The brewmaster behind White Claw’s explosive rise has teamed up with his son to take on a new challenge: fixing an energy drink market that’s long catered to teenagers, while ignoring the adults who like to buy them. With decades of beverage innovation under his belt, Tony Vieira partnered with his son Christian—a 37-year-old professional and new father—to launch mōcean, a functional energy drink designed with grown-ups in mind.
The idea was born during a 2 a.m. hospital gift shop run, when Christian realized every can on the shelf looked like it belonged in a dorm room, not next to a diaper bag. That moment sparked a father-son collaboration that blends Tony’s technical brewing expertise with Christian’s real-world insight into what today’s consumers actually need: clean energy, transparent ingredients, and no crash.
Unlike most energy drinks packed with taurine and aggressive branding, mōcean skips the hype in favor of Eastern botanicals like Shiso, plus functional ingredients like Echinacea, Elderberry, Zinc, and Ashwagandha. With recent studies linking taurine to accelerated blood cancer growth, the Vieiras saw an urgent need for better options—especially for professionals, parents, and creators trying to navigate real life, not extreme sports.
In this exclusive conversation with The Manual, Tony and Christian Vieira share how family moments, wellness traditions, and frustration with a stagnant industry inspired them to rethink what energy drinks could be. The result? A new wave of steady, functional energy designed to make life just a little easier.
Interview with Tony and Christian Vieira
The Manual: With your extensive background from Anheuser-Busch’s elite training and leading White Claw’s rise, what key lessons from hard seltzer innovation did you apply to reformulating energy drinks for adult consumers?
Tony Vieira: At both Anheuser-Busch and Mark Anthony, I witnessed how focusing on quality and flavor translated into superior customer experiences and loyalty. White Claw’s unprecedented growth rate was driven by having the right product at the right time. We weren’t the first seltzer, so we didn’t have the first mover advantage, but we had a superior product, and the consumers validated that our work, creating the world’s cleanest base, coupled with our talented Product Development Team, is what the market not only needed but demanded.
Of course, the principal architect behind White Claw was Anthony von Mandl, the owner and Chairman at Mark Anthony, who is a category disruptor with savvy business instincts. It didn’t hurt that Anthony has one of the best palates in the beverage industry, giving us what seemed like an unfair formulation advantage.
The Manual: Mōcean swaps taurine for ingredients like Echinacea, Elderberry, and Shiso—how did your late Filipino mother’s Eastern wellness traditions influence the formula, and what specific benefits does Shiso bring that set it apart from typical U.S. energy drinks?
Tony Vieira: This is a family business, so many of the decisions were made “around the dinner table.” In fact, when we began this discussion, we were fully immersed in the COVID pandemic; consequently, we knew we wanted to focus on wellness and immunity, which led me to share stories about my late mother Corina’s Eastern approach to wellness. That’s where things like Echinacea, Elderberry, Ginseng, and Zinc come from, but the Shiso was inspired by a close Japanese friend who shared its adaptogenic benefits with me. Benefits include anti-inflammatory support and immunogenic properties. Shiso is even known to help settle gastrointestinal issues.
We had found our ‘hero’ ingredient, and in a most fitting tip of the hat to my mom, it was based again in Eastern medicine.
On the other hand, Taurine never made the cut in our formulations because we didn’t see the functional benefit. This decision seems prescient today, given the recent study published in the journal Nature linking Taurine in energy drinks to accelerated blood cancer growth rates. Well over 90% of the energy
The Manual: Health studies linking taurine to blood cancer risks are alarming—how do you educate consumers on these concerns while promoting mōcean’s transparent ingredients like Ginseng, Zinc, Magnesium, and Ashwagandha?
Christian Vieira: Energy drinks love to hide behind ‘proprietary blends’ and mystery ingredients nobody bothers to question—until you read a study linking taurine to blood cancer and suddenly that neon tall boy doesn’t feel so harmless. We’re not fearmongering, but we are telling the truth: if you’re an adult who reads labels, you deserve to know what you’re putting in your body. That’s why we ditched the industry’s sketchy shortcuts and built around transparency. Our formula leans on ingredients with real benefits—Ginseng for focus, Ashwagandha for stress, Zinc and Magnesium for immune support. It’s energy that respects your body instead of testing its limits. Because grown-ups don’t want to gamble on lab sludge—we want something that works and that we’re not embarrassed to drink at work or on the sidelines of a 6 v 6 kids’ soccer game.
The Manual: Tony, as a credentialed brewmaster with an MBA, how do you balance scientific precision in brewing with the “Eastern botanical wisdom” you mention, and what challenges arose in creating sustained energy without the crash associated with traditional formulas?
Tony Vieira: Energy drink jitters are a real thing. It’s caused by excessive caffeine and other hidden stimulants, coupled with enough sugar to put you into a diabetic coma.
On the other hand, mōcean is low carb, 10 calories, and a caffeine level that is roughly equivalent to 1.5 cups of coffee, yet packed with adaptogens that support everyday life and won’t break ketosis.
When I formulated mōcean, I took a blue ocean approach and built the ingredients based on the functional benefits we wanted to offer our customers. I wasn’t going to simply photocopy the ingredient panel from existing brands. I wanted to formulate responsibly using ingredients that served a real purpose in the functional context we were pursuing.
Overdosing on any ingredient doesn’t make sense, nor does including ingredients just for label claims—it’s expensive and wasteful. I like to say we have a calibrated line of sight with our consumers. We never want our product to look like a pharmaceutical billboard.
The Manual: The functional beverages market is projected to reach nearly $278 billion by 2033—where do you see mōcean fitting into this growth?
