During a recent WaterADE trial, a care home shared a piece of feedback that really stood out. Residents had been praising the flavours, and several had even started asking for WaterADE by name.
At first, it sounds like a fairly small thing. In a care setting, it really isn’t. Residents don’t usually ask for hydration solutions. They don’t ask for vitamin-enriched drinks. They don’t ask for sugar-free alternatives. They ask for drinks they enjoy.
That single piece of feedback says more than pages of product information ever could.
The difference between drinking something and enjoying it
Every care home has all of the usual drinks on offer: tea, coffee, juice, squash, water. The challenge has never been making drinks available; it’s been finding drinks residents genuinely want to come back to.
Anyone working in care knows how personal those preferences can be. One resident loves orange, another insists on blackcurrant, and someone else changes their favourite every other week.
Taste matters because enjoyment matters. A resident may finish a drink because it has been offered, but a resident who asks for it again is telling you something completely different.
“People don’t ask for another glass unless they enjoyed the first one.”
Sometimes the simplest feedback is the most valuable
Care homes gather a huge amount of information every day: hydration is monitored, nutrition is reviewed, and fluid intake is recorded. All of it helps build a picture of resident wellbeing. Then occasionally somebody says something so simple it cuts through all the paperwork.
“Can I have that WaterADE again?”
You won’t find that on a spreadsheet, you can’t put it into a chart, what you can do is recognise it for what it is: a resident choosing a drink because they genuinely like it.
Why WaterADE was developed
From the beginning, the aim was straightforward: to create a drink residents would enjoy enough to drink regularly, while giving care homes something more than traditional juice or squash.
The result was WaterADE. A sugar-free drink enriched with Vitamins A, D, E, and C, developed specifically for older people in care settings and available at a cost comparable to many of the drinks already being served. Most importantly, residents seem to enjoy it.
A compliment that carries more weight than most
When residents ask for WaterADE by name, they are not thinking about vitamin content, or nutritional value, or ingredients lists. They simply know they enjoyed the drink and would like another one. For a hydration drink, there is no stronger endorsement than that.
The reason care homes offer drinks throughout the day is to encourage hydration. Anything that makes them more likely to reach for another glass is helping make that job easier.
“The best hydration drink is not the one residents should drink. It’s the one they want to drink.”
Want to find out why residents are asking for WaterADE by name?
If you’d like to learn how WaterADE is helping care homes support hydration with sugar-free, vitamin-enriched drinks that residents genuinely enjoy, we’d love to chat.