One bottle is listed on eBay for £10,000 and teenagers have even been getting out of bed to queue outside Asda at 6am to get their hands on it – the Prime Hydration energy drink is bubbling over.
The drink is a new venture from social influencers KSI and Logan Paul who were boxing rivals and YouTube favourites before becoming business partners and branching out to take on the likes of Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
It is being sold exclusively via Asda at £2 a bottle, under a deal set until at least Christmas, and Prime’s own website in the UK, restricting supplies and making it tricky to get hold of.
Such is demand from the YouTubers’ army of teenage fans among their tens of millions of followers on social media that all flavours are currently sold out on the brand’s own website and Asda has a three-bottle limit on sales. Many stores are only selling it from the customer service desk as queues form every time stocks arrive.
Independent retailers have been spotted selling bottles for as much as four times the Asda price while the sums demanded on eBay range from 99p to several thousand pounds.
There is even a Twitter feed – @prime_tracker – set up to help fans find available bottles. It features clips of men, young and old, jostling to get to a new delivery at a store in Bradford and diving under the shutters of another branch to reach the Prime display as it opens in the early hours.
When Prime launched in the UK in the summer, the drink was shipped from the US but the suppliers were unable to meet demand.. It is now made by Refresco, which works with brands such as Old Jamaica and Calypso, in the UK, helping to ease the flow of product.
Asda says there is no shortage but since demand remains high it is tailoring deliveries to spread supply more evenly and ensure every outlet can stock at least three of the six flavours at one time.
KSI, the alias of 29-year-old Olajide Olatunji from Watford who made his name by playing video games on YouTube, has accused Asda staff of snapping up stock themselves to sell at a huge mark up on sites such as eBay.
However, Asda staff are subject to the same three-bottle limit as customers and it is understood that the retailer has found no evidence of its workers trading stock.
KSI, whose initials stand for “Knowledge Strength and Integrity” and Paul decided to enter the highly lucrative energy drink market in the hope of rivalling the likes of “Pepsi, Coke, Gatorade and Powerade”.
On their website they state: “Over the past year, we’ve worked countless hours to formulate the product from scratch, lock in deals with the largest retailers in the world, and build a multi-hundred person team to get our products to the shelves.”
The joint enterprise comes after they fought in a boxing match in 2018 which was one of the biggest internet events in history and followed that up with another in 2019.
Paul, who has over 20 million YouTube subscribers, is best known for a controversial January 2018 video where he went to Japan’s Aokigahara forest, or “suicide forest”, and found and broadcast footage of a dead body there. YouTube sanctioned him, Paul lost thousands of subscribers and commercial partners, before coming back with an apology video.