Tony Vieira: After 30-plus years, the energy drink market that exists today continues to primarily target males/boys 16-24 years old.
We call it the Peter Pan Market, because it’s the market that never grew up.
With mōcean, we want to be the adults in the room. As such, our positioning complements the existing market, meaning that mōcean actually expands the consumer base for energy drinks. Therefore, we are incremental to the market—inviting new customers into the fold while giving the traditional consumer base something to move on to, rather than aging out of the category.
The Manual: How has your complementary dynamic—Tony’s three decades of brewing expertise and Christian’s consumer insights—fueled mōcean’s development, and what family moments beyond the hospital visit inspired this collaboration?
Christian Vieira: My dad’s been brewing almost longer than I’ve been alive—he built his career crafting drinks millions of people love. I grew up watching that, and now as a dad myself, I get to bring the consumer perspective: what it feels like to be in your 30s or 40s, trying to raise kids, manage a career, and still want a product that respects you. Mōcean is really the overlap of those two worlds—his technical expertise and my lived experience. Some of our best inspiration has come in the most ordinary family moments: me texting him a can idea while wrangling my daughters off the monkey bars, or us talking go-to-market strategy while I furiously scrub spaghetti sauce out of a unicorn stuffie.
It’s less about boardroom strategy and more about building something meaningful as a father and son, for other families like ours. We’ve built this living on opposite coasts, both chipping away at this idea with what little free time we have had over the last 4 years. Truthfully, trying to build-then-launch a brand while my ‘day-job’ is actually Mr. Mom for a 5-year-old, 2.5-year-old, and 3-month-old with colic is truly, exhaustingly hard. But doing it with my dad makes it a lot easier. And my wife could not be more supportive of mōcean and my desire to build something. Seriously, she’s like the glue holding the family together. I’m more like the glitter – technically part of the project, but mostly just making a mess and hard to vacuum out of the carpet.
The Manual: That 2 a.m. hospital gift shop moment sounds pivotal—how did becoming a father shift your view of energy drinks, and what “wake-up call” convinced you the industry was ignoring professionals like yourself?
Christian Vieira: At 2 a.m. in a hospital gift shop, I had my first ‘dad moment’ — and it wasn’t changing diapers. It was realizing the entire energy drink aisle looked like it was designed by 14-year-olds snorting sugar. Meanwhile, grown-ups like me — people with careers, mortgages, and a kid literally on the way — were completely ignored. That was the wake-up call: if I had to put on grown-up pants, it seemed time for energy drinks to do the same. Selfishly, I’m making this product as much for me as anyone because it’s actually a product I want.
The Manual: As a 37-year-old millennial professional, how did your real-world perspective shape mōcean’s mature packaging, messaging, and focus on steady energy for parents and creators rather than extreme sports vibes?
Christian Vieira: I’m 37, which basically means I’ve got one foot in a Zoom meeting and the other stepping on a LEGO my kid left on the floor. I don’t need a drink that screams ‘jump off a cliff’ or ‘go viral doing parkour.’ I need something that gets me through spreadsheets, deadlines, and 3 a.m. baby wake-ups without looking like I borrowed it from a teenager’s gaming desk. That’s why mōcean looks and talks like an adult — it’s clean, confident, and doesn’t need neon skulls to prove itself. Our whole vibe is about steady energy for real life: parents, professionals, creators—the people who actually keep the world running while everyone else is chugging liquified cotton candy. It’s why our slogan is “Make adulting easier.”
The Manual: mōcean aims to make “adulting easier” with clean, immunity-supporting energy—how does it address the gap for high-spending adults in a market dominated by “questionable ingredients” and aggressive ads?
Christian Vieira: We’re not the first to say, let’s dial back the testosterone on these energy drinks. There are now options that are fitness-focused or targeted to women, for example, and that’s great. But every energy drink you know has some form of lifestyle associated with it. We said, ‘We don’t care about the style, let’s just focus on life. We want our
The Manual: How do you plan to build authenticity and loyalty among 25-40-year-olds who prioritize quality and label-reading over hype?
Christian Vieira: Let’s be honest, Millennials don’t buy hype anymore; we read the fine print. We’re the generation that checks labels before we check out, and we can smell a gimmick from three aisles away. Amazon gets us in front of people fast, but the real loyalty comes from how we show up: transparent ingredients, steady energy, and branding that doesn’t look like it belongs at an X Games afterparty. We’re speaking to parents running on 4 hours of sleep, creators grinding on projects past midnight, and professionals trying to make it through another endless Zoom block. For them, authenticity means a drink that actually respects their lifestyle — grown-up energy for grown-up responsibilities. Amazon is an amazing resource for startup brands like us that don’t have retail distribution, and we hope that the sales story we build on that platform will allow us to really turn heads with retailers. We’re biased, so of course we believe we’ve built something great, but we know we need to prove ourselves a bit and get some skin in the game.
The Manual: What advice would you give readers seeking functional drinks that align with a sophisticated, wellness-driven lifestyle?
Christian Vieira: Stop settling for drinks that look like they belong in a college dorm mini-fridge. If you’re in your 30s or 40s, chances are you care more about your immune system, your focus, and how you feel at 3 p.m. than about chugging something called ‘Nuclear Unicorn.’ The functional drink space is finally maturing, and the best move is to choose brands that are transparent about their ingredients and designed with real life in mind. That means clean formulas, benefits you can actually feel, and packaging you’re not embarrassed to put on your desk at work or bring to a PTA meeting. Wellness-driven adults don’t need louder flavors or scarier caffeine levels—we need
