Zest Tea

Good morning hunters! 
My name is James Fayal and I’m the founder of Zest Tea. Thanks @chrismessina for hunting us! After a years worth of work in the lab and countless iterations of both flavors and design, I’m amped to be showcasing our new line of sparkling energy teas to the PH community. 
The Zest team has worked their tails off building a product that tastes amazing and is beautiful in both design and function. All of the blends have as much caffeine as a strong cup of coffee, but also contain ~100 mg of L-Theanine, an amino acid shown to have a synergistic relationship with caffeine and produce a more steady alertness that lasts for hours. Best of all, we’ve crafted these amazing products with only 25 - 35 calories and 5 grams of sugar per can. The idea for Zest came up while I was working as a VC analyst. I was an avid tea drinker, but also working extremely long hours. Tea would help me get through the first 6 or 8 hours of the day, but then I’d realize I needed something with a little more kick and switch over to whatever awful coffee or heavily sweetened energy drink was readily available in the office. Rather than continuing to compromise I developed a healthy tea-based energy product. The first version was a line of bagged teas (named Best New Product at the World Tea Expo) that came out in 2014 after a small crowdfunding campaign ($9,955 raised). Since then we have grown to selling over a million dollars of product online and scaled from 0 to 700+ retail stores this year alone (with thousands in the pipeline for next year). 
This is our first new product since our launch, so we’re excited about the next chapter of the Zest Tea saga and we’re glad to have the PH community along for the ride! We’d love feedback on the product, design, website, or anything else. Feel free to comment here or email me directly at James@zesttea.com. P.S. on top of the pre-sale discount we have a PH special for an additional 10% off with code: PRODUCTHUNT

I'm a big fan of the first product, and pleasantly surprised/excited by this new product line. The 25 calories / 5 g sugar per can is great - I'm not a fan of sugary drinks. Just bought a pack and excited to try it! Question: Is L-Theanine something that was not in the original product? If so, how did you decide / figure out that it was right for these sparkling teas?

Big fan of the original Zest products. I noticed that the flavors for the new products are slightly different than the hot tea flavors. What were your thoughts behind this decision?