Allow me to catch you up on plans for our Future Smarts conference on Dec. 5. Our return to New York City after two years of successful virtual shows promises to deliver an expert lineup as good as we’ve ever hosted.
Just yesterday I confirmed our most recent speaker addition: Michael Del Pozzo, the new president and general manager for PepsiCo’s Gatorade Performance Portfolio. The unit includes Propel, Muscle Milk, Evolve plant-based protein shakes, and now Fast Twitch energy drink for athletes. We haven’t announced Del Pozzo’s appearance, so consider this a sneak peek. BodyArmor in recent years has re-ignited a category that had become sleepy. It’s now a free-for-all and Gatorade hasn’t backed away from...
This headline stopped me cold: “Coca-Cola launches project to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and transform it into sugar.”
I checked to see if the story came from the Onion. It didn’t. I looked at the calendar. The month was August not April. I searched Google for the article’s source. It was a legit press release from Coca-Cola Europacific Partners.
The U.K.-based bottler that serves Europe, Australia, and the island nations surrounding Australia has partnered with the University of California, Berkeley “to develop scalable methods of converting captured CO2 into sugar,” the company announced in August. Attention, grabbed.
Through its CCEP Ventures unit, the Europe-based bottler will help fund work by UCB’s Peidong Yang Research Group. The sugar extracted from carbon dioxide could be used in beverage products or in the production of PET plastic, reducing the need for crude oil, the bottler said. “The development of lab scale prototypes could make the generation of essential raw and packaging materials more sustainable in the long-term,” according to CCEP. “It could reduce, some of the largest CO2 contributors in supply chains, while saving material, transportation and logistics costs.”
Aside from the sheer cool factor of such scientific work, there is good reason for bottlers like CCEP to call attention to this work years before it will yield truly scalable results. Consumers, especially younger consumers, want...
The liquor store sure has changed. I popped into one last week to grab some Finnish Long Drink for our dog sitter. I left having seen the very embodiment of a trend.
A massive display of Svedka vodka sodas and teas greeted me at the door. Other floor displays throughout the store pitched bright-colored cans of premixed cocktails, like a gin and tonic from Bombay Sapphire. Newer canned spirits brands such as High Noon and Cutwater stacked the cases high and sold them – at a premium.
An entire section of shelves was permanently labeled “Ready-to-Drink.” An endcap display, big enough to incorporate a full-sized bicycle, marketed a product from craft beer trailblazer Dogfish Head (eventually acquired by Boston Beer). The display wasn’t for beer, however. It was for canned cocktails by Dogfish’s distilling unit. Even Dos Equis offered a blanco tequila ready-to-drink margarita.
I asked an alcohol distributor stocking a display about the transformation (spurred in part by consumers’ boredom with beer)...
We’re back in New York City for Future Smarts this year and I can’t wait. After two years of successful virtual conferences during the pandemic lockdown, the team here didn’t hesitate to dive back into a live event. Why? Because of you.
Future Smarts is critical connective tissue for the Beverage Digest community. It’s there that attendees catch up with old industry friends to strengthen bonds – and make new connections. Over the years, many beverage deals have been hatched during sideline huddles. Attendees get out of local markets and offices to hear and share perspectives from around the country and world.
The beverage industry is full of niche and regional brands that find ways to remain relevant as consumer trends come and go. We drop into two such brands today – Jel Sert and Ale-8-One. Each has a century of history that started with determined founders.
Jel Sert began life in 1926 making instant gelatin desserts. Founders Charles and Lillian Wegner created the product using...
I’m a skeptic when it comes to non-alcoholic craft beers, spirits, and wines. How big can this market get without the functional benefits of alcohol, especially when sold at about the same price?
I recently posed the question to Athletic Brewing Co-founder and CEO Bill Shufelt during a panel I moderated for Credit Suisse in New York. His non-alcoholic beer brand has raised more than $70 million since launching in 2018 and accounts for almost half of the still-small US non-alcoholic beer market. Shufelt told me that most of his consumers don’t shun alcohol. Sometimes they just need a break and they like beer. He sees lots
You’ll note an extreme focus on carbonated soft drink pricing in today’s newsletter. That’s because there is no shortage of news, and soft drinks remain a massive and profitable category for US manufacturers and retailers.
On page 7, bottlers discuss the recent Memorial Day holiday weekend and how soda consumers and retailers are responding to higher list prices and fewer “hot” promotional deals. BD shares what we learned from an informal survey. The news so far is positive, even if precarious.
On page 10, we publish our annual soft drink concentrate pricing review, which reflects the inflationary environment facing the industry and its stakeholders. Increases for major soda brands like Coca- Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper as high as...
The return to restaurants in 2021, following pandemic lockdowns the year before, helped generate good news as you will see in today’s special issue and BD’s newly released Fact Book 27th Edition.
All major beverage categories, including carbonated soft drinks, posted...
Which of these are not true?
1. Tropicana offered a cereal made to be eaten with orange juice.
2. Gatorade applied for a trademark for a virtual beverage.
3. Coke Zero Sugar launched a flavor called Byte that it says tastes like a computer pixel.
A $4.99 unpromoted 12-pack of soda in the Atlanta suburbs used to be remarkable. Then came the $5.99 12-pack. Surely that had to be the ceiling, we thought. Now recently the $7.49 12- pack has emerged. There is no way prices can go even higher. Right?
We’ve written a lot in the last six months about unprecedented carbonated soft drink price elasticities. During the past decade...
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