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 ...
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.
