There was no whiteboard. No focus group. No deck with arrows pointing at a "wellness consumer."
There was a Tuesday. A 7:14 train to Bank. Four tired people on the carriage drinking the same cold flat white, all £4.20.
We are not the first people to notice this is a stupid system. We're just the first to do something about it that isn't another flat white.
You queue. You pay £4.50. You walk away with a paper cup that is briefly the correct temperature and never has your name spelt correctly.
The cup is cold but you drink it anyway, because £4.20. Your teeth feel like they're wearing yellow tights. You go back tomorrow.
This is the morning ritual of roughly half of London. Compounded over a working year, it costs around a thousand pounds, three hundred paper cups, and a low-grade dental anxiety you can't quite place.
You read the back of the can. There are twenty-five ingredients and you can pronounce four of them.
One of them is taurine, which is a thing they put in cat food to make cats live longer. One of them is "natural and artificial flavours," so the same things in a vape. One of them is a colour. Yes — you're drinking a colour.
But we didn't want to drink a colour. We just wanted to be awake.
Our Original can has two ingredients. Sparkling spring water from the UK, and caffeine. The back of the can is so short we had to make the font bigger to fill the space.
The meeting is at 2pm. You did not pick the time. The meeting is with your boss. You did not pick the boss.
Your options, ten minutes before: a third coffee, which you do not have time to get and will give you bad breath. An energy drink, which feels like turning up to a quarterly review with a tattoo. Water, which is what they recommend, and which will do nothing.
We made the fourth option. Same caffeine as the coffee. Same cleanliness of the water. Instantly. Your boss will probably ask where you got it from.
You've been Googling pre-workout. You've found one that promises a "transcendent pump." You've found another that includes a stimulant currently banned in two countries.
You just wanted to last 30 minutes on the Stair Master. You did not want a transcendent pump. You did not want a research compound.
A can of Original before a session is 80mg of caffeine, zero sugar, zero everything else. The Lime + Salt has Baja Gold sea salt in it because we read the Andrew Huberman thing as well. It works. You're re-hydrating while you train.
You shouldn't have to read the back of a can to figure out whether it's going to hurt you.
You shouldn't have to feel awake at the cost of £4.20 and stained teeth.
You should be able to drink something at 2pm and not feel jittery at 8pm.
If you've read this far, you're either very interested or very procrastinating.
Either way, your fridge need re-stocking.