Protein-packed drinks are taking over shelves. Here’s what you need to know.
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A bartender shaking a cocktail—say, a taxing two-minute Ramos gin fizz shake—is a human in motion. A bartender, standing for an eight-hour shift and shaking several hundred cocktails a night, might even be considered an athlete of sorts. Consider the sloshing body of ice and booze that oscillates from side to side in a silver shaker, meeting a hand at one end before the bicep flexes and throws the wrist, the hand, the shaker, the liquid inside. Even the home-bar enthusiast, serving thirsty guests at a dinner party, knows that making drinks can be a real workout.
As the rounds start to feel more like reps, do you feel a soreness in your arms? Luckily, there’s a drink for that.
More and more, brands are courting health-conscious consumers with protein-enhanced beverages. Every bottle you see at the corner store now reads 8G, 15G, 30G. (This is grams of protein, not a new level of cell-network connectivity.) The trend has muscled into nearly every beverage category. Of course, there have long been ready-to-drink protein shakes and protein-enriched dairy products, but the past year has witnessed protein injected into ever-stranger beverages.
Now there are coffees like Starbucks’ cold-foam-capped protein lattes and matchas or Dunkin’s lattes and Protein Refreshers. Beyond Meat, the plant-based food company, has gone liquid with its launch of a protein beverage as well, the vaguely threatening Beyond Immerse. There are even alcoholic drinks touting protein, like Mate! Vodka Protein Water, the pandering Protochol Swoleberry Spiked Protein seltzer, and the limited Friday launch of the not-an-April-Fools’-joke Espresso Proteini at Buffalo Wild Wings. (Gold’s Gym commented on the official Instagram announcement, “If it helps with the gains, we support it.”) Some have taken it to the most extreme point with straight-up, unabashed protein in water—which, aren’t we just circling back to the scoop we used to throw in our gym bottles at home?
Once you finish marveling at that, you’ll find me holding a steak knife and a fork and sporting a confused expression. I once thought that protein was meant to be chewed. Clearly, today’s consumers are ready to suck their amino acids through a straw. So how did we reach peak potable protein? And how much swoler can the trend possibly get? To tell the story of our mass adoption of muscly drinks, we must turn to the early days of American bodybuilding. For, believe it or not, it was the brawn and body oil of the 1960s that popularized duffel-bag protein powders. The shaking part? The strongmen stole that from the bartenders.
“Protein was more or less ignored until it was brought forward by a nutritionist by the name of Irvin Johnson in Chicago,” explains John D. Fair, a historian of physical culture and sports and author of Muscletown USA. “He was kind of a bodybuilder, but really, he trained bodybuilders. He emphasized diet, and he caught the attention of the individuals who were commercializing various products like equipment and food.”
The diets that Johnson implemented in the 1950s for athletes training in his gym were some of the first to prioritize protein as a key part of building muscle bulk. As his athletes started to show impressive gains, industry magazines like Iron Man and Strength & Health began covering diet as part of the nascent sport. Bob Hoffman, who owned the famous York Barbell club, launched mass-market protein powders modeled after those that Johnson mixed up.
Fair, who started weightlifting back in the ’60s, even tried those prototypical protein shakes: “I started buying these Hoffman pills and powders. These things were terrible,” he says. “The powder did not like to dissolve. You were getting this sort of milk- or water-hardened drink that tasted terrible, and it wasn’t cheap. Hoffman made his fortune out of nutritional supplements and not weights. The barbells didn’t wear out, whereas you had to keep on buying these nutritional products.” So what did those supplements really enhance: the consumer’s brawny figure or the seller’s bottom line?
Regardless, bodybuilding then erupted into mainstream American culture on the coattails of Hoffman’s product line. Arnold Schwarzenegger would become Mr. Olympia for the first half of the 1970s. Aspiring athletes watched Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa guzzling raw eggs before training. GNC, with its rotund vats of whey protein powder, slowly became a household name. But until recently, the protein craze had hewed close to its original world of “barbell men” and, more broadly, athletes. The turn toward ready-to-drink protein occurred in the 2010s, when all kinds of brands seized upon nascent consumer enthusiasm for the food group, as well as a renewed aesthetic interest in bulking up, and released products ranging from Gatorade G Series Recover 03 (2010) to Cheerios Protein (2014). And the gains have only gained from there.
