Australian students were handed ‘wellbeing shots’ made by a subsidiary of British American Tobacco. Experts fear a new front in the health wars

Photograph: Natasha May

As students at the University of Sydney prepared for their end-of-year exams in late 2023, a trio in brightly coloured jumpsuits pulled up to the campus in a van, armed with tiny bottles labelled “Ryde wellbeing shots”.

They approached students as they studied on the campus lawns, asking them to share their strategies to cope with exam stress and filming their responses for TikTok.

The students gave sensible answers – healthy diet, exercise, meditation, taking breaks between periods of study. The “Ryde Response Team” handed out bottles of Ryde, which contains ingredients such as taurine, lemon balm and ginseng extract, telling the students that one 60ml shot could “revive” them and give them focus.

“It’s a really sweet flavour, tastes healthy,” one student said, while another remarked that “it’s like a lolly”.

“You’re gonna do great,” a member of the Ryde team told a student after they downed a shot.

The Ryde website says the product, available in Australia and Canada, is made “by a team of smart people” to “make wellbeing easy”. The brand is owned by the Water Street Collective, “a group of nonconformists in a corporate world”, the company’s LinkedIn page says.

What was not revealed to students, and is not on the Ryde product label, is that the Water Street Collective is a wholly owned subsidiary of British American Tobacco.

The Ryde website only once mentions British American Tobacco, and then only as BAT.

A University of Sydney spokesperson told Guardian Australia the institution was unaware of the Ryde visit or the TikTok video, but that the University of Sydney Union (USU) had been approached by a marketing agency to provide students with free samples.

She said the USU had no idea the brand was owned by a tobacco company, nor did the USU give permission for the brand to film on campus.

“The USU is now working with the agency to have the University’s brand removed from any marketing content,” she said, and there would be no more interactions with the brand in future.

On Friday the videos were “unavailable” on TikTok.

Ryde samples have also been given out recently at Oz Comic-Con, and its advertisements have appeared at train stations and on buses in Sydney.

Christina Watts, a tobacco control researcher with the Daffodil Centre (a joint venture with Cancer Council NSW and the University of Sydney), said strong regulation had made it difficult to market cigarette and vaping products in Australia, but wellness marketing was “very lightly regulated”.

“The tobacco industry can use its decades of experience to push wellness products to a young target audience,” she said.

“On first glance it’s tempting to think the industry is moving away from deadly and addictive products. But these startup wellness brands and products do not replace tobacco profits, but serve only to expand revenue sources. These products are a thin veneer on what remains a deadly industry.”

A spokesperson from the Water Street Collective told Guardian Australia that it is “incorporated in the UK as a wholly owned subsidiary of BAT,” but operates independently. Its “marketing practices and product packaging abide by all applicable laws and regulations,” they said.

Dee Madigan, the owner of the creative advertising agency Campaign Edge, said companies were not obliged to disclose their parent company on products or advertisements.

“But in an era where people are making more ethical decisions in terms of how they shop, it’s whether there should be an obligation or not,” Madigan said. “People might choose to buy another product if they knew that the money they were spending might go towards the marketing in third-world countries of tobacco.”

Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy with the University of California, and her colleagues have revealed how tobacco companies used their knowledge o artificial flavours, colours and marketing to expand into selling sugary drinks targeted at children.

Their work, published in the British Medical Journal in 2019, showed how the two largest US tobacco conglomerates, RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris, acquired soft drink brands from the 1960s and developed leading children’s drink brands over subsequent decades.

The brands were eventually sold to globalised food and drink corporations.

The energy drink shot is the only Ryde product available in Australia, but the Water Street Collective has also registered trademarks for dietary and nutritional supplements such as cannabidiol oil (CBD) products and chewing gums, including those containing hemp and hemp derivatives.

Overseas, BAT has launched a range of CBD, vitamin and other productsthrough its corporate venture capital arm, Btomorrow Ventures (BTV).

Schmidt said any connection between tobacco and wellness brands was “essentially ‘healthwashing’ – attaching a health halo or harm reduction lens to the brand”.

She said tobacco companies were focusing on CBD products in the US, where almost 40 states have legalised cannabis to varying degrees, including through CBD confectionery.

“Linking tobacco and cannabis to what consumers see as more benign products such as candy helps to normalise these products with consumers by placing them on a par with familiar consumer goods,” she said.

Becky Freeman, a professor of public health at the University of Sydney, said consumers had a right to know what they were buying, who they were buying it from and how they were being targeted.

She described the wellness industry, worth trillions of dollars globally, as full of “baseless health claims and expensive products that do little more than empty your wallet”.

“These products often boil down to little more than clever and aspirational marketing,” she said.

“And, as has been proven over decades of success, the tobacco industry are master marketers. In this light, it’s unsurprising the tobacco industry in trying to get a piece of the lucrative wellness market.”