A drink mix in a stick pack, sold store by store.

Liquid I.V. — written with full stops, and often shortened by the company to LIV — is a drink-mix brand based in El Segundo, California, and owned by Unilever. Unilever’s announcement of the acquisition in September 2020 said the business was founded in 2012 by the entrepreneur Brandin Cohen. Lawsuit reports name the company behind it as The LIV Group, Inc.

Cohen studied at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, graduating in 2010. On the university’s alumni page he writes that he started Liquid I.V. a few years after college with two friends who were also LMU graduates, Hayden Fulstone and Cameron Killeen, and that while a student he was named the program’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year for a project raising money and meals for children affected by the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

The product is a powdered drink mix sold in single-serving stick packs, torn open and poured into water. Growth came through retail. In a release dated 8 January 2019, the company announced a national launch at Costco, rolling out to 516 Costco stores with a 30-count pack in Lemon Lime, and an Acai Berry version online. A further company release, dated 22 May 2019, added Passion Fruit to the Costco range and said the brand was by then sold in more than 20,000 stores. By the time of the Unilever deal, BeautyMatter reported in September 2020, the brand was sold in more than 30,000 stores in the United States, including Costco, Target, Whole Foods Market, CVS and Walgreens, as well as on Amazon.

Outside money came in along the way. BeautyMatter reported that a funding round in August 2018 was led by CircleUp Growth Partners, with participation from TQ Ventures, a group led by the music manager Scooter Braun. The company says it also runs a giveback programme that donates product to people in need.

A two-toned hexagon and fruit in motion.

The brand’s logo is a two-toned hexagon. In May 2024 the company announced its first brand refresh since its beginning in 2012, FoodNavigator-USA and BeverageDaily reported on 10 May 2024.

According to those reports, the refresh brought an updated version of the two-toned hexagon logo, a bold typeface and a vibrant colour palette, together with custom photography of real fruit shot in motion for the front of the packs. The articles quoted Brittany Shaw, the brand’s senior brand director, and said the new look would appear on shelves at retailers including Costco, Target, Walmart, Amazon, Albertsons, Kroger, Whole Foods and 7-Eleven, as well as on the brand’s own website. The launch campaign was called “Tear. Pour. Live. More.”

The company described the change in its own words in an article of 1 May 2024. It said it had made the Liquid I.V. name on the pack bolder so that it was easier to spot on shelves, upgraded the look with a more saturated colour palette, and put the ripe fruits behind each flavour on the front of the stick. It said the new packaging would roll out while existing stock sold through, so that some packs would carry the original design during the changeover, and that renamed products kept the same formulations.

The refresh followed the brand abroad. Food & Drink Business reported on 25 June 2025 that Liquid I.V. had launched in Australia in Chemist Warehouse stores in March 2024 and reached Costco there in June 2024, that the brand had set up a local manufacturing facility, and that the Australian packs were moving to the refreshed identity, with the two-toned hexagon logo, a more vibrant palette and a flavour-forward layout with large fruit illustrations. The same report announced a Watermelon flavour joining Strawberry, Passion Fruit, Tropical Punch and Lemon Lime, and quoted Harrison Power, Unilever’s brand manager for the product in Australia.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all water names: vitaminwater, Liquid I.V., Core, Crystal Geyser, Deer Park, Arrowhead and Harrogate. Water brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food and drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant table.

A water brand’s identity is usually carried less by what is in the bottle than by a label, a name and the place or idea it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A start-up from El Segundo inside a global group.

Unilever announced in September 2020 that it had signed an agreement to acquire Liquid I.V. The terms were not disclosed. The announcement said the business would stay in El Segundo and that Cohen would remain as chief executive; Fabian Garcia, then president of Unilever North America, welcomed the brand to the group’s portfolio.

The labelling has since been challenged in court. In August 2026 consumers filed proposed class actions in California federal courts against The LIV Group and Unilever over the labelling of the brand’s sugar-free drink mixes, Top Class Actions reported on 22 August 2026; the claims are allegations.

For a design guide, Liquid I.V. shows how a young brand can rely on one geometric mark — the two-toned hexagon — and a strict colour-per-flavour system to hold a stick-pack range together, and how a refresh a decade later could modernise the type and photography without moving that mark. Compare Pocari Sweat, Otsuka’s 1980 soft drink in Helmut Schmid’s blue and white, and vitaminwater, Glacéau’s colour-coded bottle from New York. For this guide we use hexagon navy, lemon-lime and passion pink with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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