Blake Lively's Betty Buzz Sodas Are Hitting Whole Foods Shelves
Sheesh, Blake Lively; you're making the rest of us look bad. It's just not enough that you are normalizing big families by stylishly sauntering through another pregnancy (per Motherly), or DIYing pine cone turkeys and ornately decorated pies for Thanksgiving (per People), is it? You had to go and start your own line of non-alcoholic carbonated beverages, called Betty Buzz, and make it one of the buzziest sparkling mixers around, didn't you?
Named in honor of some very important people in Blake Lively's life, Betty Buzz has people buzzing for a reason; according to the Betty Buzz website, the actor's fizzy lifting drinks are naturally flavored and made with clean ingredients only. Lively herself doesn't drink alcohol but tells People that she and husband Ryan Reynolds host a lot of parties (not to mention, he owns the ubiquitous Aviation American Gin company), so Lively is a de facto expert in what options are out there for a teetotaler when everyone around you has a drink in their hand. "I like flavor," she said simply, of her intolerance for a lesser mixer. That tendency towards taste has led Lively to create sparkling lemon-lime, ginger beer, tonic water, Meyer lemon club soda, and sparkling grapefruit for the Betty Buzz line; all made with real juices, natural ingredients, and those adorable tiny bubbles. And if there's one gang that appreciates a natural ingredient and an adorable bubble — it's Whole Foods.
Social media and smart speakers abuzz with the possibility of collaboration
Whole Foods has been in the good-for-you-food game since the 1970s, when it was just a little grocery and health food store in Austin, Texas (via Whole Foods Market). While it's often pricier than your average milk-and-bread slinger, Whole Foods generally squeaks by on the virtue of its natural and organic offerings (the largest grocery store chain in America to do so in fact, according to Britannica). And when Amazon acquired the chain in 2017 (per Bloomberg), the grocer became even easier to love.
A match made in heaven for Blake Lively's Betty Buzz? Probably. "Our retail partners are really our heart and soul of this business," Lively told Forbes earlier this year, before expanding on expansion she hopes to make to the global market. Whole Foods is a big step in that direction; plus the link with Amazon makes for fun marketing, which is kind of Lively's thing. "Hey, Alexa. Add Betty Buzz to my Whole Foods shopping cart," Lively says to her smart speaker in a recent Instagram post promoting the partnership. While the actor casually reads her book, Alexa not only adds the drinks to her cart, but gushes over Lively's work before proposing a female-led world takeover. It's not Alexa's worst idea — and if Lively is leading the charge and mixing the drinks, we're in.