Arabella Byrne
It’s no secret that the royals struggle with relatability. But every so often, they stumble upon a PR masterstroke, almost always by accident – think Queen Camilla’s not-so-secret fag habit, for example. Last week, a carton of Vita Coco coconut water (£2.60 from Tesco or, more likely, £3 from Waitrose) was spotted in the door of the Princess of Wales’s Audi as she dismounted to attend the wedding of Harriet Sperling to Peter Phillips. Not a warm, squashed bottle of garage water that may have been sitting in the footwell of the car with a dog, but coconut water. Water, maxxed; life, hacked.
Naturally, theories proliferate as to why the future queen would be glugging from what is widely known to be a hangover cure. Sorry, an ‘electrolyte-infused feel-good sports drink’. Vita Coco (approximately 95 per cent water and, presumably, 5 per cent coconut) markets itself as ‘a hydrating drink that can help you hit your daily hydration standards’.
But its website, a carousel of feel-good philanthropy adorned with pictures of labourers in coconut fields, seems to suggest far more. Vita Coco presents me with a series of playschool pictures in its signature bright blue and faintly comic font, and I’m in the mood to believe them all. It is ‘feel good fuel’ but also ‘backed by athletes as nature’s sports drink’; it will ‘take me to the tropics’, make my ‘taste buds happy’ and help ‘before and after a night out’.
