Name: How Red Bull Built Its Empire
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T22:10:24.000Z
Duration: 16 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

If you buy a can of Red Bull, you'll probably pay about $3 or your local currency's equivalent.

Nine cents of that goes towards paying for actually making the beverage you consume.

And as you undoubtedly know, in Red Bull's case, everything else is a tremendous amount.

Some slim portion of that $3 goes towards paying for this, the company's headquarters.

And this company headquarters is, is so far from normal, it's not in a major city, it's not even in a minor city.

It's in the small Austrian mountain town of Fusholansee.

This is a town with one supermarket, two coffee shops, one bank and one globally known multinational beverage enterprise for one of the world's most recognizable brands.

It'd take no longer than three minutes to walk from one side of the property to the other.

And and it's bounded by an insurance broker on one side, residential homes on another, and

It's got no walls or fences or gatehouses.

In fact, the public is even permitted to stroll through its gardens.

There's no great strategic logic behind this location.

Rather, Red Bull's co founder Dietrich Mateschitz just liked Fischl.

He liked the privacy it afforded and the outdoors it gave access to.

Small scale may be surprising compared to the global stature of the company, but

less so when considering its actual operating structure.

After all, at its core, Red Bull is a pretty simple company.

It sells its traditional flavor, a sugar free variant, a slightly different zero sugar version, then 14 different configurations of traditional and sugar free fruit flavored additions.

Each of these is sold in a couple different sizes to fit different distribution channels and markets.

Compare this to their closest yet smaller competitor, Monster Energy, which sells so many different variants, seasonal, co branded and regional flavors, that there's not even a definitive count of how many different beverages they sell, though the rough estimate is around 150 at a given time.

Adding to their simplicity, Red Bull doesn't even manufacture their own product.

They contract Austrian fruit juice company Rauch to do it for them.

In their early days, Red Bull hardly had the money to set up dedicated production facilities.

But as part of the small Austrian business community, co founder Masschitz had connections to the Rausch family and convinced them to handle it.

Today, little has changed in this arrangement but the scale.

But even then, most of the world's Red Bull is still manufactured in the shadow of the Alps and all of it by the fruit juice company.

Their largest manufacturing site is here in Ludesch, Austria.

It's co located with a Ball Corporation factory who's contracted to make Red Bull's bespoke cans not used for any other beverage.

While the direct rail and highway access allows for easy onward distribution logistics, a similar setup is replicated mere miles away, just over the border into Switzerland.

It's got a Rauch factory, a Ball Corporation plant, along with direct rail and highway access too.

Until 2021, every single can of Red Bull sold anywhere in the world came from one of these two sites.

Until the company worked with Rauch to start making product in Red Bull's biggest market, the U.S.

so the setup was replicated a third time in the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizonarouch factory here, West Ball Corporation plant here.

Keeping a 17 product line with two manufacturing partners going just isn't that involved.

Which explains why the vast, vast majority of people at Red Bull do not deal with making Red Bull.

Rather, they focus on what $1 of every red Bull sale goes towards convincing you to buy a can.

From its beginning, Red Bull was more a marketing company than a drinks company.

Prior to co founding it, Dietrich Mastershich worked at a consumer goods multinational called Blendaxe as the marketing manager for one of their lines of toothpaste.

at the time in the 70s and 80s, energy drinks were already widespread across the continent, despite being nearly unheard of in the West.

On one of Mateschitz's trips, as the fable goes, he was sitting at the bar of the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, chatting with fellow travelers and flipping through the latest edition of Newsweek.

Inside, he found an article highlighting that Japan's single largest taxpayer was energy drinks manufacturer Lipovitan.

Details get a bit fuzzy and conflicting on what exactly happened next, but

what we know for sure is that Mateschitz hated his job.

And these factors, combined with his new awareness of the fortunes found in energy drinks, brought him to TC Pharmaceutical Industries, the Thai manufacturers of a drink called Krating Dang, or in English, Red Bull.

Sensing opportunity, the Austrians struck a deal with the Thai manufacturer.

They'd each invest $500,000 into a new company, Red Bull GmbH, that'd reformulate and rebrand the product into one targeted at Western consumers.

Krating Dang, like most Asian energy drinks at the time, was sold in small glass bottles and was intended to be consumed more as a shot.

Mateschitz spent the next few years reformulating this baseline into a drink intended more for sipping.

He wanted something that tasted less like medicine and more like soda.

So he added carbonation, reduced sweetness, introduced a touch of acidity, and

expanded the default format into larger 250 milliliter cans.

Come April 1, 1987, after a prolonged process gaining regulatory approval to sell the novel product, Red Bull hit store shelves in its new home country of Austria.

It was initially positioned as premium and elusivesold for far more than the average soda.

Mateschitz went around and convinced bars one by one to stock it.

Its novelty intrigues people, and bartenders would push it as a mixer to work with vodka or Jaeger.

Mateschitz also guerrilla marketed it in the places and contexts he thought Red Bull would be most useful.

He'd hand it out for free at university campuses during exam weeks, businesses that late night taxi drivers frequented anywhere where people would struggle, yet want to stay awake.

All his efforts were compounded by strong word of mouth spread throughout the small country.

The new product was splashy and it made for a good topic of conversation.

In its first full year of operations, Red Bull sold 1.2 million cans.

Then it followed that up with 1.7 the next and quickly reached profitability, the hurdle every entrepreneur dreams of.

But after jumping over this first hurdle, Mateschitz only saw the next one.

Red Bull had to expand in his mind, but he simply just wasn't allowed to.

They were struggling to gain regulatory approval in any viable market, as national regulators were wary to approve a product with taurine in particulara food additive that lacked any long term consumption research, fueling legitimate fears that frequent consumption of it could be harmful.

Hungary and Slovenia would allow it, and the company did expand there.

But the wealthier larger markets to the west just wouldn't budge.

But then Mateschitz just simply got incredibly lucky.

On January 1, 1993, the European Union launched its single market.

Now all member states would remove almost all trade barriers, meaning their economies would effectively morph into one.

As part of this, every product approved for sale in one EU country was usually, with some caveats, approved for sale in all EU member countries.

The caveats did slow launch in many of these markets.

But as they were progressively sorted out, the France was the last EU country to allow the company in in 2008.

But all in all, Red Bull's prevalence expanded massively in a short period of time following the 1993 liberalization.

Now they just needed to convince people to buy it.

Mateschitz had to find a way to get a lot of people to hear about Red Bull.

But he had already actually come up with the answer.

The Austrian Grand Prix was on at the Oosterreichring, now known as the Red Bull ring.

Austrian driver Gerard Berger was in the midst of his second season, picking up decent points in the midfield, when a random guy, Dietrich Masterschitz, walked up to him and pitched his novel business idea to sell caffeinated soda to the masses.

Mateschitz offered $10,000 to Berger in exchange for carrying his drink around in the paddock using a branded water bottle and some other small obligations.

And even though this was a borderline offensively small sum for a Formula one sponsorship deal, he Berger genuinely needed the money.

So he agreed with this, he became the first of thousands upon thousands of storied Red Bull athletes.

These images were how Red Bull got its message out to the world.

It was that this is a high performance athlete.

Their job is to be the best at whatever they do, and