The $95 Bottle Of Water

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Read time today: 3:27 min

Hi friend,

It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.

This newsletter is written by human Lia. Here's me writing this. Hi!

Ok let's get started with the insights, read on!

I recently came across the topic of "nutritional dark matter" and I've been fascinated by it ever since.

The concept behind it: We only know a tiny fraction of what our food actually consists of.

By weight, a tomato is well researched. Water, carbohydrates, fat, and protein make up most of it, measured precisely for decades.

But every food also holds a huge chemical diversity of trace compounds. The FooDB database lists 3,977 different compounds for a cherry tomato, 4,049 for pasta. Scientists estimate up to 50,000 compounds per food item. Common nutrient databases capture only about 150 of them.

What these molecules actually do, nobody really knows yet.

As a nutrition scientist, that makes me pretty humble. We often talk as if we've long understood food. But so far, we only know a fraction of it.

More on nutritional dark matter here.

Vietnam just approved a $12.3 million AI coffee research.

Vietnam supplies close to 40% of the world's coffee, right behind Brazil. Most of that ends up in European blends, including the ones roasted here in Germany. So when climate change, pests, or disease threaten those crops, that risk lands directly in our morning cup.

The new facility will use AI to screen up to 100 coffee varieties a year, testing each one for how well it holds up against pests, disease, and shifting growing conditions. The varieties that pass get scaled up, up to 5 million seedlings a year, handed to growers across the region.

The coffee that gets us through the coming climate shocks is being chosen today, quietly in a Vietnamese lab.

More about it here.

From Popcorn to an Espresso Proteini, they're jamming protein into everything these days.

Protein-maxxing, the trend of maximizing protein intake, fueled in part by TikTok and a general fitness mania, is clearing shelves of cottage cheese, causing a whey shortage, and has farmers going wild for peas.

To meet demand, a new crop of biotech startups is doing something that sounds like science fiction: growing protein out of air.

Who it works: Microbes eat CO2 in fermentation tanks, multiply like a yogurt culture, then get dried into a powder with all 20 amino acids.

Who's doing it:

↳ Air Protein (US), the first ones on the market, inspired by NASA research

↳ Solar Foods (Finnland) just launched a delicious sounding salted caramel cold brew flavored powder with 20g of air protein

↳Biosphere (US) received $9M to produce gas-fermented proteins for military rations.

↳ Unibio (Denmark) is building the "world's largest" gas protein factory in Saudi Arabia.

This is the kind of innovation I want to see more of: real pressure taken off farmland, animals and water.

Apparently plain water isn't enough anymore. A new wave of brands is selling water that's filtered, remineralized, lab-tested and priced like skincare, sometimes $95 a bottle.

Growth has come largely through social media. Celebrities like Dua Lipa and Justin Bieber have been photographed casually sipping a bottle of Loonen (a $5 to $6 remineralized spring water).

Other brands have taken the concept even further:

↳ Erewhon sells a cup of "Sacred Water" for $12

↳ Svalbarði bottles iceberg water calved off Norwegian glaciers, $60 to $95 a bottle, stocked at Harrods

↳ Veen brings water from Finnish Lapland, north of $20 a bottle, sold mostly into hotel bars in Dubai and Shanghai

But are these waters actually better for you?

What holds up scientifically is thin. Most people get under 5% of daily magnesium from water anyway. And a 2025 French study found that bottle cap liners, not the water itself, are the main source of microplastics in glass bottles.

So the real ingredient being sold isn't purity or minerals. It's storytelling.

This idea is great. An idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest.

I met a guy a few years ago that I thought, frankly, was a bit of an idiot.

He pitched me his business. The idea sucked. His plan sucked. Even the name of the business sucked.

But I noticed that he had a pretty high action bias. He launched fast, showed up at every industry event, hung around smarter people, and never second-guessed himself into a corner.

Within 2 years, everything about the idea had changed (except the name) and the guy was making millions a year in profit. Just being in motion helped him bounce and reshape his approach until he had a winning formula.

Sometimes the smartest move is just to start moving.

Stay awesome,
Lia

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