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:
We’ll close out the year on Monday with our annual Future Smarts conference in New York City. And I can’t wait to see what comes out of the program we've assembled.
I love the conversation we generate during the course of the day, with discussion threads that weave through the speaker sessions. Points from an earlier session often find their way into a later interview as dots are connected. The impact of consumer stress on industry growth, practical implications of technologies such as Ai, the competition for soft drink market share, and expectations for the new presidential administration will be some of those threads.
We’ll start the day with executives from Coca-Cola, Keurig Dr Pepper, and PepsiCo before convening our annual analyst panel to riff on what they’ve heard that morning. Bottlers from both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo will layer in their perspectives. And we will fold in a wholesaler’s view of the retail landscape with UNFI’s CEO. Olipop’s co-founder will provide some emerging brand and category spice. And Boston Beer’s former CEO will stir the pot in the best of ways with a view across beer and non-alcoholic beverages.
Future Smarts attendees will head into 2025 with a complete view of the most urgent industry topics, as voiced by smart industry insiders. It’s great to get a helping of clarity right before we all wrap up a busy 2024.
Like last year, we’ll host a welcome reception on Sunday for all registered attendees. I love that the evening is so anchoring, helping to deepen industry relationships on a human level — mine included.
If you can’t join us, rest assured we’ll share some slices of the Future Smarts pie in our newsletter next year. In the meantime, enjoy your families this holiday season. The team at Beverage Digest wishes you all the very best.
Coca-Cola’s new holiday ads that pay tribute to a 1995 campaign called, “Holidays Are Coming,” have generated lots of attention this week over the company’s use of “Real Magic AI” to produce the spots.
The New York Times ran the headline, “Coca-Cola’s Holiday Ads Trade the ‘Real Thing’ for Generative A.I..” Commenters on social media said the ads look artificial, pointing out inconsistencies like truck tires that don’t spin. Others called the...
Scrolling LinkedIn last week, a post from Walmart Associate Merchant Nick Scutari-Dunn warranted a re-post to BD followers. Scutari-Dunn was announcing a “BRAND NEW BEVERAGE CATEGORY at Walmart: Modern Soda!” The emphasis was his.
A photo of the new store set showed Poppi, Olipop, Culture Pop, and Zevia. While a limited assortment, the suite of brands is by now well-established, pitching gut health or, in the case of Zevia, a “better-for-you” soda. In the post’s comments, Olipop Co-founder David Lester called the set an “incredibly bold and exciting move.” And Poppi CEO Chris Hall thanked Walmart for “allowing us to partner with you on the...
TikTok is helping to make soft drinks as fun as ever, and far more experimental.
Hopefully by now you’ve seen the TikTok of Mississippi Memaw ordering and sipping a Dr Pepper dressed with pickles for a sweet and salty combo. Maybe you saw NBC Today show anchors trying the concoction on television, or superstar singer Dua Lipa adding both pickles and jalapeño peppers to the concoction. Memaw points out in her TikTok video with 5.1 million views that the Sonic clerk didn’t miss a beat.
TikTok is helping to make soft drinks as fun as ever, and far more experimental.
Hopefully by now you’ve seen the TikTok of Mississippi Memaw ordering and sipping a Dr Pepper dressed with pickles for a sweet and salty combo. Maybe you saw NBC Today show anchors trying the concoction on television, or superstar singer Dua Lipa adding both pickles and jalapeño peppers to the concoction. Memaw points out in her TikTok video with 5.1 million views that the Sonic clerk didn’t miss a beat. “I’m not the only person that’s ever ordered this baby.”
That’s one of many viral beverage trends that have echoed from social media to mass media in recent years — things like...
My goal for our annual Future Smarts conference is to curate a lineup of speakers who are on the cutting edge of the most interesting story lines of the year.
Just this morning, we announced that PepsiCo Global Foodservice President Anne Fink has joined our Dec. 16 program in New York City. Her team won a major victory this year by closing a 10-year beverage supply agreement with Subway in the US. And her team is collaborating with partner Celsius on the energy drink company’s foodservice strategy (pg 8).
In today’s issue (pg. 9), we write about Coca-Cola’s Fairlife business, led by protein shake brand Core Power, which has been a resounding success for the company. Future Smarts Speaker John Murphy, Coke’s president and CFO, played a major role in the company’s 2020 acquisition and integration of Fairlife.
From the world of retail, Future Smarts will host Stuart Aitken, who is Kroger’s chief merchant and marketing Officer. The retail chain is in the midst of an almost two-year merger process with Albertsons that would create the country’s largest supermarket chain (pg. 14).
In beverage distribution, another story this year is Keurig Dr Pepper’s work to optimize and bolster its company-owned distribution system. KDP’s US Refreshment Beverages President Andrew Archambault will join us to discuss that strategy. We’ll also...
Our lead story (pg. 3) uncovers how Olipop Cofounder Ben Goodwin intends to pursue $1 billion brand status — and he says he can do it without direct store delivery, at least for now. This digestive health drink, or gut soda as some refer to it, didn’t exist before six years ago. And Olipop helped spawn a formidable competitor in Poppi. Many alternative sodas have marketed themselves at the expense of traditional sodas. Olipop has been among the most successful so far. I’ll note, as well, that in an era when barriers to entry in non-alcoholic beverages are lower than ever, Olipop is a brand built on function, R&D, and efficacy. That’s worth watching.
The second story in today’s issue (pg. 6) features a conversation with former Coca-Cola Venturing and Emerging Brands executive Matt Hughes. He is a well-known and respected industry voice whose expertise bridges the gap between mainstream and emerging brands. Now with private equity firm Franchise Equity Partners, Hughes is tracking the winds of change within
I finally tried A.G. Barr’s Irn-Bru during a trip this month to Scotland. The carbonated soft drink is said to outsell even Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in the country. Irn-Bru is dubbed “Scotland’s other national drink,” coming after, of course, Scotch whisky. The soda has its own closely guarded “secret recipe.” At Edinburgh airport, an Irn-Bru branded orange and blue vending machine awaited my arrival — it also contained Coke, Diet Coke, and 7Up.
Irn-Bru’s flavor is hard to describe. I’ll try. While the drink has a medicinal orange color, it doesn’t taste anything like the orangy flavor of a Fanta or a Crush. There are bitter tonic notes owing to the quinine in the formula. Perhaps Irn-Bru would work well as a mixer for gin? I’m not sure of that. Apparently, young Scots...
Check out BD’s podcast this week if you haven’t. Former Beverage Digest Editor and Publisher John Sicher and I had a compelling discussion about gut sodas like Poppi and Olipop.
While the two products and a host of similar prebiotic and probiotic sodas represent only a share point or so of the carbonated soft drink category, they are grabbing an outsized share of attention on social media and at retail. Both Poppi and Olipop have been the subject of M&A rumors, which haven’t panned out and were likely premature. Poppi grabbed headlines early this year when it snagged a last-minute Super Bowl ad spot to cast the drink as “the future of soda.”
The question we explored on the podcast is whether the gut soda category has the kind of staying power that would make it attractive for companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr Pepper. We ended up seeing
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