“We are in something that I’ve been calling the protein arms race, and like most things in consumer packaged goods, it’s mostly consumer logic,” Adam Melonas, the CEO and founder of Chew Innovation, a Boston-based food product development lab, tells me. “At a certain point, I think it’s going to reach, if it hasn’t already, the point of the absurd. It’s in booze, it’s in water, it’s literally everywhere you expect it and a whole bunch of places that leave you puzzled.” The only drink on the original food pyramid was milk (and, officially, it still is). But in a world where consumer preferences have coaxed milk from every proteinaceous nut on the market, the nutritional calculus has changed. People are ready to guzzle their protein. And companies are equipped to provide.
Where the bodybuilders of the ’60s simply mixed soy flour with cacao and sold the slurry through magazine ads, today’s companies have the advantage of modern food science. Whey, which is the most common animal protein in protein shakes, is not especially soluble in water due to the persistence of dairy fats. However, newer, so-called clear proteins, which can be produced by refining whey into whey protein isolate or whey protein hydrolysate, contain fewer calories and are more easily incorporated into drinks without changing texture or color. Some clear proteins are also derived from plant matter. Enter the era of a new range of feasible products: protein coffee, protein vodka, protein water.
And really, brands don’t have much choice but to pile in. “The financial implications [of rolling out new protein products] are not insignificant,” Melonas considers. “But I would also say the financial implications of not doing it are far greater. If your competitor happens to have that high protein foam and you don’t, then all of a sudden that may be that extra reason [for buyers to go with the competitor], when we’ve got an abundance of choice everywhere.”
Without question, companies are sprinting to give consumers what they want … even if it isn’t what they need.
The new dietary guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services recommend 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, but not all proteins are created equal. Eating chicken, eggs, or tofu is one thing, but guzzling 30 grams of predigested peptides from whey protein is an entirely different form of ingestion. “If I put my business hat on, I would say, ‘Eat more protein. More is more is more,’ ” Melonas quips. “If I put my science hat on, I’d say that I’d struggle to find an American today who needed more protein.” But according to the a 2025 study by the International Food Information Council, 79 percent of Americans are unaware or unsure of how much protein they should be consuming.
The consumer’s confused health mentality is nowhere more obvious than in protein alcohol. Sugary booze, which has been plagued with a market downturn due to growing health sentiment among (especially Gen Z) tipplers, seems to be antithetical to the gym-maxxing protein trend. Yet Christopher Wolstenholme, the owner of Mate! Vodka Protein Water, has developed a pea-protein-spiked version of a canned vodka cocktail. His core consumer, he tells me, is active and health-conscious but still wants a drink every now and again. “I do a lot of tastings in liquor stores, and I’ve discovered that it’s not just that new-to-drinking crowd,” he says. “It’s a lot of people who partied back in their early 20s but, as they’re getting older, are now really focusing on their health and what they drink.” Wolstenholme’s Mate sponsors events that combine sociability with activities like pickleball tournaments or golf outings. The inference seems to be that the virtues of protein ameliorate the drawbacks of alcohol.
Melonas even ties the craze back to other hypermodern innovations in health: “GLP-1 users needed more protein because they were losing lean muscle mass at the same time as losing fat,” he says. “Essentially, the GLP-1 thing has been an accelerant for this whole protein arms race.”
There’s a tidy through line that connects the bodybuilders who stomached the earliest renditions of protein shakes with the Ozempic body sculptors who need to preserve muscle as they shed pounds. Eating protein is for normies; drinking protein is for those who consume it with the intention to biohack. Our current drinkable moment is about weight: how many grams you can ingest. How much weight you can lift. How much weight you can lose. Who can keep track of it all?
As I crack open a can of lime-and-mint-flavored Mate! Vodka Protein Water, I’m just not sure what I should be counting. Is it my protein intake? My calories? How much booze I’ve consumed? The drink isn’t much different from a High Noon or a mass-market seltzer, though it seems to have a touch more viscosity and a longer, chalkier aftertaste. At the very least, it’s a novelty, with 8 grams of protein and 4.5 percent alcohol by volume. I guess this is the new way to get ripped.
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