A tired-but-clever joke from the 1980s pointed out that Evian (one of the first trendy bottled still-water brands) is naive spelled backward, and for most of the 20th century, US consumers agreed that spending good money on drinking water that they could just as easily get free from the tap was rather silly. However, in the late 1990s, as soft-drink companies began offering bottled water at nearly the same prices as soda (or sometimes more), and health-conscious consumers began learning about the benefits of drinking more water, multiple bottled water brands began to flourish (many either started or later purchased by the big soda conglomerates). Whether this increased demand was the result of clever marketing or the trend toward healthier lifestyles is unclear, but we suspect it was a bit of both. However, with the Aquafinas and Dasanis and Poland Springs of the world seemingly locking down the $47 billion (annual) US bottled water market—estimated to hit $80B by 2033—you’d think there’d be no room for scrappy new upstarts in this particular Food & Beverage category. But you’d be wrong. Let’s look at one of the water brands that have beat the odds, created new demand, and are making a serious splash: Hint water.
In 2004, Hint founder and former AOL executive Kara Goldin says she was 45 pounds overweight, had acne, and was addicted to Diet Coke, consuming upwards of 10 cans daily. Goldin says, “I’ll be the first to admit that the word ‘diet’ had totally fooled me. Gosh, I thought I was being so responsible. When I read the full list of ingredients and didn’t even recognize most of them—I thought, what the heck was I drinking?! That day, I decided to cut diet soda out of my life and started drinking water instead. Three months later, my acne was gone, I was bursting with energy, and I had lost 40 pounds!”
But here’s the thing: She wasn’t just drinking plain water. She told ASU News, “I started the company when I realized Diet Coke was really bad for me... I started slicing up fruit and throwing it in water because I realized I was just never a water drinker. I really saw there were a lot of people, like me, who just didn’t drink plain water.” Turns out, her simple idea for naturally fruit-flavored, non-carbonated water hadn’t really been tried before, at least in this form. It had no sweeteners or artificial flavors at all, though people who have tried it almost universally state that it kind of “tastes sweet.” She and her husband Theo started formulating fruit-essence-flavored water in their basement and garage and selling it locally in 2005. Though growth was initially slow, some careful grass-roots demand-generation combined with solid marketing strategies (more on that below) spurred Hint to grow to an estimated $220 million in annual revenue by 2024. The company has received numerous awards, including “Best Flavored Water” from Health, Men’s Health, and SELF magazines, “Best Enhanced Water,” and “Top 25 New Products.”
Goldin herself gained notoriety and was selected to be one of eleven women for Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, and one of Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women in 2012. In 2015, Goldin was selected as winner of the Marketers That Matter award for Brand Building Small Company. The Huffington Post also named her as one of six disruptors in business alongside Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, and she was San Francisco Business Times’ Most Admired CEO one year.
Hint has grown into an estimated quarter-billion-dollar company, but the Goldins were anxious not to follow the typical growth strategies employed by other beverage companies… or at least not at first. A Forbes report from 2010, the same year Hint Water Inc. was officially founded, quoted Kara Goldin as saying, “Consumers want to feel as though they’ve discovered something new… They want to stumble upon emerging products, not just have a giant billboard posted in front of them and an expectation that they’ll buy.” Thus, Hint initially developed a small, loyal following by focusing on selling the naturally flavored water in San-Francisco area health-food stores and yoga studios—health-conscious buyers, in other words, who could appreciate the benefits of cutting artificial sweeteners, sugar, and chemicals out of their diets.
The Goldins also pitched the water to a category of consumers who were not simply health-conscious, but had legitimate health issues such as diabetes or heart trouble, and to recovering gastric-bypass surgery patients as a calorie-free way to help them hydrate and keep weight off.
Local customers took the hint, so to speak, and sales grew steadily among not just health-minded people, but those reeling from the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. People looking to trim more expensive sodas and bottled waters from their shopping lists found Hint gave them the less-expensive beverage satisfaction compared to some premium brands, while still providing the delicious flavor experience they wanted… all without calories, chemicals, or sweeteners. This is a good example of reading the market conditions, knowing your customers, and taking advantage of large economic disruptions. By 2009, Hint’s revenue had climbed to $12 million annually, representing a 20% increase over 2008.
A later Forbes interview (2022) elucidates Kara’s initial “aha moment” as far as developing her product and her customer base: “I never thought about Hint as taking on big beverage or the sweetener industry. What interested me the most in the early days was that I had solved a problem for myself, which led me to solving problems for other people. I started hearing from consumers who had issues with diabetes or cancer patients who were going through chemotherapy whose taste buds had changed. Health is something that, no matter how much money you have, no matter what your gender is, your socioeconomic background, anything, if you don't have it, your life is not complete. How can you get people to change their habits? You show them. Stop yelling about what people shouldn’t do and instead solve the problem.”
But Hint’s grass-roots, health-minded customer development could only go so far, and the Goldins weren’t so altruistic as to eschew spending money on national marketing when it came to that point. The company simply couldn’t grow much more without exposing a larger portion of the country to the concept. The founders were confident that the product was so good it would catch on in other markets, and in summer 2010, they spent $3 million, or roughly $30% of their annual revenue, on mainstream online ads created by an in-house marketing team, followed by TV spots and (yep) billboards. Kara Goldin said at the time that she wasn’t concerned Hint’s expansion would alienate some early fans. “Consumers may say they have an issue with brands because they are too [mass-market], but availability of product is even more important.” Hint got distribution in more stores, including mass-market outlets Target, Costco, and Starbucks. The company had a hit on its hands, and people started expressing their opinion that unflavored water was now considered boring.
