Interesting story about the inventors of Gatorade, their offers to sell it (cheap) which were turned down, subsequent lawsuits, and the royalties they now get:
Royalties for Gatorade Trust surpass $1 billion: 'Can't let it spoil us'
Gatorade was invented by Dr. Robert Cade and his medical fellows Dr. Dana Shires, Dr. Alex de Quesada and Dr. Jim Free in a University of Florida lab in 1965.
Fifty years after the invention of Gatorade, the men who developed it, their families and friends have now made more than $1 billion in royalties from its sales.
Although details of the royalties given to the Gatorade Trust, which was formed in May 1967, are not public, the University of Florida, which receives a 20 percent cut from the royalties, reported this week that its total take from its piece in Gatorade had risen to $281 million.
That would mean the trust, which originally had nine members including doctors, two trainers and a lab technician, has benefited to the tune of more than $1.1 billion since it was sold to Indianapolis-based Stokely Van-Camp in 1967.
The $1 billion number is a remarkable sum of money considering what it took to get there. Gatorade was invented by Dr. Robert Cade and his medical fellows Dr. Dana Shires, Dr. Alex de Quesada and Dr. Jim Free in a University of Florida lab in 1965.
"I think we'd all be living well without it," said Free, who is the one credited with coming up with the Gatorade name. "But it has enabled us to do things like establish a family foundation and a family office. It also has its challenges in that we cannot let what we have spoil us."
Lawyers of Bingham Greenebaum Doll, who manage the trust, would not say what the royalty structure is, aside from the 80/20 split, or how much it has changed over time.
A document filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by Stokely Van-Camp, then a subsidiary of Quaker Oats -- in a contract with the trust that began in January 1993 -- once revealed that the trust would receive a royalty of between 1.9 percent and 3.6 percent, depending on how much Gatorade was sold in a given year. PepsiCo then acquired Gatorade with its Quaker Oats acquisition in 2000.
After his team's formula was used by the school's football program for two years and received great publicity, Cade offered the product in its entirety to the university's head of sponsored research in 1966 in exchange for $10,000.
When the university passed, the drink was brought to Stokely Van-Camp, which turned down the doctor's offer to sell the product for $1 million and instead agreed to pay the doctors $25,000 up front, a $5,000 bonus and a five-cent royalty on every gallon sold.
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Entire article:
http://espn.go.com/college-football...oyalties-gatorade-inventors-surpass-1-billion
