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Kinda dumb question but I figured it fits the sub lol
so these boxes are at my work and they're a syrupy hyper sweet mixture that when combined with carbonated water make soda and it got me thinking:
is it because of the costs, or kids accessing it, or some law?
Panera bread basically did and a few people died, so that probably didn't help.
I miss the old Panera, with the Lemonade That Kills You™
Land of the free my ass
damn press always ruining fun, if mildly dangerous, foods.
Wasn't it like super caffeinated though?
People would kill themselves by over consuming it.
Panera bread had a charged lemonade energy drink and two people died.
Costs. These types of machines are generally free refills. You take a 32oz coke, and say actual cost to the store for you getting that coke is about 15 cents. You paid $2.30. Most people get 1 refill. But even if you get multiple, they still make profit.
I don't know wholesale costs of monster, but I know a 20oz bottle in stores here costs about $2. While a 24oz can of monster costs about $9.
It wouldn't surprise me if a 32oz fountain of monster cost the store like $0.70 wholesale. So there's no way they could make profit if people got multiple refills.
Plus, if you try to sell the monster at a higher cost than coke, what would stop someone from dumping the coke, and refilling with monster? Paying the lower innitial price, and now getting refills.
WTF? Monster costs $9? That's insane.
But you’re right it's cost. I had a Soda Stream and I had the red bull syrup for it so the ability is there and the materials exist.
That’s because monster overcharges, caffiene powder is cheap and you could add it to soda for cheap
If you can get ahold of it, yes, very cheap. The problem is that a little goes a very long way, so it's not so easy to get a hold of anymore, at least in the US.
It was probably 10 years ago that I discovered that I could buy a 500g bag of pure caffeine powder for about $20, plus a milligram scale for another $20. I was drinking quite a bit of sugar free Red Bull at the time, and had been ordering them by the case ($50ish?) to save a little money, so it was a no brainer for me to switch to caffeine powder. Break even point was maybe 2 weeks worth of caffeinated beverages.
The bad news is a few people OD'd on caffeine powder around that time (completely unrelated to me), so it was pretty much banned. The good news is that 500g is a fucking shit load of caffeine. I often get my caffeine from more traditional sources now (coffee, tea), so that bag may end up lasting me the rest of my life.
For some additional context, a 250mL (8.4 oz) can of Red Bull contains 80mg caffeine, while a 1/16 teaspoon (~0.3mL) scoop of pure caffeine powder is about 200mg. That works out to less than 0.5¢ ($0.005) of caffeine per Red Bull, and I'm not even getting wholesale pricing.
You can get it super easy in the U.S. for cheap
Here is lab grade caffeine
That if you wanted to make 150mg energy drinks it would cost less than 3 cents each.
If you want to just mainline caffeine I would recommend caffiene pills they are preportioned and are cheap here are the equivalent to 100g pre measured out for under $20
But my point still remains that the cost of caffeine is completely irrelevant to the cost of energy drinks
wtf? 0.5l of coke and 0.5l of monster cost the same where I live
where the fuck you live that a monster costs nine dollars
Plus, if you try to sell the monster at a higher cost than coke, what would stop someone from dumping the coke, and refilling with monster? Paying the lower innitial price, and now getting refills.
People have been doing that for years with buying water, and then filling it with fountain drinks.
I suppose you could counter it the same way that some stores handled the soda refill issue. Have the energy drink refills behind the counter, where only employees can refill it. Have a special cup so employees can tell which customers actually bought an energy drink. Also gives employees a chance to intervene if someone tries to get too much and kill themselves (like with the Panera Bread lemonade/
Monster costs the company pennies more to make it. They just aggressively marketed these if they had a higher price because the original one in the USA, Redbull, was imported from Ireland at first which made the entry price higher.
Bars usually have redbull dispensers around here. But as others have mentioned, caffeine in bulk can do damage. I once went to a gas station and they had energy drinks on tap. I'm had a 48oz energy drink with energy shots. I TALKED WITH CAPS LOCK ON FOR 4 DAYS NON-STOP.
It's usually sold as red bull, I.e. Someone orders a vodka red bull and they will give them vodka and that, but it's some off brand shit in the guns, and they still charge like it's a red bull. Pro tip, don't order that shit if it comes out of a gun.
Out of sheer idiocy I grabbed a can of a new energy drink and it had 300mg if caffeine. I normally drink 500ml of tea a day but that thing had me vibrating through walls 50% into the can.
500ml of black tea is going to be maybe 100mg if we're generous, no wonder!
300mg is a lot at once, you can get more than that drinking an extra large coffee, but that's super variable, don't know how accurate this is 
people can easily go over the recommended limit (400mg a day I think)
I just want them to make a flavor with ibuprofin already mixed in
The inevitable howling from Karens when their children get ahold of a 64 ounce Big Gulp of the stuff notwithstanding, the main issue is that fountain availability would pull back the curtain on the supposed value of energy drinks. These are no more expensive than Coke or Pepsi or Sprite for their bottlers to produce, but they've successfully bamboozled the public into believing that a Monster or a Red Bull or whatever is "worth" 4-6x more per ounce than a normal soda. This is obviously bullshit, but if you were able to dispense it at the same rate and the same price as normal soda the jig would be up and the energy drink brands, not to mention the convenience stores selling most of them, would have an absolute cow.
they've successfully bamboozled the public into believing that a Monster or a Red Bull or whatever is "worth" 4-6x more per ounce than a normal soda
Christ is this actually true? I've never had them...
