Onest was created with a pretty simple idea: energy drinks could be better. Better ingredients, better tasting and, most importantly, a lot more honest about what actually goes into the can. Founder Maya Bedeau came to the idea after spending around eight years working in drinks marketing, where she saw first-hand how confusing the language around “natural”, “healthy” and “clean” products could become. After leaving her job in 2024, she decided to create the kind of energy drink she had always wanted to find herself: something refreshing enough to drink regularly, with ingredients you can actually understand and without the huge hit of sugar or artificial extras associated with traditional energy drinks.
Onest is made in the UK and combines 80mg of natural caffeine sourced from coffee beans with magnesium citrate and B vitamins. Each 250ml can contains just 4g of sugar and fewer than 30 calories, with no artificial ingredients or chemical preservatives. Rather than trying to create the strongest possible energy hit, Onest is designed to give you a more everyday kind of boost, whether that’s before a workout, halfway through a long day at work, on the way to a meeting or during one of those mornings when another coffee simply isn’t going to solve the problem.
Taste has also been a big part of the brand from the beginning. Instead of the overly sweet flavours often associated with energy drinks, Onest has gone for lighter, fruit-led combinations including Apple Berry, Tropical Peach and Mango Lime. The drinks are vegan-friendly, gluten-free and made using a recipe developed from scratch, with every ingredient chosen for a reason.
It’s a young independent brand, but one that has already started making an impression. In 2026, Onest was named Best Sports/Energy Drink at the UK Soft Drinks Awards, competing against much larger and more established names in the category. At its heart, though, Onest remains true to the original idea Maya started with: make an energy drink that tastes good, does its job and doesn’t make people decipher the back of the can to understand what they’re drinking.
