EAT&DRINK
A Soft Drink Rises as Soda Slides
Princeton’s Ben Weiss used a little-known coffee extract to load Bai5, his low-cal,
fruit-flavored beverage, with beneficial antioxidants. by Eric Levin
If you shopped at Princeton health-food stores, gourmet
shops or the town’s Whole Foods in 2009, you may recall a
slim, energetic young man sitting at a
table offering samples of an antioxidant-rich, fruit-flavored soft drink and
asking what you thought of it.
That man, Ben Weiss, is now
founder and CEO of Bai Brands, whose
core product—the Bai5 line of low-cal,
antioxidant-rich, naturally flavored soft
drinks—came out of those table talks.
Bai5’s distinguishing ingredient is an
extract made from the pulp that sur-
rounds the seeds (beans) of the coffee
plant. This endocarp, or coffeefruit,
as industry people call it, is often dis-
carded. But it is rich in polyphenols, a potent antioxidant.
Bai means “pure” in Mandarin, but is pronounced “buy,”
Last January, Forbes ranked Bai
Brands number 13 on its 2015 list of
America’s Most Promising Companies.
According to Forbes, the Hamilton-
based company had 2014 sales of $48.1
million. According to Weiss, who lives in
Princeton with his wife, Danna, and two
children, “We’ll be $125 million in sales
this year.”
Bai’s surging growth clearly owes
something to its 2014 national distribu-
tion deal with industry giant Dr Pepper
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SMASH HIT: Bai5
founder Ben Weiss
at the ping-pong
table outside his
office at Bai Brands
in Hamilton. Staff
brainstorming
often takes place
around ping-pong.
