Our Foundation

It’s incredible how quickly we can change the way we feel and perform, both mentally and physically, by simply staying hydrated.  It’s so easy to get caught up in complicated nutrition and performance regimens and miss foundational needs that are sometimes incredibly simple. Before we created sum. we realized how confusing it was to find the right hydration beverage on the shelves of grocery stores, convenience stores, or online. There are SO MANY options with SO MANY ingredients! Because of the wide range of hydration needs both within and between people, there is not currently a hydration solution on the market that meets these changing needs. Not to mention, when we buy beverages in single-use containers, we are only contributing to the tremendous amount of single-use waste piling up in our landfills and natural environment. 

Even though there are undoubtedly great hydration products on the market, when we really dug into it, we came to the conclusion that the traditional beverage industry is extremely archaic, wasteful, and is not set up to meet the changing hydration needs of the customer. It is greatly contributing to the confusion about hydration and the single-use waste we’re all trying to avoid. We believed that we needed to get back to the basics on the ingredients that go into hydration and into the current century to allow people to build their own beverages to meet their needs... So we created sum.

Our Story

Built around our Mission to hydrate communities through simple, sustainable, and convenient solutions, our founding team started building sum. over five years ago to deliver the healthiest, highest quality hydration products to our customers. We wanted to help people live healthy lives through hydration and help reduce the amount of single-use waste flowing into our environment. 

Our name, sum. was chosen as a reminder of how important it is that we take care of one another. Our logo, the blue dot, comes from the inspirational book written by Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot, in 1994. The book highlighted the photograph taken of our tiny planet by the Voyager I from 3.7 billion miles away. In it, Carl Sagan is quoted as saying, “It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Stuart Griffin
Co-founder, CEO

It is our goal to become the new standard in beverage brands. A brand that chooses to use responsible means to manufacture, distribute, and market its products. But while we go about our business,  it’s our commitment to do our part to care for one another in this little corner of the universe.

We started by asking ourselves, “If we were going to build the beverage industry into a sustainable, healthy, transparent model, what would it look like?” There was one word that kept coming to us that we couldn't escape: Simplicity. And that is the word that has guided every decision we’ve made to this point. We set out to create a brand that honored the value of Simplicity. From the ingredients in our products to the way we communicate with our customers, the way we distribute our products, the form factor of our physical designs, and the way we provide information about hydration science. All guided by our unwavering commitment to Simplicity. 

We believe this commitment to Simplicity provides huge benefits to the people who entrust us with their health and to our natural environment that we aim to be good stewards of. While our brand and products evolve we will lean on this commitment to deliver the most trusted products in hydration in the most sustainable ways possible.

One of the many ways we do this is by helping our customers understand what the science says about hydration and how to apply simple, effective protocols in your life that produce big, positive outcomes. Our Head of Science, and member of our founding team, Courteney Benjamin, PhD will guide you through our hydration philosophy and how you can apply it in your life. We designed our products using leading hydration science, but it’s our goal to communicate these things in a manner that is easily applied to your everyday life and this is what Courteney will do in her video and written blog posts. 

We hope you will engage with our blogs and send feedback that will help us improve the way we deliver our products. 

Thank you, and Stay Hydrated!