How MTE (And Reggie Watts) Are Rewriting The Rules Of The $21 Billion Energy Drink Industry
Huckleberry Açaí: MTE's newest flavor, born from a partnership with musician and creative Reggie Watts. | More than Energy
The TV channels used to go dark at midnight. Just snow. Then silence. That was 1989. Today, there are 800 channels pumping content around the clock, a phone in every pocket delivering a permanent flood of notifications, and a culture that spent decades treating sleeplessness as a badge of honor. The human nervous system was not designed for any of this. And the energy drink — born in that same late-80s moment, loaded with caffeine and artifice — hasn't changed a single formula since.
Jeff Boyd noticed. And then he decided to do something about it.
Boyd came to wellness the way most entrepreneurs come to their best ideas — through personal frustration. After a career in finance and a successful exit from a shipping company in 2019, he found himself at a crossroads. The answer wasn’t obvious at first. A friend offered him a stake in a tequila brand with premium seven-year agave. He was tempted. But he kept circling back to the same question: Is this actually helping anyone? It wasn’t. So he kept looking — this time inward, at his own life. The stress that wouldn't quit. The sleep that never quite restored. “I tried everything,” he says. “Nothing hit.” That gap became More Than Energy, or MTE.
Huckleberry Açaí: MTE's newest flavor, born from a partnership with musician and creative Reggie Watts. | More than Energy
Building the Flywheel
The design brief sounds, at first, like a contradiction. More energy. Better sleep. Less anxiety. Sharper focus. These things don't usually live in the same product. Caffeine buys the lift but charges it to your sleep. Adaptogens calm but rarely energize. The industry has spent four decades picking a side.
Boyd and his team — biochemists, Ayurvedic formulators, nutritionists — spent nearly two years refusing to. The result is a powder engineered around what he calls a flywheel of wellness: ingredients that don’t just work, but work together. Saffron and ashwagandha support deeper sleep not by sedating, but by stripping out the stress that prevents real recovery. “It helps you be more restful when you are asleep,” Boyd explains. “It doesn’t help you fall asleep.” The distinction matters. Four grams of fiber anchors the gut. Clarity and mood draw from both modern nutrition science and Ayurvedic tradition.
His analogy is a phone battery. Most people go to bed at one percent, spend all night barely clawing back to full, and burn through it again by noon. MTE raises the baseline — ten percent, then twenty — so the nightly charge gets shorter and the daily energy goes further. “I wanted to be the opposite of that every day,” he says. “Feel great, be energized, ready to show up — and then be able to do something with it.”
MTE doesn’t pick a fight with coffee. “A supplement doesn’t replace coffee,” Boyd says. “It either makes it better or something altogether different.” This isn't a wellness lecture in a can. It's a daily ritual designed to make everything else work better.
The Cult and the Collaboration
The repeat purchase rate sits at nearly fifty percent — remarkable in a category built on impulse. Users describe being caught off guard by what energy can feel like without a cost attached. Some have swapped out alcohol entirely, getting the mood lift and the social ease without the morning bill. What comes up most is the absence of the downside. Focus without the jitter. Energy without the debt.
That reputation travels. It's how Reggie Watts — comedian, musician, bandleader of The Late Late Show, one of the most genuinely original creative minds working today — ended up in the MTE story. He tried it. Same reaction Boyd hears constantly, except this time it came with a collaboration offer.
In Watts’ own words, the experience landed fast. “When I first tried MTE, I had no idea what to expect, but that first experience, I was genuinely surprised at how elevated my mood felt, how ready I was to actually start my day. No spike, no crash, just this calm momentum.” He now takes it an hour before coffee, carries extra packs to shows, hands them to friends. “The way they light up when they try it, stay lit up — that’s wild.” Of the ingredients, saffron was the only unfamiliar one. “Honestly, that’s been a welcome discovery. I don't get stoked about products very often. When I do, it means something.”
The result is MTE's fourth flavor, now available: Huckleberry Açaí — Watts' choice, a nod to his home state of Montana. Boyd on why it works: “Anybody who knows Reggie knows he does things differently. Anybody who knows MTE knows we do too. We built a better way to energize and feel great, and Reggie brings that same originality and feel-good spirit into everything he creates. Throw in the fact that huckleberry and açaí are as interesting together as they are delicious, and this felt like the perfect partnership.”
The Shift
MTE is currently direct-to-consumer, available in roughly four to five hundred retail locations, with a deliberate push into retail planned for this year. The DTC model was a strategic choice, not a limitation. In a category where consumers have been conditioned to expect one thing for forty years, Boyd believes the story has to be told directly. “This is how energy is done now,” he says. “This is what Poppi did to soda.” Red Bull isn't going anywhere. Neither is coffee. But there is a better way — and the question is whether the market is ready to see it.
He thinks it is. Not a new category, exactly. A shift. Energy without the guilt, without the cost, without the crash. Energy that feels good. The idea that those words might one day seem obvious is, perhaps, the whole point.
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