UPDATE energy drink review and what Kardashian saw

Daniel Solomons spent four years building an energy drink almost nobody had heard of. The former investment banker started Update in 2022 out of New York with backing from the Hess family, who sold Hess Corp. to Chevron for $53 billion in 2025. The product was deliberately odd: no caffeine, no sugar, and a stimulant most shoppers couldn’t pronounce.

Then a customer started emailing.

Kim Kardashian found the brand in 2023. Her team placed large, repeat orders. She kept sending notes about flavor, formulation, and packaging that nobody had asked her for. By mid-2025 the company decided she’d stopped being a customer. In February 2026 Update relaunched with Kardashian named as co-founder, and on March 1 the cans hit more than 4,000 Walmart stores, one of the largest beverage rollouts Walmart has run.

UPDATE is a caffeine-free energy drink built on paraxanthine, the stimulant your body normally produces when it metabolizes caffeine, sold in 12-ounce cans at roughly $2.99 each. That’s the product. The deal behind it is the more interesting story, because most celebrity beverage launches run in the opposite direction: a brand hunts for a famous face, cuts a check, and prints the name on the label.

Update got the sequence backwards. This piece covers both halves, whether the drink is worth buying and what the relaunch reveals about how celebrity equity deals actually get made now.

Last updated: August 2026

Quick answers

What is UPDATE energy drink?

UPDATE is a zero-sugar, caffeine-free energy drink from New York-based Update Beverages, powered by 300mg of paraxanthine per 12-ounce can. Kim Kardashian joined as co-founder in February 2026. It sells in five flavors, Berry, Grape, Peach, Mandarin, and Pineapple, for about $2.99 a can.

Does UPDATE energy drink work?

Yes, paraxanthine is a genuine stimulant, so the drink produces real alertness. Peer-reviewed trial data supports short-term cognitive gains at a 200mg dose. What’s less established is the marketing claim that it beats caffeine. Independent researchers say the evidence for superiority is thin.

Is UPDATE better than Celsius or Red Bull?

It’s different, not clearly better. UPDATE costs more per can than Red Bull and skips caffeine entirely, which matters if you’re jittery or drinking energy products late in the day. On price and availability, Celsius and Red Bull still win.

What is UPDATE energy drink?

UPDATE is a functional beverage that swaps caffeine for paraxanthine, the compound your liver creates when it breaks caffeine down. Roughly 70 to 80 percent of the caffeine you drink converts into paraxanthine in most people, so the pitch is simple: skip the parent molecule, take the active metabolite directly, and avoid the side effects that come with the rest.

The label backs the positioning. Each can lists carbonated filtered water, natural flavors, citric acid, alpha-GPC, paraxanthine under the enfinity trademark, tartaric acid, steviol glycosides, salt, monk fruit, L-theanine, vitamin C, and vitamin B-12. No sugar, no calories, no synthetic colors. The enfinity ingredient comes from TSI Group, which supplies paraxanthine to the handful of brands using it.

Five flavors shipped with the relaunch. Walmart carries them in 12-packs and single cans, plus a variety pack exclusive to the retailer. Update also sells direct through drinkupdate.com, which is where Kardashian first became a customer in 2023.

The company is not new money chasing a trend. PitchBook lists roughly $13.9 million raised across the company’s history, with investors including K5 Global, Palm Tree Crew Investments, and RiverPark Ventures. The $7.96 million round closed in September 2024, more than a year before the Kardashian announcement. That timing matters for how you read the deal.

Does UPDATE energy drink actually work?

It works, with an asterisk. Paraxanthine is a real stimulant and it does what stimulants do. The asterisk sits on the comparative claim, that paraxanthine is meaningfully better than caffeine rather than simply different.

The strongest evidence comes from a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. Thirteen healthy participants took either a placebo or 200mg of paraxanthine, then ran through the Berg Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a Go/No-Go test, the Sternberg task, and a psychomotor vigilance test. The paraxanthine group showed measurable gains in short-term memory and sustained attention, with fewer reasoning errors six hours after dosing. You can read the full trial on PubMed.

Thirteen people is a small sample. Later TSI-linked studies reported paraxanthine outperforming caffeine on cognition after a 10km run, but those studies come from the ingredient supplier’s own research program, which is standard in supplements and also a reason to discount the headline.

Independent voices are cooler. Writing in The Conversation, researchers noted there isn’t much evidence paraxanthine beats caffeine, and that the practical difference between the two is smaller than the marketing suggests. Healthline raised a separate point worth knowing: “caffeine-free” does not mean stimulant-free. Paraxanthine still stimulates. It just has a shorter half-life, around three hours, which is why it interferes less with sleep.

Consumer reviews land where the science does. Reviewers at Sporked and Elite Daily reported smooth alertness without the drop-off, and Walmart’s own review pages skew positive on both flavor and effect. Reviewers who dislike it mostly object to the sweetener profile. UPDATE uses sucralose alongside stevia and monk fruit, which is a familiar complaint in the zero-sugar category.

The honest verdict: it delivers a calmer, shorter-lasting lift than a 200mg coffee. Whether that’s worth a premium depends entirely on how caffeine treats you.

