Walk down the beverage aisle of just about any major retailer right now and the geography has shifted. Shelf space once reserved for sugary soft drinks and beer is shrinking. In its place: an expanding wellness section, stocked with functional drinks promising electrolytes, adaptogens, and ingredient labels people actually read.
Benjamin Schubert, CEO of Varon Corp (OTCID:OZSC), has built his company's entire strategy around the belief that shift is permanent.
The beverage holding company started in 2021 in the spirits business. Within a few years, it had pivoted toward functional beverages, layered in a sports-drink brand built around NBA player partnerships, and begun working through a transaction with Ozop Energy Solutions Inc that would bring its operations toward the public markets. The company now describes its mission as pioneering "elevated wellness," a phrase that shows up often enough in its materials to function as a mission statement.
The functional beverage arms, Varon Wellness and Varon USA, now command most of the company's attention, a shift Schubert ties to retail real estate. "We've seen major buyers command major departments, whether that be beer departments or soft drink departments, literally losing budget in real time to the wellness sections of these retailers," he said. "Functional ingredients and functional beverages are taking over. They are the future. They're here to stay.”
The numbers back it up: the global functional beverage market is on track to grow from roughly $164 billion in 2026 to nearly $240 billion by 2031, with North America already accounting for almost half of that market. Sports drinks, Ballislife Drink's specific category, are growing faster than the segment average.
It's a pivot he frames in personal terms too. After two decades building fashion brands, Schubert described the transition as both challenging and rewarding, requiring a hands-on approach to scaling brands from concept to retail shelf. "I found myself in a warehouse with a clipboard, sometimes driving a forklift, moving cases and helping get products out the door," he said. "It's probably not something I would have imagined myself taking so much pride in, but I genuinely believe we're building something meaningful."
Building on existing communities
The clearest articulation of Varon's strategy is that a community's existing loyalty can be transferred onto a beverage with minimal friction, simply by partnering with the organizations and individuals who already hold that community's trust.
"The number one thing we've done differently is flip the traditional model on its head," Schubert said. "Instead of creating a product first and then trying to build a community around it, we've partnered with communities that already have deep engagement and built products designed specifically for them."
He's careful to distinguish the structure from a standard licensing deal. "We structure them as joint ventures and strategic partnerships," he said. "Unlike a traditional licensing agreement, where you take someone's intellectual property and hope it resonates, we have the ongoing support of the entire organization behind the brand."
Ballislife is a leading basketball lifestyle media platform in the US, reaching millions of fans through digital content, live events, and athlete partnerships, and has accumulated more than 5.8 billion video views across its channels.
HYDRO, the flagship sports hydration drink of Ballislife Drink Inc., Varon USA’s joint venture with Ballislife Inc., tests this idea. Rather than formulate a product and search for an audience, Varon USA partnered directly with Ballislife Inc. and NBA players, structuring the relationships to include equity stakes rather than standard sponsorship deals. "We really have top tier athletes that chose to be a part of this,” Schubert said. “These guys chose to partner at an equity level with us, as opposed to accepting just sponsorship deals from other well-established, larger brands. It says a lot for the brand."
The Southern California rollout, which began in June 2026 and placed HYDRO in close to 160 retail locations, leans on that structure directly, tied to two-time NBA All-Star point guard Darius Garland, who plays for the LA Clippers and joined Ballislife Drink as both a brand ambassador and equity partner.
“Southern California is one of the most important basketball markets in the country, and it’s a market we’ve been working toward for some time,” said Schubert. “Basketball culture, fitness, and daily hydration all intersect here, and that’s exactly where our product fits.”
Schubert's pricing thesis adds another layer. Basketball fans, he argues, already spend heavily on merchandise tied to teams and players they follow, and the comparison is deliberate. "When you start talking about a $2.99 beverage to hold the brand in your hand and be associated with that particular brand, that's when we're going to see the growth opportunities really pick up," he said.
The company's other functional beverage brand, Bucked Up Canada, offers a more conventional retail story. Varon Wellness recently secured a commitment worth more than C$500,000 from a national warehouse retailer, anchored by a new mini-can format aimed at high-volume, multi-unit retail environments. "This order is important because it's not just about volume, it's about expanding how the brand shows up in the market," Schubert said. "The mini can format gives us a new way to drive multi-unit purchasing in high-traffic environments, and that opens the door to broader retail applications beyond this initial rollout."
The company is projecting roughly C$2 million in Bucked Up sales by the end of 2026 and has expanded the brand into protein products in Canada.
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The structure behind the brands
Varon's strategy isn't limited to individual products. Schubert describes the company functionally as a platform built around multiple operating divisions and strategic partnerships, with certain initiatives developed through private companies alongside strategic partners.
That structure is becoming more concrete through Varon's transaction with Ozop Energy Solutions Inc. (OTC: OZSC), which is expected to wrap up in 2026. The deal gives Varon a framework to keep building and scaling its various brands while creating opportunities to unlock value over time. Rather than growing a single operating company, Varon is positioning itself as a platform that can support multiple ventures across different sectors and stages of development at once. As individual businesses mature and demonstrate traction, the company sees room to advance them further through broader market exposure and access to capital, combining the agility of private companies with the capital access that comes with being public.
The big win
Strip away the athlete partnerships and the joint-venture structure, and Varon's wager is really about retail real estate. Schubert describes buyers pulling shelf space from beer and soft drinks in real time and reallocating it to wellness, a shift that shows no signs of slowing. Companies positioned early in that reallocation, with distribution already in place and products already on shelves, stand to capture an outsized share of a category still very much in its growth phase.
Varon has spent the past year putting exactly that foundation in place: anchor accounts with major retailers and brand partnerships designed to convert existing loyalty into shelf space and velocity rather than build it from scratch. The next test is execution at scale, but the company enters that phase with real distribution, real retail commitments, and a category tailwind behind it. If the wellness shift holds, as Schubert is confident it will, Varon is positioned to be one of the brands that defines it rather than one that simply rides along.