That was my biggest takeaway from this month's BevTech conference, an annual gathering hosted by the International Society of Beverage Technologists. This is where the nation's beverage scientists go to discuss "The Science of the Sip," as this year's event was themed. The 350 professionals in attendance engineer and manage everything from ingredients to PET blow molding needed to get a drink from formula to shelf. I opened the conference with an overview of industry trends before taking in several presentations and a few extremely technical breakout sessions.

Right now, there isn't a major food and beverage company that isn't working on the shift...

We pulled off the highway not far from Granada to visit, unannounced, a small olive oil producer. The gracious staff fought through a...

A single license can cover unlimited users across BD's core premium products: the BD Newsletter, the Coke and Pepsi Systems, the Keurig Dr Pepper System, and the Fact Book. Each subscriber gets an individual login and round-the-clock access. Onboarding is straightforward through a custom company page, so professionals can sign up and start reading immediately. Billing is simple: one invoice at annual renewal, no per-seat juggling.

For companies where beverage industry intelligence is a competitive input, an enterprise license converts it from a line-item expense into an institutional resource — making it easy to share BD's market insights and data with every colleague who needs them.

Some bottlers even extend access to frontline sales associates as a professional benefit, giving those associates a wider industry view. BD becomes a tool that helps create richer, more contextual customer conversations up and down the street.

For more information on enterprise licensing options, email HERE to start the conversation.

Inside, you can buy anything from clothes to packaged snacks and ...

Cruising around the suburb where I spent many summers as a kid, I ran across a 7 Brew and a Scooter's within a half-mile of each other.

Since my last visit several years ago, 7 Brew has opened at least 10 locations and Scooter's at least eight in Louisville. Yet another fast-growing drive-thru chain, Dutch Bros, started moving into the city just last year.

This is a familiar suburban trend across...

Most of you know my...

Just this week, PepsiCo announced a global partnership with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team starting next year. Mercedes is among the most valuable and elite teams in open wheel F1 racing. The marketing partnership covers...

Just this week, we announced PepsiCo Beverages US CEO Ram Krishnan. He joins the conference as investors pay renewed attention to PepsiCo’s performance and structure. On stage, Ram and I will discuss the product, consumer, retail, and economic changes that are shaping PepsiCo’s beverage business.

Last week, we announced the addition of Keurig Dr Pepper CMO Drew Panayiotou. He, too, joins at a pivotal time, as KDP looks to close the $18 billion acquisition of JDE Peet’s before separating its coffee and refreshment beverage businesses. We’ll discuss how Drew’s team is enticing consumers of both portfolios.

We’ll also spend time with another high-profile marketing leader: Coca-Cola Global CMO Manolo Arroyo. Of high interest in this discussion is how technology, such as AI, and social media are influencing marketing investment and organizational decisions.

And this will be compelling: Monster Beverage Co-founder Rodney Sacks will discuss the soaring energy drink category he helped forge over two decades on the way to building a $7.5 billion global powerhouse with a $65 billion market cap. I will be honored as well to present Rodney with the Beverage Digest Visionary Award. Past honorees have included the late PepsiCo CEO Don Kendall and the late Coca-Cola President and COO Don Keough.

No Future Smarts event is complete without the presence of our beverage bottling community. This year, we’ll hear from Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages President Jean Claude Tissot, as well as from Kelly Clay, president and CEO of Pepsi bottler Admiral Beverage. These leaders are experts on local market execution, the retail landscape, and just about anything else beverage related.

We’ve also assembled a panel to dissect one of the hottest beverage trends: Hemp-based ready-to-drink THC. The category is on a regulatory roller coaster ride. Brand owners Drea Groeschel of Better Than Booze and David Mukpo of Pamos Cannabis Cocktails & Spirits will illuminate this challenging and potentially lucrative category. To help make sense of the ever changing regulatory haze, cannabis and hemp Attorney Seth Goldberg of Pashman Stein Walder Hayden will join the panel as well.

Experts from our conference sponsor EY will share insights on industry disruptors and the future of beverages. You’ll hear from Americas Beverage Sector Leader Sean Harapko, EY-Parthenon Partner and Beverage Transactions Leader Greg Miller, and Former Chief Digital Transformation Officer and EY Executive in Residence Dan Werth.

Future Smarts 2025 will tackle regulatory issues and Wall Street views, too. Our popular sell-side analyst panel will feature Kaumil Gajrawala from Jefferies, Bonnie Herzog from Goldman Sachs, and Nik Modi from RBC Capital Markets. In an additional session, Nik will use data to dive into several topics our readers often ask us about. Plus, American Beverage President and CEO Kevin Keane will help assess everything from ingredient regulation to SNAP soda bans and what’s being done to create a constructive outcome.