Is UPDATE energy drink worth it?

At $2.99 a can, UPDATE is priced near the top of the mainstream energy shelf and below the boutique functional tier. That’s defensible if caffeine gives you anxiety, disrupts your sleep, or leaves you flat by 3 p.m. It’s hard to defend if caffeine works fine for you, because Red Bull costs less and a cup of coffee costs a fraction.

Buy the variety 12-pack rather than singles if you want to test it. Flavor preference in this category is unusually personal, and reviewers disagree sharply on which of the five is best. Grape and Berry get the most consistent praise. Peach divides people.

One practical note the reviews mostly skip. Because paraxanthine clears in about three hours, UPDATE is a genuinely different tool from a morning coffee. It’s a 3 p.m. drink. If you’re buying it to replace your first cup of the day, you’ll probably be disappointed.

The customer-to-co-founder route

Here’s the part Forbes and Food Dive covered as a footnote, and the part founders should read twice.

Kardashian didn’t get recruited. She showed up as a buyer, stayed a buyer for two years, and then made herself useful for free. According to the company’s own account, reported by Inc., she “began offering thoughtful, unsolicited feedback on flavor, formulation, packaging, and how the brand could better serve modern, high-performing consumers.” That feedback turned into a collaboration. The collaboration turned into a partnership. By mid-2025 Update decided the label “customer or advisor” no longer described what was happening, and gave her the co-founder title and the equity that goes with it.

Compare that to the standard structure. In most celebrity beverage deals the brand pays for access to an audience, and the celebrity’s involvement ends at the photo shoot. Grey Journal has covered the tell before in celebrity tequila brands, where George Clooney’s Casamigos is the outlier precisely because he and Rande Gerber were drinking their own blend years before there was a company. The pattern repeats in Sydney Sweeney’s SYRN, where equity and creative control separate a founder from a face, and in Cardi B’s Grow-Good Beauty, where the operational partner does the heavy lifting behind the name.

The through-line is ownership. Beyoncé built five ventures on exactly this principle, taking stakes rather than fees, and she was doing it a decade before the model became default. Kardashian, whose Skims and SKKN valuations pushed her to billionaire status, has run the same play repeatedly.

What’s new in the Update deal is the direction of the approach. Solomons didn’t pitch her. She pitched him, accidentally, over two years of order history and unpaid product notes. For a founder, that’s a specific and repeatable signal to watch for: the customer who keeps buying and keeps critiquing is worth a conversation before a competitor has it.

The real bet isn’t the celebrity

Strip the name off and Update is making a category bet, and the category bet is the harder one.

The U.S. energy shelf is not a soft market. Celsius Holdings reported $782.6 million in revenue for Q1 2026, up 138% year over year, and holds roughly a 20.9% dollar share of U.S. ready-to-drink energy after acquiring Alani Nu for $1.8 billion and folding in Rockstar. Monster is launching a new line called FLRT. Alex Cooper launched Unwell Energy in late December aimed squarely at young women. Bloom Nutrition and Gorgie are already there.

Every one of those brands sells caffeine. Update sells the absence of it.

That’s the differentiation, and it’s genuinely defensible in a way “new flavor, new influencer” is not. Ingredient-level differentiation creates a moat that a competitor can’t replicate with a marketing budget, because paraxanthine supply runs through TSI Group and the regulatory and formulation work takes time. It also caps the addressable market to people who have a problem with caffeine, which is a smaller pool than people who want energy.

The Walmart deal is the test. Going from direct-to-consumer to 4,000 doors on March 1, with a stated path to 13,000 locations by early Q4 2026, means Update now has to sell to shoppers who have never heard of paraxanthine and won’t read the can. Retail velocity, not press coverage, decides whether those shelves stay stocked next year.

What founders can copy from this

Three things in this deal transfer to companies with no celebrity anywhere near them.

First, watch your order history for people who behave like owners. Kardashian’s team placed large, repeat orders and sent unsolicited product feedback for two years. That behavior pattern, buying consistently and critiquing constructively without being asked, identifies your highest-value potential partners better than any outreach list. Most companies have three or four of these customers and never call them.

Second, build the differentiation before you build the distribution. Update spent four years on an ingredient thesis with a modest raise, roughly $13.9 million total, which is small money in beverage. The Walmart rollout came after the product was distinct, not as a way to make it distinct. Companies that buy shelf space to fix a positioning problem tend to discover shelf space is expensive and positioning is still broken. The Quince founders ran a similar sequence, fixing the supply chain economics before scaling demand.

Third, structure partnerships around contribution, not attention. Update gave a title and equity to someone already doing the work of a co-founder. That’s a cleaner deal than paying for a name, and it survives the moment the celebrity moves on, because the product decisions she influenced stay in the can. Audience attention is rented. Product work compounds.

The energy drink might not last. Category graveyards are full of well-funded brands with better stories than shelf velocity. But the deal structure behind UPDATE, a paying customer who earned her way into the cap table by being useful first, is a template worth keeping regardless of what happens to the cans at Walmart.