A ten-year-old budding entrepreneur has made a delicious profit selling empty bottles of Prime energy drink online.
Charlie Smith braved supermarket lines last month to get his hands on the signature drink created by YouTube superstars Logan Paul and KSI.
Charlie saw an opportunity to sell the empty bottles on his mother's eBay account for a 17% profit once the viral drink was out of stock in the UK.
Today The Northern Echo reported that Prime sells for as much as £100 a bottle in some parts of England.
‘Little Del Boy' Charlie Smith, 10, says he would like to be a businessman when he grows up
Premium drinks retail at £1.99 in the UK, but have reached highs of £100 in parts of England.
Charlie's father, Adam Smith, 38, said: “We think it's stupid that he's buying drinks they're obsessed with for £2.”
But we can't argue with him because he's getting his money back.
It's very normal for Charlie. He is very good with his money.
‘He thinks it's great to be able to drink it for free.
He likes to try to buy and sell anything to make a profit. Charlie is a bit of a little Del Boy.
Charlie's first sale netted him £12 for five empty bottles of Prime, which normally retail for £1.99 in supermarkets.
Following this success, he has begun paying fellow youngsters £1 for their empty bottles in the hope of pocketing a better margin on the open market.
Budding entrepreneur Charlie added: ‘I love it, I love making money. I want to be a businessman when I grow up.'
Charlie started using a ‘Prime Tracker' app on his smartphone before Christmas to find out where and when they would be available in supermarkets, allowing him to source a collection of flavours.
But Charlie thought he might get his pocket money back when a schoolmate asked if they could buy some of the empty bottles he had amassed.
Prime Tracker costs £0.89 on the App Store and is, at the time of writing, the No. 1 app on the UK purchase chart.
Charlie saw an opportunity when a friend from school offered to buy some of his empty bottles.
Charlie has been using an app to find Prime in stores before reselling the bottles.
Charlie, with the help of his father, tried to put empty bottles on the eBay auction site.
Empty bottles sold for £2 more than retail drinks in supermarkets.
Since then, Charlie has started buying empty bottles from friends for £1 to resell online.
Adam said, “It went above the retail price of what they sell for a full bottle, which is ridiculous.”
‘Now he's trying to buy them from other people empty for £1 to try and resell them.
Now he has about 25 in his bedroom. She's been checking out eBay, but she was also going to try to do Facebook Marketplace because there's other stuff there.”
Hundreds queue outside Aldi stores across the UK to buy the exclusive Prime energy drink
KSI denied that they were making the product scarce to increase its publicity and convenience.
Co-owners KSI and Logan Paul have denied they are artificially reducing supply to increase hype around the drink, which is already popular in the US and hit UK shelves late last year.
In response to the chaotic scenes of shoppers vying for the drink at Aldi, KSI tweeted: “We're not even trying to do that.”
“We're doing a ton of Prime every day, the demand is literally too high, man.”
KSI criticized stores allegedly reselling new bottles above retail price as a guest on Capital FM this week.
ASDA reneged after the rapper called them out for raising their prices to £2.50 a bottle.
He agreed that “it's crazy” how people are behaving “over a drink.”
KSI and Logan Paul have nearly 50 million YouTube subscribers between them and are popular with younger audiences.
The couple have branded their new collaborative venture, Prime, as a healthy alternative to many energy drinks.
The drinks come in a variety of flavors including Tropical Punch, Grape, Lemon Lime, Ice Pop, and Blue Raspberry.
The vast majority of each 500ml bottle is filtered water, mixed with 10% coconut water.
The latter is a good source of minerals such as potassium, magnesium, calcium and sodium, important components for the health of the heart, skeleton and muscles.
Traditional energy drink cans can contain more than 80g of sugar and as much caffeine as three cups of coffee.
By comparison, Prime only has 2g of sugar per bottle, about 7 percent of the recommended intake for an adult. Instead, it gets its sweetness from the substances sucralose and acesulfame K.
Prime also contains 113% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A, 125% of vitamin E, 243% of vitamin B6, and 192% of vitamin B12.
However, dietitians remain skeptical of the drink's nutritional benefits.
Duane Mellor, a registered dietitian and researcher at Aston Medical School in Birmingham, told MailOnline: “It seems to have some more expensive ingredients than your average sports or energy drink in the form of branched-chain amino acids.”
These have been claimed to improve exercise performance, recovery and muscle building.
‘However, none of these claims have been accepted by regulators and should not be used when marketing products such as this. It's interesting that you use a potassium salt, since most sports products use sodium, as it can aid in the absorption of water, glucose, and amino acids.
