It’s the little drinks company that thinks it could be big. Blackcurrant beverage-maker Ārepa retails its petite and purple $7 bottles across the country and has pitched itself as just the tonic to boost mental and athletic performance.
Ārepa’s co-founder and co-chief executive Angus Brown (he shares those roles with his friend Zac Robinson) told the Weekend Herald of ambitions to conquer the United States and Japan, but acknowledged there were some short-term hurdles closer to home that first needed to be overcome.
The company’s recent expansion into Australia has found it grappling with regulatory issues, while questions have been raised over the statistical significance of its recent clinical study aimed at proving that it really does do what its founders claim.
In a story that’s now been well-told, the company was founded in 2013 after Brown grew tired pushing V - the first energy drink to break into the mainstream in New Zealand - and lost grandparents to brain illnesses and a friend to suicide and wanted to work on something positive.
“We’re the good guys, man. We’re trying to replace the need for obesogenic energy drinks. You know, people have died from consuming too many energy drinks,” he told the Weekend Herald at Ārepa’s open-plan concrete offices in Morningside.
Deliberately leaning away from woo and into science, the pair recruited highly-regarded professor of human pharmacology Andrew Scholey as chief scientific officer. The company has been granted trademark registrations for “The Brain Drink” and “For Mental Clarity”, alongside a handful of patents for their blackcurrant-based blend anchored by a berry now formally called “Neuroberry®”.
From small beginnings selling at yoga festivals and cannily making professional sportspeople - inevitably the most excited at the mere suggestion of a competitive advantage - early adopters, Arepa has now raised millions in shareholder capital, recruited New Zealand’s highest-paid sportsman Steven Adams as an investor, and Brown talks of potentially raising $100m more in Series A funding over the coming year.
But for now Ārepa is in limbo. A decade after founding the company continues to burn cash in university laboratories labouring towards an ambitious metamorphosis from energy drink for the wellness set into a quasi-medical tonic whose claims of boosted mental and athletic performance are finally accepted by regulators and critics.
This journey of transformation - that will surely mark the difference between Ārepa being a small local business with a pile of cash, or a very large international one with a valuable stash of intellectual property - has not been smooth sailing.
Clinical trials of its product, with a few studies published to date and a dozen more underway, are the point of difference with competitors who rely solely on vibes from marketing. As Brown puts it: “It’s a brain drink because we do human clinical research on the effects of our products on the brain.”
But an early, unpublished, study found Arepa had no discernible effects. Brown says as a result they subsequently changed their formula, and now commits to publishing all research - even if it doesn’t prove what he passionately already believes.
Scholey, talking via video-link from the north of England, is also a believer in the product and the science behind it. He is overseeing a dozen other studies currently underway into Ārepa for which - while they are yet to be published or peer-reviewed - early results are promising, he says.
“I’m reluctant to talk too much on the record about results which haven’t been peer-reviewed yet, but I’m very confident in them … The focus is on brain health, looking at acute mental performance, and there we are finding results,” Scholey says.
While future published research may put doubters in their place, concerns have been raised by scientists that the most recent published study to date on Ārepa does not yet justify the hype attracted to the company and its brew.
In August major newspapers in Australia and New Zealand covered the publication of an article in the European Journal of Applied Physiology assessing the effects of Ārepa on competitive cyclists in conditions meant to mimic polluted environments.
The Sydney Morning Herald asked readers to picture “an all-natural performance drink or supplement that is scientifically backed to enhance cognition, increase alertness, reduce brain fog and even improve reaction time and physical performance.”
Reporting that professional cyclists who used Arepa were able to shave 20 seconds off their four-minute sprint times, the Sydney Morning Herald said - without apparent irony - “it’s a too-good-to-be-true product”.
The New Zealand Herald also covered the study, following a pitch by a public relations firm working for Ārepa that claimed the drink would see New Zealand win more gold medals at the Paris Olympics, and reported the study’s findings were a “major nod” for the company.
Not disclosed in these stories or press materials, but properly caveated in the journal articles themselves, was that the speed improvement seen in the cyclists was so marginal they failed to pass the bar of statistical significance and were formally indiscernible from those who had consumed a placebo. This was in large part due to the extremely limited number of participants in the study - a mere nine had made it through the trials for their results to be published.
