Anna Cobb was 20 years old when an energy supplement she bought at GNC nearly closed her throat. What followed was a hospital stay that included time on a ventilator — and, once she’d recovered, a deep dive into exactly what was in the energy products she and her peers were drinking every day. What she found didn’t sit well with her.
That research became the seed for Rejuvenation, the plant-based energy drink brand Cobb founded and now runs as CEO. The pitch is straightforward: sustained energy from plant-based ingredients, without the artificial additives that filled the products lining GNC shelves — and without the jitters-then-crash cycle that comes with them.
Cobb built the company the way most first-time founders actually do, which is to say: unglamorously. During her senior year at Tuskegee University, she started with a campus plant-based catering business to test the market and build a customer base close to home. When COVID-19 pushed her graduation online, she used the moment to formally launch Rejuvenation — manufacturing her earliest batches in her mother’s kitchen with basic equipment, working multiple jobs simultaneously to keep the operation funded.
That kitchen-table start has scaled into a real regional operation. Rejuvenation now has a manufacturing team of eight women and is stocked in 13 grocery stores across the Washington, D.C. metro area, where Cobb is based — modest by national-beverage-brand standards, but a meaningful foothold in one of the country’s more competitive retail markets, built without the outside capital most beverage startups lean on to get there.
Follow Rejuvenation: rejuvenationbyvqc.com · Instagram @rejuvenationbyvqc