Search for hydration advice now and a pattern shows up that wasn't there a few years ago. Products that used to market themselves around a workout, a run, or recovering from one, increasingly describe themselves as something closer to a daily habit: "everyday hydration," built for general use rather than a specific occasion.
A Shift in Language, Not in Evidence
This isn't one brand's marketing choice. Across the UK electrolyte category, a number of brands have started describing their products this way: general, all-day, non-sports framing, sometimes stacked with other ingredients beyond electrolytes alone. It's a real, observable shift in how the category talks about itself, not a claim that it's the whole category or that every brand has moved the same way. What hasn't moved alongside it is the evidence.
What the Evidence Still Says
We've written about this directly before: the evidence on when electrolyte supplementation is actually useful describes exercise, illness, and specific medical situations, not daily life for most healthy adults on an ordinary diet. That conclusion didn't change because the marketing did. A product can describe itself as "everyday" without anything about the underlying need for it becoming more everyday in the process. The ingredient is the same ingredient. Only the occasion attached to it has moved.
Why the Occasion Is the Claim That Matters
This is the same reasoning behind our own positioning: own a moment, not an ingredient. An ingredient, or a word like "everyday," is copyable in about as long as it takes a competitor to update its packaging. A moment, genuinely owned in someone's working day, isn't copied the same way. "Everyday hydration" describes a product's reach. It doesn't describe a specific point in anyone's day the way "the moment before another coffee" does. That difference is the actual claim we're making about our own positioning, not a comment on whether any other brand's product works.
Why Our Own Formula Reflects This
Our V2 formula doesn't include electrolytes. That's not a claim that a formula with electrolytes in it is worse, including one marketed for everyday use. It's a decision consistent with what the evidence actually says the workday occasion needs: a desk-based working day isn't the exercise, illness, or medical situation the evidence describes, regardless of how a product elsewhere in the category chooses to position itself.
Why 0800Labs Is Interested
We're not arguing against "everyday" as a word. We're pointing at the difference between a claim about reach and a claim about a moment, because that difference is exactly what "own the occasion, not the ingredient" means in practice. We call the occasion we're building for Workday Hydration. It's our own term, not an established category, and not a claim about what any other drink, "everyday" or otherwise, actually does.
We're building something for that moment. There's no product to buy yet. The Labs is how we'll tell you when there is.