How we stopped counting calories and learned to love Spindrift

The first thing that differentiates Spindrift sparkling water from its competitors — also brands of sparkling water — is the color. The second is the calories. In the wider water world, both are negligible. A can of grapefruit-flavored Spindrift is the color of rose quartz; not even rose quartz, but the imprint of where rose quartz used to be. It contains 17 calories, which, according to the calculations of MyFitnessPal, is fewer than two individual Doritos. (Lemon, which is the color of water with a sunbeam running through it, has only 3 calories, a third of a single Dorito.)

But in the realm of flavored status seltzers — a place where bubbles are clear and nutrients are zero — this is radical. For the past several decades, “seltzer is clear” has been a defining trait of seltzers, the way floppy ears are a defining trait of basset hounds. And while not all of them have been free of calories (some varieties, like cane-sugar sweetened Original New York Seltzer, are not so different from clear soda), the dominant players in the current flavored seltzersphere are water equivalents with fizz.

Let us define our terms. Seltzers are a subset of sparkling waters: plain water that gets its bubbles from carbon dioxide (CO2). If there is a fruit-adjacent taste — a twist of lime, a soupçon of pamplemousse — it generally comes in the form of “natural flavor,” which is what allows a can of seltzer to taste vaguely, kind of, a little like a tangerine. Spindrift, however, gets its taste not from “natural flavors” but from “squeezed fruit,” or what is colloquially known as “juice.”

“We squeezed 1/3 of a real cucumber into this 4-pack of sparkling water,” the box copy proclaims. “We squeezed over 26 real berries and a wedge of lime.” Spindrift wants you to know it is squeezing approximately 37.5 percent of a single lemon into every can. It wants you to know the lemon grew up on a family farm in California. The calorie count is so tiny — three! — that the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even require the company to list it, that’s how negligible it is, but they want to list it, Spindrift’s founder and CEO Bill Creelman tells me, because a nutritional panel with non-zero numbers on it is proof that the ingredients are “real.” The color and the calories are the evidence.

It is easy to overemphasize the meaning of all this. Spindrift has calories — a gram or two of sugar, a lone carb — but unless you are counting very closely, it will make no impact on your diet or your life. It’s not that there is no nutritional difference between Spindrift and erstwhile seltzer starlet LaCroix, or Bubly, or Adirondack, or Polar, or Canada Dry, or whatever zero-calorie, no-sugar, “natural flavored”-flavored brand you prefer; it’s just that there’s no nutritional difference that matters.

The Spindrift nutrition label, though, deep down, is less about nutrition than the idea of nutrition; it is a 12-ounce, raspberry-lime-flavored reflection of our changing values, a case study in a can.

The idea that seltzer is a health drink is not new. Carbonated water has “always walked the line between a medicine and a beverage,” writes seltzer aficionado Barry Joseph in Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink. Bubbling forth from certain springs, naturally filtered and carbonated mineral water was believed to have curative properties for centuries before it was ever bottled, and were you both ill and wealthy, your doctor might prescribe you a trip to the spa, to soak and also sip.

With bottling, the spa could come to you, and so seltzer became the luxury-healing hybrid, like the 19th-century version of wheatgrass shots. Schweppes, the first seltzer bottler in England, promised it could “reduce fever, ease ‘biliousness’ (indigestion), and address nervous afflictions and ‘the debilitating consequences of hard living,” Joseph writes.

Perrier claimed to awaken the senses — and doesn’t it? — while Poland Spring billed itself as an antidote to kidney problems. Could it do these things? Sort of, maybe, in some cases. It is true that these naturally occurring seltzers were laced with different minerals, and that some of these minerals had desirable effects: Magnesium and sulfate could make a laxative; water from an iodine-rich spring might, in fact, improve the function of the thyroid.

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

More recently, seltzer’s main health benefit is less curative than preventative, as in, it prevents you from drinking something else. A 2009 ad from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene showed human fat pouring from a bottle of soda. “Are you pouring on the pounds?” it asked. In smaller print, it advised New Yorkers to drink “water, seltzer, or low-fat milk instead.” In the summer of 2015, the Washington Post set out to explain “How seltzer water became cooler than Coke.”

