Since launching in the UK in October, the energy drink Prime has gone viral and made headlines across the country for its popularity and scarcity, leading to a flourishing black market trade for the beverage and early morning queues of children with begrudging parents outside ASDA stores. Intrigued and slightly bemused by the Prime Hydration phenomenon, I went to three ASDA superstores in the Bristol area to see if I could catch sight, and maybe even taste, the holy grail of energy drinks.
The supermarket chain, like its parent company Walmart in the US, has an exclusive agreement to distribute the drink in the UK. Naively assuming it can’t be that hard to track down a bottle of one of the brand’s six flavours, I plotted a store crawl of three Bristol ASDAs, travelling north to south and taking in Cribbs Causeway, Filton and Bedminster.
Despite the ambitious goal, I was optimistic that the only obstacles that could possibly thwart this energy drink odyssey were the cold November rain and Bristol’s patchy bus service. How wrong I was.
