Gatorade Called to Quench Soldiers’ Desert-Size Thirst

It started out as just another hot, lazy summer and workers at the Quaker Oats plant figured the Gatorade they were making was for weekend warriors on tennis courts and softball diamonds.

Now that it’s quenching the thirst of full-time soldiers in the Middle East, work doesn’t seem so dull anymore.

Thousands of gallons of the drink produced at the Newport plant are bound for the Persian Gulf, and more is on the way.

“This started about two weeks ago when we received a rush order for two truckloads of 12-ounce Gatorade,” plant manager Bill Wolford said Friday.

Through some overtime effort, the plant got the order of about 500,000 quart bottles completed in time for delivery to Camp LeJeune, N. C., and an airlift to the Middle East.

Since then, the plant has delivered about 23,000 cases of the beverage to Charleston, S. C., where it was loaded onto container ships headed to Saudi Arabia.

The plant is working on another order of 20,000 cases of liquid Gatorade for the military and is expecting potentially larger orders for the drink in powdered form.

In Newport, a town of 8,000, there’s a sense of mission at the 600-employee Quaker Oats plant.

“The folks here at the plant are very much aware of where this product is going and we are keeping them abreast,” Wolford said.

“We have several employees in the plant that have children in the armed service and also in the reserves,” general supervisor Thom Pasinger said.

“It’s a small town, so everybody knows where the shipments are going,” said warehouse manager Mel Wadlinger said. “The guys in the warehouse are proud. We’ve got a lot of veterans.”

Gatorade was developed for athletes in the 1960s to prevent dehydration and heat illnesses. It didn’t get its first taste of military action until recently in Panama.

The military’s demand isn’t expected to cause a shortage of the product in the domestic market, said Peter Vitulli, president of Quaker’s grocery specialties division, at corporate headquarters in Chicago.