Retired Waikato University science communicator Alison Campbell, after reviewing the article and accompanying press for the Weekend Herald, believes the study in question had an “underwhelming conclusion”, hampered considerably by the small sample size.
“The numbers aren’t high enough to allow us to draw strong conclusions,” Campbell says.
Professor of human nutrition at Massey University Pamela von Hurst, given a similar task, praised the design of the study but also drew sharp attention to the sample size.
“One could argue a trend, or very small effect, but I believe that the results do not support the claim that the product will make athletes go faster,” she says.
Brown strongly rejected any suggestion he or his company overcooked promotion of the study, saying the release was signed off by Auckland University and the statistical significance - or insignificance - of its findings could be found by reading the journal article.
“It’s up to anyone else to do the due diligence on whether it was statistically significant,” he says.
Scholey, more conciliatory, says the study came close to statistical significance but was flawed by its trial period coinciding with Covid lockdowns that wreaked havoc on recruiting and preserving study participants.
“It was really unfortunate, but I can tell you that having been involved with many, many clinical trials, including stuff related to Covid, unfortunately, a lot of studies were really compromised because of lockdown,” he says.
Complaints about Ārepa, concerning both its ingredients and the claims made in its marketing, have also been made to food standards authorities in New Zealand and New South Wales, and also the Commerce Commission.
The Commerce Commission, which enforces the Fair Trading Act that prohibits false and misleading advertising, said it had received three complaints about Ārepa but a spokesperson added “we are not currently investigating this business”.
The New South Wales Food Authority in Australia told the Herald it had also received complaints about Ārepa, but under transtasman agreements had referred the New Zealand-made product to the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI).
MPI’s Vincent Arbuckle, the deputy director of New Zealand Food Safety (NZFS), told the Weekend Herald: “NZFS has received complaints about Ārepa products and is working with the brand’s owner, Alphagen NZ, on the matter. While this is ongoing, we are unable to provide further details.”
Brown was adamant there was “no issue” between Ārepa and regulators over its marketing. He says while the company was building its case for the clinical properties of its berries, it was sheeting home all current labeling and marketing copy to pre-approved claims in the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code relating to just its vitamin C content.
“We know, in our heart of hearts, that it’s not the vitamin C that’s delivering these health effects. But without clinical research for now all we can say on our packaging, is we have to use the pre-approved vitamin C claims,” he says.
“We take anything that MPI has to say to us very, very seriously. We’ve been having an ongoing relationship with them for the past five, six years, around our interpretation of the code, how we’re using the code, and leveraging the vitamins, the pre-approved vitamin C claims, to say what we’re saying.”
Brown says MPI’s investigation instead concerned differences between food codes in Australia and New Zealand, with the latter allowing the use of more, and higher doses of, ingredients - key among them Ārepa’s claimed “hero” compounds L-theanine and Enzogenol.
Brown blames the issue on “a whole bunch of pissy competitors saying ‘they can’t do that’”, but expressed confidence that agreements between Wellington and Canberra where each accepted the others’ food standards would see resolution in Ārepa’s favour, and maybe even give him a leg up with more room to innovate than his Australian competitors.
“It hasn’t slowed us down in Australia, we’re just receiving more flak, but they don’t quite understand that we have full rights to do what we’re doing in Australia with those ingredients, We didn’t anticipate that it would be so complex, but we take we take these matters very seriously,” Brown says.
While issues with MPI are a short-term concern, Ārepa’s Holy Grail - getting enough substantiation to regulatory authorities to allow them to make health claims specifically about Neuroberry remains, frustratingly for Brown, in the middle distance.
“I’d say, by the end of, sometime mid next year, we should hopefully have at least one self-substantiated health claim. I would like to hope so,” he says.
If that - admittedly high - hurdle can be passed, Brown has global ambitions to repeat the trick in the vastly larger markets of the United States and Japan.
“There are not many food companies that are doing this, at the size and age that we’re at. They’re big, big food companies doing it for particular ingredients that have had years of research behind them. And we’re trying to do it in half the time and a tenth of the budget.”
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism - including twice being named Reporter of the Year - and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.