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I’m sick.

Man sick, even. The kind where the tone of my voice never changes from a whine and when I got out of bed this morning and nobody was around to console my mansickness, I had no choice but to spend a half hour describing my symptoms to my cats.

So I went to the convenient store to pick up whatever potions exist to make me feel better.

My first thought: Orange juice.

Fine, but boring.

Vitamin water? I think I heard that it’s too sugary.

I spent two months of my life researching the market for Snapple’s new antioxidant water.

Their problem?

They invented a product which a) Only exists to take a small chunk of a monopoly (Vitamin Water), and b) Decided that their target niche was health freaks.

I have no data in front of me currently, but my gut says this:

Americans wish they could be healthier.

But they want to be healthier by doing a very small amount.

My guess is that most Americans don’t exercise, and of those who do, most still exercise in order to feel less guilty about other guilty pleasures (read: brownies).

So marketing a healthy product to already-healthy people makes no sense. They’ll see right through it.

But there still remains, then, a huge huge market for some kind of elixer/potion/drink/smoothie that is good for you, good for the environment, and will somehow make you feel less sick through a variety of factors.

My recommendations to the future inventors:

1. Use caffeine. It makes you feel good. Remind people that the best headache medicines are full of caffeine, and they’ll love you forever.

2. Use as many “superfruits” as makes sense taste-wise (not cost-wise). Pomegranate is delicious and should be the focal point. Remember, POM juice has one of the most ingenious marketing strategies around, but they’ve never answered one very important question: “When is the right time to drink 100% pomegranate juice?”

3. Make it kind of minty. “Numbs the throat, quiets the mind” kind of deal. A medicinal taste is really in your favor here and I don’t think you should avoid it.

4. If orange juice has a consistency of, say, 50%, and a smoothie has a consistency of 100%, make this potion roughly 65%. You’ll thank me later.

5. Do not heat-fill the product. A green bottle might not allow you to make “no preservatives” claims, but saying “good for you, good for the planet” equals epic win these days.

6. Make it taste better than juice. And if you can’t do that, at least make it taste “healthier.” That’s the moral of the story. If it can’t be delicious, do not, under any circumstances, underestimate the psychosomatic power of a consumer “forcing down” your product in order to make themselves feel better.

7.  MSRP $2.09-2.89.  Cheap enough, but make them feel like “it’s worth it.”

Paypal me a small echeck of gratitude.