The answer, they concluded, was increasing health consciousness, paired with an enduring love of bubbles. “Free of calories, sodium and fake sweeteners, the sparkling waters seem to have struck a sweet spot with health-conscious buyers eager to swap out syrupy sodas for the benefits of water but nevertheless bored by the most abundant liquid on earth.” This year, the New York Times crowned sparkling water “the drink of summer 2019.” In the intervening years, the number of seltzers on store shelves has only multiplied.

The great seltzer revival coincided with not just a decline in regular soda sales but also increasing anxiety about the artificial sweeteners in diet soda. First sugar was the enemy, and then fake sugar was also the enemy, and if you cared about those things — but also wanted flavored fizz — there was only one clear option.

There was one brand that seemed to float above the rest: LaCroix, the Midwestern flavored seltzer darling, which exploded into pop culture in the middle of the decade, distinguished by its savvy marketing and its ugly-chic cans. Last summer, New York magazine declared it the winner of the “seltzer wars,” holding around 30 percent market share at the time.

That nobody seemed to know what exactly was in LaCroix, seemed, if anything, to be an asset. Where does this magical elixir come from? people asked, as though the answer might be beyond human comprehension.

The company was extremely clear about what the drink did not include: calories, sugars, sodium, artificial ingredients, GMOs. When asked what was in the cans, the company explained that the “natural flavors” are derived from “natural essence oils,” and when, in 2017, the Wall Street Journal asked the obvious follow-up question — what is an essence? — LaCroix’s spokesperson responded with this prose poem: “Essence is—FEELINGS and Sensory Effects!”

Randy Shropshire/Getty Images

Actually, what qualifies as a natural flavor is not all that mysterious, because the FDA defines it. The FDA does not define essence but allows companies to use the word, a spokesperson told the WSJ, to describe “flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof,” according to food-labeling rules. Still, LaCroix does seem to defy the laws of earthly logic. That it could taste like something while containing nothing gave the drink its otherworldly charm.

Then last fall, LaCroix’s beloved bubbles began to go flat. In October, an Illinois woman filed a class action lawsuit against National Beverage, LaCroix’s parent company, alleging that while the brand claims to be “all natural,” it in fact contains a number of artificial ingredients, including “linalool, which is used in cockroach insecticide.” LaCroix vigorously denies these accusations.

It didn’t seem to matter, in the coverage, that linalool is also found in 63 spices and is, according to a report from the National Institute of Health’s National Toxicology Program, a common ingredient in food and drink. What mattered was that at least some small number of people felt betrayed by LaCroix, which had billed itself not only as “all natural” but as “innocent,” and now maybe wasn’t. In January of this year, it was hit with a second lawsuit.

Is this why, by March, Guggenheim Partners beverage industry analyst Laurent Grandet wrote that sales were “effectively in freefall”? Is it the reason that shares of National Beverage stock, which had been trading at $127 this past September, are now going for barely $42?

Probably not. LaCroix is flailing for a long list of different reasons: increased seltzer competition; lack of innovation; poor management; a different lawsuit filed by a former executive alleging that the company wanted to bill the cans as BPA-free before they actually were.

Spindrift

But the company’s struggles do seem to embody a general cultural shift, away from a calorie-obsessed diet culture and toward a more nebulous system of self-regulation we are calling “wellness.” And here is Spindrift, to pick up the newly fallen slack.

Though its star has risen only recently, Spindrift has been around since 2010, when Creelman, a former Massachusetts farm boy, launched the company to wean himself off Diet Coke. “I had this background living and being around real ingredients,” he told me last fall by phone, and here he was, crushing cans of diet soda. He didn’t like it. He began to wonder if there wasn’t a business opportunity here. A seltzer for the farm-to-table age.

The first iteration of Spindrift was sweetened with sugar, making it more of a soda than a seltzer. It was refrigerated, too, because the only way the company had figured out to keep its real ingredients stable was to keep them cold. Gradually, though, they began pulling out additions that felt increasing unnecessary: sugar, color, natural flavors.

