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These New Startups Are Promising to Cure Your Next Hangover. What Does Science Say?
Jessica Stillman
6–7 minutes

When Benjamin Franklin quipped that death and taxes are unavoidable, he clearly forgot a third inevitability of life: hangovers. Since some distant ancestor scooped fermented fruit off the forest floor and discovered they felt a little loopy afterwards, the pleasure of alcohol has always been followed by the pain of the next day.

It’s a truth as old as humanity. (Even older according to researchers who say even some monkeys apparently enjoy a tipple.) But is it one that modern scientific and business ingenuity are about to overturn?

Startups are flooding the market with various pills, powders, and potions all promising to let you imbibe tonight without consequences. The business case for this wave of new hangover cures appears rock solid. The scientific case for their efficacy, however, is a lot more mixed.
The market for hangover cures is booming

Over the last several years, article after article has explained that Gen Z is drinking less than previous generations. That might have given you the impression that preventing hangovers wouldn’t be much of a growth industry. But you’d be wrong.

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The online narrative that young people today are more abstemious than those that came before appears to have jumped the gun. As Business Insider recently reported “Gen Z Is in Their Alcohol Era”.

“Turns out, though, that Gen Z is not that different. They’ve just taken their time to get to the bar,” writes BI’s Emily Stewart. “Seventy-four percent of Gen Zers report having had a drink over the past six months… That’s in line with the 76 percent drinking rate of the total adult population.”

This steady appetite for booze across the generations is reflected in the steady growth in the market for solutions for the pain that surely follows. Market research firm Grand View Research estimates “the global hangover cure products market size was estimated at USD 2.34 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 6.18 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.9 percent from 2024 to 2030.”

That growth doesn’t require too much explaining. No one likes headaches, but we do like the social lubricant of a few drinks. But there is likely another driver too: Western mania for Korean culture.

K-beauty and K-pop are the country’s best known exports, but Korea and Japan are also pioneers in the hangover prevention space with “mature and widely adopted hangover recovery product industries deeply tied to their respective drinking cultures,” Taeyoung Hwang, an analyst at market research firm Mintel, told the Guardian. Interest in other aspects of their cultures may be fanning interest in these products as well.
Meet the startups selling indulgence without consequences

As you’d expect, crafty entrepreneurs angling to meet this market demand. ModernRetail recently ran down the list of startups promising to prevent your next hangover:

Day-guard, started by a pair of Brown University grads, offers “a Korean pre-alcohol jelly that promises to prevent hangovers”
LiQure, which sells  a line of” anti-hangover gummies, is also expanding into convenience stores after launching three years ago” 
Fool’s Fix “bills itself as a post-drinking solution to hangovers” for “for young people who want to indulge without the headache.” 
Undo markets its pre-alcohol gummies “with an origin story rooted in Las Vegas nightlife culture, as the founders met at the Wynn resort and casino.” The company recently raised a $1 million seed round and started selling at Target and 7-Eleven 

With people these days optimizing their sleep, their fitness, their diets, and their mental health, why not try to maximize their next drinking session as well? And if you’re an entrepreneur, why not profit off the impulse?
But do they work?

All of this suggests hangover cure entrepreneurs are chasing a genuine cultural and business trend. But do the products they offer actually work? The answer to this question is far more hazy.

Most of these products claim to work by acting in some way to disrupt the process by which alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde, a harmful compound medical science has shown can make us feel lousy. Which sounds rational and promising, but as Shayla Love recently documented in the New Yorker, the tidy story sold by hangover cure makers is at odds with the unsettled state of the research.

First, it’s important to stress that these products are being sold as supplements. That means the FDA has not evaluated them for efficacy.

Second, scientists don’t fully understand why we get hangovers in the first place. Nor are they at all clear on the role played by acetaldehyde, which breaks down quickly and is hard to measure. Some studies suggest the chemical might actually make us feel good or even drink more.

As Jonathan Howland, a Boston University professor who has studied hangovers, tells Love, “Coming up with an intervention when you don’t know the mechanism in the first place is kind of dicey.”

When Love and her husband test out these hangover cures, the results are underwhelming. “I felt lousy in proportion to how much I’d drunk,” she sums up.

Her experience at least suggests these products may disappoint consumers looking for a magic solution to drink without suffering. Entrepreneurs looking to ride a wave of interest in somehow marrying humans’ age-old love of alcohol with our newfound obsession with wellness are likely on to a winning business proposition, however.