Today I found a few cans of Blu Frog sitting on my doorstep, a small 8 ounce energy drink with a brightly cheerful and maybe a little evil frog staring out at me. The drink itself seems smart enough – cute can, mystery ingredient, interesting ingredients – the only issue is where to find it. You can’t get this in most convenience stores, liquor stores, or any other place you usually get your energy drinkage. So where do you find these things?
Answer – from the Blu Frog cult. You can not find these on their official website – in any stores or anywhere under affiliate sites in less than 2 cases. It seems the company’s idea is to go the route of Verve and Affiliate market these. That means people were conned ( although, some might actually have sales experience) into buying 2 cases of this from a good friend, family member or website stumble – and are then hit with campaigns on MLM sites and craigslist that go like this:

“Blu Frog Energy officially launched on 1/23/09 and we’re at the top of the wave! Since experts claim that the energy drink industry will continue to grow to over 24 billion dollars in annual sales by the year 2011, don’t you want a piece of that?!”
Does this mean anyone can profit from you selling an unknown energy drink – or just this energy drink startup company. They give you the website and the promotional materials, then it is up to you to advertise their drink for them and start raking in the pennies – or be stuck with 2 cases of this stuff to drink up all by yourself. Not to mention, companies that leave comments on their own blog about how great they are, or fill forums and steal and change reviews to fill their ads are slimy and underhanded.
Now, if you are tempted to try out Blu Frog, the people at http://www.blufrogmarketing.com were the people gracious enough to hook me up with some cans. If you do decide to give this a try, These people were super nice and friendly in all conversations, and worked hard to get me these cans to try for all of you out there. I would suggest you contact them for drinks, as these poor souls are working on commission…

Enough of the scheme – lets see how the drink stacks up.

Taste: 8
I liked this flavor a lot, although it was completely different than I was expecting. I thought with a name like Blu Frog, it would be either blue, or it be a Red Bull clone. What this is is way different, being a tropical juice blend of mango and papaya, pear and apple juice, giving this drink more of a deep nectar flavor. The flavor is quite unlike other energy drinks – and seemed to be hit or miss with the people I had try. Of the 8 people I had sample the flavor, 5 loved it and thought itt was fantastic – and 3 thought it was , while not the nastiest stuff on earth, not good either. Myself, I thought it was pretty yummy, and I liked the mix of juice and regular sugar to sweeten things up.

Packaging:5
I hate being pandered to. There is something about selling a product in which you have to be leading the curve of trends, not on the backend. The XTREME packaging turned me off, and I could not really think of who this drink would appeal to. Extreme athletes and young club kids would be embarrassed by the big goofy frog on bright colors. Now, I lov a good pun, but the slogans they had plastered on the can were too silly – with slogans like “the hip way to get your hop on”, Frogs are nocturnal, so keep your Blu Frog in a cool dry place”, ” Don’t lick the can MAN, the good stuff is inside!” and “Feel the Frog!” I also was rubbed wrongly by the distressed and grunge fonts everything was in – looking like someone was working very hard to XTREM-ify a product to fit with their marketing.
I do like how they listed the caffeine and taurine amounts, rather than hide them in a proprietary blend. I also think the printing job on the can itself is lovely – so nice, in fact, that on first glance I thought it was a wrapped plastic can. The only 2 other points I found is there is no double facing in the can, so if you were to get this into stores it would be a pain to face, and The cap is oddly placed, where your hand (for lefties) covers up the logo when drinking. It would be better if the logo was facing outwards, so you could advertise the can as you were drinking.

Nutrition:7
While very tasty, this drink is definitely not a Verve. Verve had lots of trace minerals, tons of vitamins and was about as healthy as you could get an energy drink. This stuff ranks as only OK. Other than your typical energy drink stuff ( this has 80 mg of caffeine, 1000mg taurine, inositol, Quercetin ( the stuff that FRS energy is selling their drink on) and an overdose of B vitamins, the secret ingredient in here is a sea plant, called Limu Moni. Tis stuff has a bunch of flucoidan – something which is supposed to boost your immunity and general health. While very interesting as an ingredient, I am unsure if it is what you would want in an energy drink. Still,it is better as a secret ingredient than Quercetin.
I can tell you that there is a nice little kick in here – about what you would expect from your basic lightweight energy drink. I got about 2 hours of energy – about as much as I would have from a small coffee or a shot of espresso. No real crash – as there are only 68 calories in here.

Website code:9 website function:3 www.blufrogenergy.com
On first glace, I thought the site was very pretty. It went along with the ever-so-predictable grunge theme and logo. It has lots of info on the drink itself, as well as comparisons to other top selling drinks. Unfortunately, it has waay too much mlm stuff on there, and no place to just get the drink. The coding was very nice, and I liked how all the parts worked. I guess it was not the designers fault if they wanted to plaster a ton of info on how to make a mint selling these things.