Air Up: scent-flavoured water bottle becomes latest playground craze

Lena Jüngst, who co-founded Air Up while a student, says the drink was targeted at health conscious Gen Z’s and millennials, and became popular after going viral on TikTok.Photograph: Stephen R Johnson/Alamy

From loom bands to fidget spinners, playground crazes are usually cheap and cheerful, but the latest must-have is an expensive drinks bottle that comes with scent pods that trick your brain into thinking water is cola or fruit juice.

The growing popularity of Air Up, with the cheapest bottles starting at about £30, is a dilemma for parents.

On the one hand it is a lot to pay when standard reusable flasks can cost a couple of pounds, but on the other it might keep children away from sugary drinks.

Lena Jüngst, who co-founded Air Up while a student, is bemused by its coveted status in British classrooms. “It is a really funny effect,” she said, adding the company set out to make “responsible consumption more attractive” and to encourage adults to drink more water.

When it launched in 2019 the Munich-based startup’s pitch to customers – that the bottle would see them “experience water like never before” – was aimed at health-conscious gen Z’s and millennials. However, the brand soon went viral on TikTok and the rest is history.

Air Up went on sale in the UK in 2021 and Jüngst said that as it became more popular the sales data revealed a large cohort of 40-year-olds who it turned out were parents buying for kids. “It was not on purpose, but in the UK 60% of our consumers are kids,” she said.

The bottles work with circular pods that fit on the neck of the bottle. Drinking from the straw creates a suction that transports the water and also air from the outside through the pod into the mouth.

According to the “How it works” section of the Air Up website, “about 80% of what we perceive as flavour is actually derived from what we’re smelling”. So what makes you experience flavoured water is simply smelling the aroma – made from natural ingredients such as fruits, herbs and spices – that comes out of the pod as you drink.

There are nearly 30 pod flavours, ranging from lemon, lime and blackcurrant to the more wacky chocolate orange and iced coffee, with the company estimating that the drinks work out at roughly 33p a litre.

Jüngst says the “sky’s the limit” when it comes to flavour. “Kola” is its most popular but “you could make bacon or summer rain”. “We want to go a lot more experimental and wild.”

“There is a very tiny amount of transference of the aroma into the water but it’s so small, it has no impact on the body,” she said, with the company likening the intake to inhaling fresh bread in a bakery.

Reusable bottles are big business in their own right these days, with the global market worth more than £7bn and tipped to grow at 4% a year for the next decade. This is thanks to a shift in consumer attitudes.

While in 2015, just 20% of people in the UK used a refillable water bottle, research now suggests that figure is 65%, yet 10m single-use water bottles are still bought every day.

From nothing five years ago, Air Up turned over €200m (£171m) in 2023, a rapid rise that has attracted the attention of brands such as PepsiCo, which is an investor, with actor Ashton Kutcher among the celebrity shareholders that seem to be de rigueur for growing brands these days.

But with reusable water bottles also now a competitive fashion market – from the oversized Stanley water cups to high-end bottles that come with accompanying apps to monitor your intake – is Air Up just another fad? Jüngst insists that’s a no. “What makes us different to all the other water bottles in the market is that we sell healthy flavour.”

The idea behind reusable bottles is they are supposed to last a lifetime, potentially replacing the thousands of single-use plastic water bottles you might otherwise have consumed, explains Jane Martin, the chief executive of environmental charity City to Sea.

She said the growing popularity of refillable water bottles, especially among young people, “is of course positive” but that it was important to “consider the flip side of the impact of new product development from brands adding to consumption culture, and therefore undermining the principles behind refill and reuse”.