Hint also leaned heavily into the new social-media and online sales dynamic, including a 14-, 30-, or 60-day subscribe-and-save direct-to-consumer distribution model that attracted many new online-savvy customers who wanted to try new flavors or get their favorites at a pretty steep discount (and avoid having to visit the grocery store to purchase). Hint’s expansion has been impressive and steady since, exceeding 50% year-over-year growth for several years, hitting $90 million in annual sales by 2018, and some estimates showing as much as $230 million in 2024, though, since the company remains privately owned, the numbers haven’t been fully disclosed.
So, is there anything particularly special about the water Hint uses to make its tasty flavored H2O? Nope, it’s locally sourced at multiple Hint bottling locations around the country (more on this below). “We use a mix of reverse-osmosis, deionization, and ultra-violet purification to create a refreshing water.”
As far as flavorings, the company says, “Our flavor formulas are a closely held secret, but our fruit essences are all derived from fruits, vegetables, and spices.” Internet speculation varies from the logical to hardcore conspiracy-theory (as with everything) but we suspect Hint uses the same kinds of natural fruit flavorings that are available to any US beverage company. They really do know how to pick ‘em, though, because the water tastes surprisingly good to us.
At one point, plastic water bottles were viewed as environmentally responsible, but that has changed in a big way over the past 20 years or so. Plastic pollution of our oceans and waterways has become a serious problem, and the potential negative health impacts of using plastics as beverage or food containers have also become a hot-button issue. For a bottled water company that has used plastic packaging from the outset, it can be a real challenge to navigate the market in a way that allows profitability and sustainability. Hint has an entire section of their website dedicated to educating consumers on the company’s sustainability efforts, as well as discussion of the plastic bottle issues.
One way the company has advanced in sustainability initiatives is in developing increasingly localized bottling processes. To consolidate resources and cut down on fossil fuels used in producing and transporting Hint’s products, they now produce their bottles, label them, and press their caps in the same facilities where they purify and infuse their water and fill the bottles, all of which are in the United States. They have significantly grown the number of production facilities, and they are spread across the US so the company can produce and distribute products closer to where customers shop and live. For nationally sold brands, this makes a lot of sense if it’s economically feasible for a business to maintain multiple production facilities.
As far as the plastic bottles go, Hint has already made strides in increased sustainability, but there are still pretty significant milestones ahead. For now, the company states, “100% recyclable [note the careful use of that word there] PET bottles make the most sense for product quality, customer satisfaction, and the environment for the majority of our customers.” The Hint bottle’s cap is 100% recyclable, the PET plastic is safe for beverage use (with no plastic leaching) as certified by the FDA, and there are no plasticizer chemicals or BPA used. Whether you agree with PET bottles being the right choice for the company’s primary packaging or not, the latest Hint bottles use 40% less PET than the original design, which is a significant step in the right direction in the view of many customers.
Hint also points out that well-meaning critics may not fully understand the issues related to alternative water-packaging options:
The company’s site claims to have achieved a “Zero Waste” water purification system as of 2024, though actual details on what that actually means are a little sketchy. They are also moving toward 100% recycled PET (rPET) as a source for their bottles, with a goal (as the technology advances) of transitioning fully to rPET by 2030, completely eliminating Hint’s use of virgin plastic, which will further reduce the company’s carbon footprint.
It can’t be ignored, however, that Hint has also started offering its water in cans: “Our newest initiative in Hint packaging, aluminum cans, is lightweight and recyclable, and it allows us to provide another option to meet the sustainability initiatives of some of our customers.”
With great success often comes serious challenges, and as the Hint company attracted interest from investment groups, the Goldins found they needed that revenue to support their plans for growth. Unfortunately, this turned into a double-edged sword, as Belgium-based food and beverage investment firm Verlinvest gained majority control over Hint’s board, and in late 2021, The Goldins were “reassigned” to unspecified roles in the company (essentially fired). In November 2023, the Goldins filed a lawsuit claiming they were not paid what they were owed and were wrongfully terminated. According to one legal analysis, Kara and Theo Goldin’s suit alleges “that board members representing Verlinvest fired them in retaliation for raising concerns about alleged conflicts of interest and the disclosure of confidential information outside the company in violation of California law. The lawsuit includes claims of gender discrimination. The complaint alleged that Kara Goldin was treated in a ‘biased, sexist and discriminatory manner’ as the only female CEO in Verlinvest’s portfolio of companies at the time. The board members have denied wrongdoing.” According to the report, “The Goldins are seeking damages that include compensation for unused paid time off, which they estimate to be at least $350,000. Additionally, they have asked a judge to reinstate them to their former roles at the company over three years after being fired by Hint’s board of directors.”
As far as we can determine, this suit is still not settled as of early 2026. A *ahem* glass-half-full view of the situation would be to point out that Kara Goldin’s initial dream of helping American consumers make healthier choices has certainly made an impact on the market as well as on multiple Hint fans over the years. “I realized in launching this drink, if I could just launch something so simple that gets people to enjoy water again, we can change health in America,” Kara has said. “We are really trying to help people get healthier by making simple, better-for-you choices that are actually enjoyable.” Here’s hoping the company can do the right thing by both its customers and its founders.
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