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The story
On September 19, the Nikkei reported that under the planned consumption tax cut, Red Bull—classified as a soft drink—would see its tax rate drop to 1%, while energy drinks classified as quasi-pharmaceuticals, such as Lipovitan D, would remain at 10%. The headline centers on how two products both marketed as “energy drinks” end up on opposite sides of the tax line depending on whether they’re categorized as “food.” On 5ch, the thread turned into a broader chat about familiar energy drinks, touching on how Oronamin C once shed its pharmaceutical-like classification by adding carbonation—letting it be sold outside pharmacies—and claims that Red Bull’s Japanese formula differs from its overseas version.
Consumption Tax Cut: Red Bull at 1%, but Lipovitan D Stays at 10% — Gap Hinges on “Food” Classification – Nikkei
September 19, 2026, 5:00 AM
[Subscriber-only article]
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Wait, could Oronamin C even have qualified as a pharmaceutical with those ingredients? Maybe that flew 60 years ago.
If you eat it, it's 1%
Totally forgot about the newspaper's tax rate. If groceries drop to 1%, that makes three different tax rates in play.
Consumption tax is a mechanism for spreading the burden of social security spending—which eats up more than half the national budget—across everyone, not just the working generation.
In other words, cutting consumption tax just shifts that heavy social security burden back onto the working generation alone.
If you're going to cut consumption tax, you need to cut social security spending itself, or the burden on working people won't actually go down.
They're skimming 10% off every sale, so the ones really footing the bill are workers.
Consumption tax is really a policy for handing massive tax breaks to big export-focused corporations lol
Every time consumption tax goes up, corporate tax quietly gets cut lol. Back in the Showa era the corporate tax rate was around 50%, but since consumption tax was introduced it's been cut down to about 30% lol
It's a bullying tax system that targets the huge number of small and mid-sized businesses that only sell domestically (you owe it even if you're running a loss), and of course we regular consumers end up shouldering it indirectly too, since it gets passed on to us as higher prices.
The big export-focused corporations skim off about 12 trillion yen a year in "consumption tax refunds" from the roughly 30-odd trillion yen in total consumption tax revenue paid by all those domestic-only small and mid-sized businesses lol
And then the remaining 20-odd trillion yen a year is what gets announced as "consumption tax revenue" lol
Reminds me of the old Oronamin C commercial where Kon Omura mixed it with a raw egg.
How old even are you, grandpa? Same age as him or something?
Don't know about that, but there was a home-visit TV show when he was 91 that showed Kon Omura's house still gets a year's supply of Oronamin C delivered every year.
A bad tax like this should just be scrapped, period. It's really a sales tax hiding under the fake name "consumption tax." (´・ω・`)
If you're gonna do it, just make it a flat 5% or 3% across the board.
That way you could even scrap the invoice system too.
Which idiot came up with the invoice system anyway? I honestly think it's a garbage system.
The whole point of the invoice system is to keep export tax refunds from being classified as subsidies, so tweaking the tax rate won't make it go away.
Scrapping it is the only option.
Businesses that lose out from it complain, and their complaints are legitimate both legally and politically.
Okay, that's a pretty extravagant way to use it. I just use those frozen gel packs that come free with ice cream for that.
Come to think of it, the old Japan-market Red Bull had the same caffeine content per can whether it was the 250ml or 355ml size…
Why bother with the hassle of a different formula (well, different concentration) for no real reason? (Apparently they're the same now?)
Aspara Drink has an apple flavor, so it tastes a bit different from other energy drinks?
Chiobita is on the sour side.
Gronsan is insanely sweet, never drinking that again.
Did "24-Hour Regain" disappear at some point?
Pills just make you feel queasy and don't really do anything, right? Honestly, when you're sleepy, sleeping is the cheapest fix anyway.
It's not just caffeine though—there's a bunch of other stuff in there, plus calories.
Go with Monster.
It's got medicinal ginseng in it, which cancels out caffeine's side effects.
Isn't takeout already 1%? Or is this time different?
The McDonald's move is to "get creative" and just keep the price the same anyway.
Serves you right, old man lol
They just want a massive dose of caffeine. The real comparison isn't Lipovitan, it's Min-Min Break (a popular caffeine-shot brand).
It's basically juice—caffeinated juice. And there's a lot of flavor variety too.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s consumption tax includes a reduced-rate system that has applied a lower rate to food and beverages—excluding alcohol and pharmaceuticals/quasi-pharmaceuticals—since it was introduced in 2019. Many energy drinks are sold as “quasi-pharmaceuticals,” putting them outside the reduced rate, while carbonated drinks like Red Bull are treated as soft drinks—i.e., “food”—and so qualify for the lower rate. That institutional quirk is once again the focus here. The thread mostly ran on the oddity of this classification and nostalgic chat about energy drinks, though some posters raised long-standing arguments about the merits of the consumption tax itself and export tax refunds. Since the full article is subscriber-only, it’s worth noting that the headline alone doesn’t make clear exactly how far the tax rate will drop under this cut or the precise scope of what’s covered.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Consumption Tax Cut: Red Bull at 1%, but Lipovitan D Stays at 10% — Gap Hinges on ‘Food’ Classification.”
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