a sweet yet.
Who's already on the shelf
| Company | Format | Retail (as of Sept 2026) | Source |
|---|
| Leisure Hydration | Powder | Target, Whole Foods, H-E-B | BevNET |
| DryWater | Powder | Walmart nationwide (2024), Walgreens +6,000 doors (2026) | Orange County Business Journal |
| Cure Hydration | Powder | CVS, Walgreens, Kroger, Sprouts, Albertsons; 15,000 stores as of 2023 | PR Newswire |
| Jelly Drops | Water sweets | DTC in UK, US and Canada; Amazon UK and US; care homes and NHS settings | Jelly Drops |
| VYVE | Lollipop | DTC, shipping in the US and UK; no retail listings announced | VYVE |
| Le Lick | Lollipop | Wholesale via Faire, aimed at checkout counters | Le Lick |
Read the two tables together and the gap is hard to miss. The drinks get the venture rounds and the supermarket doors. The waterless brands, the ones in the fastest-growing format, are still selling direct or through wholesale marketplaces. That's not a weakness of the trend. It's how early we are.
Why we love this trend
- The innovation moved from ingredient to delivery: Electrolytes are commoditised, so the frontier is now the format, and hydration you can eat works in all the places a drink doesn't: planes, lunchboxes, desks, dancefloors. When a maturing category starts spawning format startups, that's usually where the next big brands come from.
- The demand came first: Jelly Drops had 50,000 people on a waiting list before it had a product, and search interest in the category has been compounding for two years. Startups riding existing behaviour beat startups trying to invent it.
- The everyday UK slot is still open: Jelly Drops proved a British startup can build a hydration sweet people genuinely love, but it built for care. The everyday occasions, the desk, the commute, the checkout, currently belong to American brands. A British lollipop or jelly sweet for the mainstream, sold where sweets have always been sold, is sitting right there, and with online sales making up over half the UK category, it's a very reachable gap.