Here’s What You Should Know About Gac, The Next Big Superfruit You Haven’t Heard Of

If you’ve ever read an interview with a celebrity, you are likely familiar with the old adage that the secret to good skin, health, and all-around prosperity in every facet of life is drinking water — and lots of it. Water is hydrating and refreshing, but sometimes, it can get boring. Thankfully, the supermarket beverages aisle is chock full of new health drinks and alternatives you can turn to when plain old H2O just isn’t cutting it. Enter Gấc, a line of superfruit-infused still and sparkling drinks that claim to offer a host of health benefits.

The superfruit in question is gac, a spiky, orange-red melon that grows throughout Southeast Asia and Northeastern Australia. The orange-y color speaks to the fruit’s high amount of beta carotene, a pigment that’s also found in fruits and veggies like carrots, cantaloupes, and sweet potatoes. Atlas Obscura describes gac’s taste as “almost entirely flavorless and has only a faint, fatty vegetable taste.” While the fruit has been well-known in the region where it naturally grows, it's now easier than ever to try the fruit in new forms — like waters with added nutritional boosts.

The Gấc line of drinks are a product of company GacLife, whose founder Yin Zou stumbled upon the fruit during a business trip to Vietnam. After regularly consuming the fruit, she claimed to see health benefits including improvements in her eyesight, skin, and energy levels. Creating a line of waters that incorporated the fruit was a natural extension of her discovery. The drinks come in a range of flavors with different benefits, though they all have high amounts of carotenoids like beta carotene and vitamins thanks to their superfruit namesake.

The drinks’ purported benefits include helping with vision protection and assisting with better skin by increasing collagen levels. The beta carotene and lycopene in gac have also been linked to potentially decreasing the risk for heart and eye diseases.

“Gấc’s new product line is designed to provide organic solutions to everyday health and wellness problems. We see the success of CBD-infused products, and other beverages like kombucha, driven by strong consumer demand in natural products that address issues ranging from digestion, fatigue to stress, mood, and sleep,” Zou said in a statement. “We developed our product line to answer this demand and provide consumers with a daily ready-to-drink health solution.”

The Gấc line already includes drinks tailored for hydration and sport, but the company is now launching new flavors: Sleep, Energy, Beauty, Cleanse, and Relax. Sleep, as the name suggests, is meant to be a “soothing sleep tonic” thanks to the addition of chamomile. Relax, described as a calming elixir, proclaims to be “like CBD, but better” due to the ingredient kava, a root and herbal remedy linked to stress relief. Energy contains green tea and is intended to help with fatigue, while Cleanse incorporates activated charcoal. Finally, Beauty has blueberry juice in it and is focused on helping with skin and aging.

The drinks are available for purchase now on the company’s website, Amazon, as well as IRL retailers in Southern California. If you're looking to try the fruit itself, you can check stores that carry Southeast Asian foods, or online. But who knows — with retailers like GacLife making it a household name, the fruit might well land in your local health store soon.