God people are stupid
God people are stupid
And, we have a winner!
Words to live by: Don't step in the marketing.
I can get generics for $1 at The Dollar Store and they're every bit as good at the $5 brand names at the gas station.
A regional gas station near me has their brand of energy drinks in soda dispensers like this one.
There's no technical reason why you couldn't. It's probably just some stupid marketing reason like:
There at least used to be, and I got royally screwed by it.
The employee hooked the wrong "orange" syrup up to the dispenser, and what I thought was 32oz of Orange Crush (caffeine free) was 32oz of some Orange energy drink. Needless to say, I was up all night and ended up having to call off work the next day because I was so exhausted and useless (I'm very sensitive to caffeine).
Probably also less common due to liability. Panera got into hot water with their highly caffeinated lemonade.
Go to AM/PM, bruh. They got energy drinks on the fountain. Mostly their own brands, but sometimes they have monster or rockstar depending on location.
QuikTrip has RoosterBooster
QT has Rooster Booster
sounds like a boner pill
I think I saw one with a Mountain Dew Gamefuel or whatever it's called
Didn't Panera kill someone with one of those?
I still maintain that someone with that level of caffeine sensitivity should have either:
1 - Read the fucking sign that said it was caffeinated, or
2 - Not drank a mystery liquid in lieu of signage
"but why would you think lemonade would be caffeinated?" People with severe food allergies don't just shove random food in their mouths, why would this person?
This is the sign that people did not read 
Honestly maybe we should just drop the dumb flowery marketing names like "Charged Lemonade" and call it "Lemonade with a metric fuck ton of Caffeine"
Did they have caffeine sensitivity? I just thought they consumed a fuckload of it.
One of the people did, I don't think she had a lot.
A major truck stop chain in Finland just recently started doing exactly that.
My guess has a few factors to it (in no particular order):
Cost soda syrup is likely a lot cheaper than the chemical concoction for energy drinks.
Safety Energy drinks pose a much greater health risk if the concentrations are off. Companies would have to prevent young children from accessing the machines (if they are used in restaurants). They would also have to prevent customers from drinking too much. I can also imagine chugging a bunch of the syrup would likely kill you (it's bound to happen).
Flavor Control soda companies already accept and plan for the difference in fountain vs bottled sodas. I feel energy drink companies want as much control as possible to keep their brand image perfect.
As much as i do consume energy drinks with a meal i do think we shouldn’t normalize it to much.
Also in a “restaurant” the strong flavor can be said to ruin the taste of the food. Though of course in practice we aren't going to these placed for fine dinning and often precisely to get a chemical fix the places themselves still like to uphold some perception of being cullinary.
Didn't they do that at Panera Bread and a few people died?
Don't know about where you live, but in the EU, there's a hard upper limit on the caffeine concentration in drinks you can legally sell.
Any syrup designed to be watered down before you drink it would be above the limit and therefore illegal.
I've had postmix based energy drink in the Netherlands, so that's not true. Ingredients are not held to the same standards as premixed drinks.
To answer op's question, I think it's more of a supply/demand case, and a postmix doesn't display the brand as well as a can of an energy drink does (which is also marketing).
I haven’t done the math but I can’t imagine that’s the case or most sodas would also be illegal in their concentrated form.
In addition to what everyone else is saying, a really good reason not to have energy drinks on a soda fountain, aside from the fact that the energy drink soda would cost far more than a regular soda, is that energy drinks contain a lot of caffeine and if they were on dispenser some idiot would go and fill up a 64 Oz energy drink and drink the equivalent to 5 to 8 Red bulls in a single sitting.
No gas station wants to deal with the legal ramifications of "exploding people's hearts because they are too stupid to understand that these things can be deadly", because if people are dumb enough to chug Red Bull until they die they are also dumb enough to sue because of the deaths.
If I were to guess... it's probably because the chemical makeup of energy drinks would damage the machine? Maybe it's more acidic or something?
TBH I am 100% guessing here, talking out my ass, having done ZERO research on the topic.
Those machines are usually all plastic, acid doesn't hurt them. And a lot of the acidity in energy drinks comes from the carbonic acid in the carbonated water and the citric acid that's added. But those are present in a lot of sodas as well. They all have the carbonated water and a lot of them have citric acid as well. Something like Fanta is probably more acidic than most energy drinks.
The whole energy drinks are super bad because they are so acidic is mostly nonsense. The same was said about coke as far back as I can remember (and I'm an old man). Sure it's very acidic, but lots of things we eat and drink are acidic, that's something most of us can handle just fine. A lot of people think orange juice is a healthy drink, but it's usually more acidic than soda and unless you squeeze the fruit yourself usually contains just as much if not more sugar.
Not to say energy drinks are good for you, the combination of sugar and stimulants such as caffeine and taurine is most definitely not good. But the same can be said of many things we consume. Our bodies like a lot of the things that aren't exactly good for you. I've seen old folk complain about young folk drinking energy drink, whilst they themselves are drinking coffee with two sugars. When consumed in moderation energy drinks are totally fine.
For those who don't realize this, it's highly likely you will feel 1000 times better than you do today, in ways you may not expect, if you switch to drinking water.
I encourage everyone to try it for a month. And if you feel like a month is too long, evaluate your attitudes towards these things as it relates to addiction.