It is a multimillion-dollar business started by a mom who began to see her daughter's brightly colored, juice-filled sippy cups as nothing more than insidious sugar-delivery mechanisms. In late 2004, Kara Goldin put a stop to the juice for her kids - juice from cups, bottles, boxes and pouches - and began experimenting by dropping bits of fresh fruit into glasses of water. We had always put lemon or lime in our water, so I started putting different types of fruit in the water, and the kids loved it," said Goldin, a mother of four in San Francisco. "Our kids would have playdates, and I'd put a fresh raspberry in the kids' water and later the moms would call me and say, 'What is this raspberry drink you're giving my child?' " Today, Hint - bottled water with a hint of fruit, and not a trace of sugar, calories or preservatives - has retail sales of about $25 million, according to Goldin. The top-selling flavors include watermelon, blackberry, raspberry-lime, strawberry-kiwi, pomegranate-tangerine and mango-grapefruit. "This whole thing began when my daughter was reaching for some more apple juice," Goldin said. "I was noticing how kids were in the habit of moving from milk in a sippy cup to juice in a sippy cup that they'd have throughout the day. That's a lot more sugar than kids should have."

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