The plan had been to run two separate product lines — one of sodas, one of seltzers — but three or four years in, the team found themselves “migrating organically to the unsweetened product. It was clean and better for us, but it also tasted really, really good.” And it turned out that America just happened to agree. “I would love to tell you there was a lot of heavy analysis,” Creelman says, but there wasn’t.

He says they were just doing what felt right. In 2017, Spindrift discontinued the soda line and removed all natural flavors and essences from the sparkling waters, leaving behind a short list of recognizable ingredients: carbonated water, fruit, other fruit, sometimes citric acid. Sales that year clocked in at $33 million. In the next 12 months, the company is projecting triple that, $100 million, according to the Times. You can buy Spindrift at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Kroger, Walmart, Costco, and Target, among others. It’s at Panera. It’s at Starbucks.

Compared to LaCroix, which brought in a disappointing $240 million in sales last quarter, Spindrift is still tiny. But where LaCroix, with its all-natural essences, is falling out of favor, Spindrift and its 20-plus real blackberries is on the rise.

“We have entered an era of conscientious dining,” declared the restaurant industry publication Flavor & the Menu. “The trend of counting chemicals instead of calories is informing change in foodservice.” It is playing out all over the food industry: Subway updated its bread recipe, first ditching the obvious enemy (high-fructose corn syrup), and then cutting out the stabilizer azodicarbonamide as well.

Instead of artificial coloring, Kraft mac and cheese now gets its Day-Glo shade of yellow from a mix of paprika, turmeric, and annetto. There is a whole category of chip-like snacks, made from a cornucopia of unchip-like vegetables — cauliflower, jackfruit, beets, peas — that are “from the ground” and “from the farm” and “all natural,” and while all that is true, it is also true that they are basically just chips. Of course seltzer is gaining on soda. Of course people have some questions about the linalool.

Nobody is exactly sure how we’re supposed to eat (or drink), but every few years, there is another theory. Fat is bad. Fat is good. Eat six small meals a day. Eat only during certain hours. Even now, we can send texts of ourselves as talking unicorns but we know surprisingly little about how bodies work.

One thing we thought we knew, though, was the basic math of calories: To gain weight, eat more calories than you burn. To lose weight, eat fewer. It’s a basic tenet of public policy: According to the World Health Organization, the primary cause of global obesity is “an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended.”

And this isn’t untrue, exactly. It’s just that it’s too simple. Maybe all calories are not the same. Maybe different bodies process those different calories differently. So that’s one problem with counting calories: While it works for many people, at least for losing a few pounds in the short term, it also sometimes doesn’t, and that’s maddening.

Also, caring about calories just isn’t very cool. Next to eating only grapefruit, calorie-counting is the most obvious kind of diet that there is, which is a problem, because dieting is embarrassing. Everyone knows diet culture is oppressive! Diets don’t work; diets are bad; love yourself. But diet culture didn’t go away; it just adapted into the more amorphous“wellness.” If you care about “wellness,” you should know where your food comes from, and what’s in it, and it got there.

Certainly, there’s plenty of research to suggest that this is a good idea. “Increasingly, scientists think processed foods, with all their additives and sugar and lack of fiber, may be formulated in ways that disturb the gut microbiome,” explained Vox’s Julia Belluz in June. “Those disturbances, in turn, may heighten the risk of chronic disease and encourage overeating.”

There are a lot of lot of troubling (and well-documented) problems with new “wellness” culture — an umbrella term that encompasses everything from celery juicing and Instagram vitamins to sleeping when it’s nighttime and moving sometimes — but it’s hard to argue that you shouldn’t eat mostly stuff that came from the ground, in more or less the form in came in. Food that is, in other words, “natural.”

Here is where it all gets tangled up. It’s not like we stopped counting calories in order to count chemicals, or that we got obsessed with chemicals and so had no choice but to abandon counting calories.

Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist and author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America, explains the chronology like this: On the one hand, you have people frustrated with “the Jenny Craig calorie counting model,” because it’s hard and joyless and, in the long term, rarely seemed to work. At the same time, the alternative food movement starts to gain mass momentum, with Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman leading the charge. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Who can argue?

