Pickle Juice® 2023: Putting a Stop to Cramps

Filip Keuppens, Executive Vice President of The Pickle Juice Company, was kind enough to spare some of his time for DeliveryRank and explains the benefits of this miraculous elixir on all kinds of cramps, sport related and other. 

Can you describe the How, the Why and the When of Pickle Juice?

In September of 2000 the Dallas Cowboys were playing the Philadelphia Eagles in what is now still the warmest game in the history of the NFL. It was 100 plus degrees Fahrenheit on the field and the Cowboys were heavily favored to win. They ended up losing to the Philadelphia Eagles and their athletic trainers were asked why the Cowboy players were cramping  and the Eagles weren't.  It turns out that the Eagles athletic trainers were drinking pickle brine right out of the jar.  

My predecessors started doing some very rudimentary research to understand why that pickle brine was helping with cramping and discovered that it was actually the acetic acid in the brine that was somehow helping. Quite honestly, they didn't really understand why or how that was working but they knew it wasn't the salt content or electrolytes that they previously thought had been the contributors. 

Fast forward to 2010 when a team out of BYU, led by doctor Kevin Miller and his associates, did research on a lot of different folk remedies and discovered that muscle cramping is a neurological phenomenon rather than physiological phenomenon.  At that point we really understood how muscle cramping works and how it was a completely different set of stimuli relative to any other ailment.

This is how we started going down that pathway and in 2015 we were able to isolate specifically which neural receptors were causing cramping and interfere with the signals that cause the cramping themselves with a very specific acetic acid.  It just so happens that acetic acid makes our products taste like pickles - and hence the name!

What challenges did you encounter (if any) when launching and growing the business?

It is really interesting that the challenges we faced when launching are different from the challenge group we now face, and a lot of those challenges were self-imposed to some degree.  Convincing the consumer to take something that interacts with your central nervous system and neural receptors, and which targets the esophageal receptors that interact with the neural pathway that causes cramping, is somewhat challenging. 

It needs to be as unintimidating as possible and so we figured we can either call our product by the function it performs or by what one might be familiar with. The naming convention of Pickle Juice originally created some familiarity and it was intended to lower barriers of acceptance by the consumer. However, now we are facing the challenge of educating consumers on the difference between pickle brine and Pickle Juice, and that they simply share a name. 

When you are growing as rapidly as we are it can be difficult to keep everybody on task, to maintain focus and to make sure that everybody is engaged and enthusiastic. We are a very culture driven organization for this purpose. 

What can you tell us about what goes into your pickle juice and who exactly can benefit?

Everybody can benefit because cramping is something that affects everybody at some stage. In the US we find that about 50% of all adult consumers suffer from some type of muscle cramping element. 

A lot of people see the sports component of our business and much of our press comes out of Australia and South Africa. We are very plugged into the rugby and cricket communities so very often people send us TV screenshots of a super rugby or cricket player drinking our products on the pitch. Everybody sees the athlete piece but what people don't see is the prevalence of nighttime leg cramps.

A lot of people, especially as we start getting older, start having issues with lower leg cramps at night so we have a pretty broad reach.  Our products - and it's been tested time and time again - are the sole products in the world that top muscle cramps and because they work at a neurological level they can make that cramp, or even imminent cramp, disappear within just 60 seconds. 

What is your target market, and do you foresee this changing?

Our target market is anybody who has muscle cramps but then there is a secondary market -  mothers that are looking for healthier alternatives for their children to sugary sports drinks. Many of the traditional sports drinks are really just non carbonated sodas, full of sugar and additives. 

What lies ahead for the business, and what is your mission?

Our mission is to frustrate the Pharmaceutical industry ;) but fundamentally what we are trying to do is create products that are organic, natural and hyper functional. We want to  break down any barriers that are driven by marketing sticks and buzzwords and really provide products to consumers that help make a difference and improve their lifestyles. We want to solve problems without compromising ethics, integrity or doing things the right way. 

We are actually in the midst of launching a brand new product, probably within the next month, which is a chili lime Pickle Juice. We have identified the functional properties of capsicum peppers and introduced those to our flagship Pickle Juice. It is a new experience from a flavor perspective and the functionality is working really well. 

We are based outside of Dallas TX and we have a distribution hub in South Africa and Australia. We are currently looking to open up Europe in the next couple of months and in addition, we are expanding our Canadian presence. New products and new regions are the name of the game!

If you would like to find out more about Pickle Juice® , visit https://picklepower.com/ or follow on https://www.facebook.com/picklejuicesports or https://www.instagram.com/picklejuice/