This is another Future Smarts you don’t want to miss.

As a 55-year-old who came of age during the Reagan “Just Say No” to drugs era of the 1980s, there is still stigma and apprehension attached to marijuana for me. That’s despite 15% of US adults telling Gallup last year that they smoke marijuana, up from 7.0% in 2013. Forty-seven percent of Americans said they have tried marijuana. THC is now legal in some form in all but four states.

Meanwhile, the

To that end, we are now up and running with a new Beverage Digest Enterprise License that is proving to be popular with early adopters. I love that companies can now provide the Beverage Digest Newsletter and other products to their c-suite, management teams, and rising leaders with an easy interface and no friction.

In fact, some customers, such as beverage bottlers, have extended this market intelligence to front line workers, as a source of brand data and industry grounding that is connected to the bigger picture.

Conversations with our podcast fans revealed a hunger among young industry managers for connection between big industry developments and their day-to-day jobs. That’s where budget-friendly access to Beverage Digest comes in. We structured the Enterprise License to make the newsletter more accessible as a training, development, and intelligence tool for all employees.

Drop me an email or let us know HERE if you want to take a deeper look. We’d love to welcome your associates into the Beverage Digest community.

I will be honored to present Rodney with our highest award during the Future Smarts conference in New York on Dec. 15. He and I will then sit down for an on-stage conversation about...

The post generated a...

When founders Stephen and Allison Ellsworth appeared in late 2018 on ABC’s Shark Tank — a show that is like red meat for start-up dreamers — the glass bottled product they hawked was Mother. Infused with

The New Coke episode came during...

Meanwhile, I traveled to Las Vegas earlier this month to speak at BevTech, a conference hosted by...

Laura and I again served as judges for a high school “Beverage Expo,” where students created hypothetical non-alcoholic beverage brands and concepts. Think science fair for budding entrepreneurs.

Each group conducted research, picked a target market, created a logo and prototype, and set pricing. They pitched their products to volunteer “investors” like us during Shark Tank like presentations. The investors handed out $1,000 mock checks. Teams that raised at least $5,000 earned an A.

We last participated in 2023. The expo is an interesting window into the teen mind from a beverage perspective. This year there were 30 teams, about half of which pitched energy drink brands. Here are some observations:

— Product names included SereniTea, Fizzin’ Tea, Summer Sip, Aura Sipstation, A-Plus, Blitz, and Georgia Peach.

— Alani Nu was one of drinks mentioned most as a competitor by energy drink teams. One student said females at the school gravitate to Alani Nu’s bright package colors and lifestyle vibe, while Celsius is associated more with fitness and athletics.

— Many entries were positioned as health-conscious. Several incorporated “fitness influencers” in their marketing plan. “Athletes” were a common target audience, even though this Atlanta-area Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics school doesn’t have sports teams.

— Mango was a popular flavor this year, like one brand called Viva Mango.

— While matcha was popular two years ago, we saw only one matcha product this time and it was an energy drink.

— The students generally prefer tea that is sweet and bottled, rather than unsweet or canned. After all, they are in Georgia, the home of Southern sweet tea.

— A common trend is to ask for a sip from another student’s drink. The low-tech way to avoid lips touching the can or bottle is to employ a “waterfall” technique, whereby the drink is poured into the mouth without touching or being touched by the recipient. One team had a solve for this problem — a sports cap spout.

Today’s special issue is a top-level view of that annual all-channel Fact Book report. It provides a snapshot of the intense competition within the U.S. non-alcoholic beverage business. The following newsletter pages cover major beverage companies, categories, trademarks, and brands. It’s a quick reference guide to how the biggest players are performing in liquid refreshment beverages, with an emphasis on carbonated soft drinks...

First, when it comes to carbonated soft drinks, Coca-Cola appears to dominate the region. From the small local market near our Airbnb rental in tiny Conca dei Marini, to the trendy restaurants in mid-size Sorrento, there was always a Coke for sale. We didn’t stumble on a Pepsi until we hit a market in the much larger city of Naples.

While this was no formal survey, the disparity actually makes sense to me, knowing something about Coca-Cola’s and PepsiCo’s global strategies. PepsiCo’s global beverage expansion strategy has historically focused...

A Coke boycott by...

That said, the tenacity and dedication of this band of hardcore fans and its followers is impressive. Just this past December, the group sent me a spiral bound 2025 Dreaming of Tab Calendar, with images of Tab in various holiday settings. They also shared “market research” and a survey of 206 people that they used to predict an initial market opportunity of almost $43 million should Tab return...

Meanwhile, we’re excited to have just released our newest territory map book — The Keurig Dr Pepper System. A key feature of this new resource is a map of KDP’s company-owned distribution network, which covers 80% of the US population, according to KDP. We are referring ...

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.

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...