BD attended the Natural Products Expo West show last week at the Anaheim Convention Center & Arena outside Los Angeles. The event has become a showcase for products capitalizing on consumer health trends, which often evolve to mainstream appeal and drive acquisitions by large consumer products companies. Food and beverage offerings as usual dominated the show, which included more than 3,500 exhibitors spread across the equivalent of almost 10 football fields. Here’s an analysis of beverage themes and trends that emerged from this year’s show:

Coca-Cola is now more than six months past an option to buy cold-pressed juice maker Suja.

Coke has expanded tests of a lower-calorie flagship Coca-Cola variant launched in Mexico in 2017 (BD 10/6/17). The product

Sales of CBD-infused drinks reached $86 million in 2018 and will grow to more than $1.4 billion in 2023, Zenith Global and Beverage Digest have concluded in a joint report. Favorable federal regulation in the U.S. would...

Super Bowl sponsor PepsiCo is used to being in enemy territory. The last four Super Bowls were hosted by cities where Coca-Cola enjoys a market share lead in carbonated soft drinks, as the table below shows. While the same holds true this year for Super Bowl LIII, the stakes are even higher as Coke’s hometown Atlanta plays host.  

BD’s Dec. 7 Future Smarts conference featured an interview with Kate Daly, executive director of Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Starbucks and McDonald’s are among 14 consumer product companies that have partnered with Closed Loop since 2015 to make recycling more viable. 

On Dec. 20, Dirty Lemon parent company Iris Nova announced $15 million in seed funding that includes a minority investment by Coca-Cola. Coke’s Venturing & Emerging Brands unit has paid close attention to Dirty Lemon. The brand gained attention for its unique go-to-market strategy, which founder and CEO Zak Normandin has named c-commerce, or “conversational commerce.”

Coca-Cola North America has upgraded its customer center in Atlanta to make better use of technologies such as virtual reality. The newly-renovated and renamed KOlab 600 is linked to existing space where sales teams collaborate with retailers and restaurant operators. BD got a look at the center during a Jan. 3 ribbon cutting by CCNA President Jim Dinkins.