It’s just that these new rules for eating didn’t seem entirely divorced from the more oppressive tenets of the old ones. “What’s really interesting about Pollan,” Sole-Smith says, “is that he took all the stuff about farming and making the food supply more sustainable — which, by the way, I’m here for, I’m not criticizing that part of his mission — and he married that to the war on obesity. He really connected those two arguments.” She is less here for that part.

She’s not saying it’s intentional. She’s not a conspiracy theorist. But as a veteran of women’s magazines, Sole-Smith is as aware as anyone that while it’s hard to market ethics, it is easy to sell thin. To change how people ate, “they had to make it aspirational,” she says. “And aspirational in America means weight loss.” The result is that it’s all a muddled mess.

And yet you can’t just write it off! “Counting chemicals” is not just a trend, like beet-and-goat-cheese salad, or bagels dyed like rainbows. It is a set of values, a whole still-newish rubric for evaluating what is and is not “good.” That is the crux of it: The question of what is and isn’t “natural” transcends science. It is not only a question of health. It is a question of morality. We could all fixate on fiber content instead — maybe we should! — but we don’t. It just doesn’t speak to our collective anxieties in the same way.

One might point out that real fruits also are made from chemicals. One might point out that, in terms of health, there is no discernible difference between “natural” chemicals and “synthetic” ones. It’s true, but it’s missing the point, says Alan Levinovitz, an assistant professor of religion at James Madison University who’s written widely about why consumers seem to care so much about what is and isn’t “natural.”

“It may be the case that ‘apple flavor’ is a chemical in the same way ‘the juice from an apple from an apple tree’ is a chemical,” he told me last year, in the midst of the peak LaCroix panic, “but what people mean when they say ‘I don’t want chemicals in my food’ is ‘I don’t want substances that are produced through methods that are fundamentally alien to me and relatively recent and therefore not time-tested in my food.’”

People have a general sense that there are problems in the food system. “We’re conscious of climate change. We’re conscious of deforestation. We’re conscious of the evil of industrial agriculture.” We’re conscious, too, that everything we eat seems linked, somehow, to cancer or another way of dying, and while the guidelines for what we’re supposed to eat seem to keep changing, we haven’t eradicated dying yet, so we’re probably still doing something wrong.

“The way we transcend that,” Levinovitz says, “is through seeking out that which is natural.” If we are swallowed by the oceans, or we get sick, well, at least it’s not our fault. It’s nature! What could we have done?

There is nothing wrong with me wanting the flavor in my seltzer to come from happy lemons. Maybe it’s even good. But it doesn’t offer absolution. Consumption habits alone, however “natural,” aren’t going to fix a broken system.

As a scholar and critic of diet culture, Sole-Smith is even more skeptical that the shift is a net positive. We are less anxious about calories than we used to be, she agrees, but she argues we haven’t so much abandoned them as forced them underground. “I think whenever we shift enemy food or diet thinking, we don’t really redeem the old demon,” she says. We just add more layers of neurosis. “The natural thing is the new manifestation of diet culture, for sure.”

Diet culture is about more than achieving certain bodily ideals; it is, as Michelle Allison argues at the Atlantic, about escaping death. In this way, it always fails. But if we can’t actually escape it, “maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.” A few years ago, there was a momentary frenzy about how maybe eating lots of kale was bad for you. It was a bogus study, it turned out. But reading the headlines, my first thought was: When I die of kale-eating, I’m going to feel so silly.

If we’re being honest, your choice of cool canned seltzer probably matters approximately not at all. You can have 17 calories in your water-and-real-grapefruit-flavored Spindrift, or 0 calories in your “naturally essenced” pamplemousse LaCroix, and either way, you will be fine. Or maybe you won’t be. That is the perpetual risk of being currently alive.

In the parable of status seltzers, LaCroix is the processed past. Spindrift is the newly pastoral future. LaCroix gets its flavor from some proprietary cocktail of chemicals, some of which may or may not be synthetic. Spindrift gets its flavor from a specified number of blackberries, or strawberries, or limes. The real advantage of real-fruit Spindrift is that it tastes good. Have you had fruit? It’s great. That we know for sure.

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