I Quit Energy Drinks For 30 Days And Replaced Them With Caffeinated Candy. Here's What Actually Happened.

Two cans of Red Bull a day was costing me $240 a month and a 3 PM crash I could set my watch to. So when a friend handed me a strawberry sucker that promised the same kick in a tenth of the size — and twice as fast — I had to find out if it was real.

For the better part of three years, my morning ritual went like this: alarm, shower, drive-thru, two cans of Red Bull. By 10 AM I was wired. By 3 PM I was dead. By 4 PM I was shotgunning a third can just to make it home from work without falling asleep at a red light.

I'm not proud of any of this. Most people reading this — if you're honest with yourself — have some version of the same story. Maybe yours is coffee. Maybe it's pre-workout. Maybe it's the same thing as mine: a $4 can of something cold and fizzy, three times a day, $240 a month, and a heart rate that would make a cardiologist nervous.

Last month a coworker pulled a small black case out of his backpack, popped it open, and held out what looked like a translucent red lollipop.

"Try this instead," he said. "It's 150 milligrams. You'll feel it in ten minutes."

I gave him the look you give someone who hands you a piece of candy and tells you it works faster than coffee.

The first test

For context: a Red Bull is 80 milligrams of caffeine. A tall Starbucks is 235. The thing in my hand was 150 mg in something the size of a Jolly Rancher, and the brand on the case said Sucker Punch.

I took it. I'm a journalist. I've eaten worse things on assignment.

Here's the part I wasn't ready for: it actually worked. And it worked the way they said it would. Within ten minutes I felt something — not the wired, jittery, knee-bouncing tweak of a third Red Bull, but a clean, steady lift. The kind of focus you get on the second cup of coffee, except it showed up on the first ten minutes of the first sucker.

I asked my coworker what was actually in it. He shrugged and pulled up the website on his phone.

The pitch was simple: caffeine absorbs through the tissue under your tongue dramatically faster than it does through your stomach. A coffee or an energy drink has to be digested first — that's why you're waiting 30 to 45 minutes for the kick. A sucker dissolves slowly in your mouth and goes straight into your bloodstream. Same caffeine. Different delivery system. Faster onset. No 16 ounces of sugar water sloshing around your insides.

I went home that night and ordered a 30-pack. The strawberry one. It was on sale for $34.98 — down from $80.94, which I assumed was a marketing fiction, but whatever.

Day 1 through Day 7

The first week I treated it like a science experiment. I gave up Red Bull cold turkey — a decision I do not recommend without a plan — and started carrying one of the little cases in my jacket pocket.

• One sucker at 7 AM in the car instead of a Red Bull.
• One at 1 PM after lunch.
• One at 4 PM if I was going to the gym.

That's three suckers a day. Each one is 150 mg of caffeine. Three Red Bulls is 240 mg total. Three suckers is 450 mg total — which is a lot, technically, but spread out over the day and absorbed sublingually rather than dumped into my stomach in 12-ounce slugs of sugar.

Day three was the first time in two years I didn't have an afternoon crash.

Day five was the first time in two years my hands didn't shake when I tried to send an email at 4 PM.

The math nobody talks about

Around day 10, I sat down and did the math, because that's the kind of person I am.

I'm not exaggerating those numbers. I went back through three months of my Apple Card statement to make sure I wasn't being dramatic. I was, if anything, being conservative. I forgot to count the bottles of water I bought to chase the Red Bulls.

One sucker comes out to about $1.16. A can of Red Bull at the gas station near my office is $3.99. The math, as they say, math's.

Day 30

I'll spare you the day-by-day. By the end of the month, four things had changed:

• I stopped crashing. The 3 PM dip just didn't show up anymore. I assume it's because I wasn't dumping a 27-gram sugar bomb into my stomach four hours earlier.
• I stopped getting jitters. Whatever the sublingual absorption is doing, it doesn't spike the same way. The lift is steadier. My hands stopped shaking.
• I stopped peeing every 45 minutes. Genuinely. This is what nobody tells you about Red Bull — you're not just drinking caffeine, you're drinking 12 ounces of liquid every four hours. A sucker is a sucker. You're not chugging anything.
• I slept better. I assume because I wasn't taking my last "energy" hit at 4:30 PM and washing it down with 80 mg of taurine and a chemical cocktail.

By week three I'd cycled through three flavors — strawberry, blue raspberry, and the green lime, which is somehow my favorite, and I am not normally a green-anything person.

The catch

I keep waiting for the catch and I haven't found one. The closest thing to a downside: if you're someone who genuinely loves the ritual of cracking a cold can in the morning, a candy is not going to scratch that itch. There is no satisfying tssht. You don't get to throw the empty across the parking lot.

That's it. That's the catch. Less garbage in my car, less garbage in my stomach, and roughly $400 a month back in my bank account.

If you've read this far you're probably wondering whether to try it yourself, so I'll just tell you how it works. They put a $50 money-back guarantee on it — meaning if you don't feel a noticeable kick, they'll refund the order and hand you fifty dollars on top. I've never seen a brand stand behind a product that aggressively, which is honestly the thing that pushed me to try it in the first place.

— Mason Reeve is a freelance writer covering health, productivity, and consumer products. He has not been compensated for this article.