Beverage Digest is walking the show floor along with about 65,000 other attendees at Expo West in California this week. We'll investigate natural ingredient trends that could one day drive the growing and profitable functional packaged beverage market. We're also looking for what's new within existing ready-to-drink segments and product lines, and talking to the founders and leaders who propel the sector.

We'll share our observations in live updates here, so check back through the next couple of days.

Subscribers can email us if there is something specific you'd like to ask about. For those attending the show, feel free to send any noteworthy observations as well.

The buzz around artificial intelligence is growing louder, and companies want to know whether this tech will actually help them in their work. Launched in November, ChatGPT has given mainstream users access to a form of A.I. that can create everything from poetry to legal briefs. This kind of machine learning has broad implications for companies and brands, including within the beverage sector. ChatGPT’s potential to disrupt caused a “code red” inside Google, according to the New York Times. Setting aside the important debate around the efficacy and ethics of A.I., the following story is intended to help make sense of the current hype surrounding GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) technology...

Brand Backed By Former Hedge Fund Owner, Major League Pickleball Founder

Richard’s Rainwater has spent the last couple of years making sure the brand won’t be ignored. Fresh off a 2021 Series A funding round that was north of $10 million, the Austin, Texas-based packager of actual rainwater has been expanding shelf presence at retailers including Kroger, Albertson’s and HEB, adding production capacity, and executing an aggressive publicity campaign. If you hadn’t heard of the still nascent brand previously, you’d be...

Last week’s NACS convention for convenience store operators in Las Vegas offered a first look at product innovation from beverage makers looking to get new products into retailer store resets for 2023. The annual event includes a...

Coca-Cola’s US strategy for Costa Coffee came into sharper focus last week at the NACS convenience retail show. The company unveiled a new ready-to-drink canned coffee for the US market, showed off its Smart Cafe? automated coffee kiosk program, and shed light on plans to add standalone cafe?s. Since buying the UK-based coffee chain in 2019, Coke was forced to...