Turn over a can or bottle of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in the US and you’ll find a new ingredient — stevia. The natural sweetener is now part of a formula that already included aspartame and acesulfame potassium. The new...

Happy New Year! To kickoff 2025, I’ll tell you about a few emerging brands that intrigued me in 2024. I don’t review or endorse products, and I won’t now. But I do taste lots of new drinks annually, so standouts jump out at me. Foremost, that means delivering on taste, which these products do. While each promises functionality, I won’t vouch for their efficacy or eventual market success. I also won’t judge their pricing, which can be rich. In short, these products offered an interesting proposition and ended up tasting surprisingly good — to me at least. So, here we go:

Nestle and celebrity podcaster Alex Cooper will launch a functional beverage in January called Unwell Hydration that is targeted at women. The drink, packed in 16.9-oz PET bottles, contains 700mg of electrolytes, a blend of B-complex vitamins, 75mg green coffee caffeine, and no artificial colors or flavors. Unwell is sweetened with stevia. Flavors are ...

Keurig Dr Pepper has added Snapple Zero Sugar Peach Tea to fountain drink dispensers at 7-Eleven, Speedway, and Stripes convenience stores nationwide.

Dunkin’ has added a limited-edition Peppermint Mocha flavor to its line of Dunkin’ Spiked Iced Coffees. The canned hard coffee drink, which contains 6% alcohol by volume, will be available at grocery and package stores across 28 states during the holiday season....

Monster Energy has added a Vice Guava flavor to its zero sugar Ultra line. Rapper French Montana has signed on as a brand ambassador for the tropical fruit flavored variant and the broader Ultra line.

Rebbl has launched a ...

PepsiCo-owned SodaStream has launched a line of Crafted Cocktail Mixers for its make-at-home soda appliances. The syrups come in flavor combinations Pineapple and Jalapeño for tequila, Grapefruit and Elderflower for vodka, and White Peach and Ginger for whiskey. A variety pack of all three flavors sells...

British American Tobacco has launched its Ryde functional shots in the US on Amazon. Three variants are tropical-flavored Energize featuring green tea caffeine and taurine, orange-flavored Focus featuring L-theanine and ginseng; and raspberry-flavored Relax featuring with...