Drink to Your Health
Carmel Magazine - Winter 2008
By Michael Chatfield

Store shelves groan under the weight of dozens of new soft drinks. Designed to energize, hydrate or to supplement a healthy diet, they come in a dizzying array of colors (some look like they glow in the dark) and flavors (from mmm-mmm to mildly medicinal).

In the '70s, Wyck Hay, an impish, energetically unconventional businessman, co-founded the groundbreaking, hippie-friendly Celestial Seasonings herbal tea brand with his pal Mo Siegel. They later sold the company to Kraft Foods—for a number with a lot of zeros.

"When you meet success at a young age, you get the feeling that anything is possible," he says. After several more careers, including marketing energy-saving devices, Hay created an organic energy drink product, KaBoom. The Carmel Valley newcomer has also launched a health drink, Osteo.

So what possessed Hay to enter the beverage fray? Attending a health foods convention in Las Vegas some years ago, he sampled a Red Bull. And hated it. Thinking that a market existed for a healthy energy drink, he concocted KaBoom, an organic energy juice with none of the added sugars and weird chemical s so common in other brews.

But there was a false start. "The original KaBoom label featured a Hiroshima-style explosion graphic and the slogan, 'Slam One Down and Rock On!'," Hay recalls. "And then we launched it a couple of days before September 11, 2001." It goes without saying that he chalked that one up to bad karmic timing, pulled the product and retooled.

A born marketer—exceptionally charming, with a salesman's gift of instantaneous rapport—he set up samplings of the repackaged product in health food stores throughout Northern California and personally presented the product to customers.

Now marketed by Tucson based Brand X LLC, KaBoom is available in three flavors at retailers throughout the country and locally at Whole Foods.

Osteo was conceived as a way for women to fight osteoporosis by supplementing their diets without, as Hay says "gagging down calcium tablets." Developed in collaboration with an orthopedic surgeon, a serving of the calcium-and-mineral-fortified fruit tea supplies about half of a woman's RDA for calcium. In Carmel, Bruno's and Nielsen's Markets stock the beverage.

Although he is the creator of a household-word brand name and product line, Wyck Hay is interested in more than mere moneymaking. He truly cares about putting quality, organic and healthy products on the market, and with Osteo, he has one that can actually help prevent a crippling disease.