I had a great podcast conversation late last week with my friend and former Beverage Digest Publisher John Sicher to discuss a series of big industry developments in the past month. The coming Keurig Dr Pepper coffee-soda split. PepsiCo’s sale of Rockstar Energy and an additional investment in Celsius Holdings. Elliott Investment’s case for refranchising and value creation at PepsiCo. Coke shopping Costa Coffee. The ripples from these deals and actions will last for years. Check out the podcast HERE, and forward the link to colleagues or up-and-coming leaders who like to think about how these developments fit together.

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.

Keurig Dr Pepper has announced several launches in addition to the rollout of new permanent flavor Dr Pepper Blackberry. They are 7Up Tropical, Snapple Peach Tea & Lemonade, Bai Simbu Strawberry and Bai Shala Coconut Strawberry, A&W Ice Cream Sundae, and RC Cola Zero Sugar. (For more on brand Dr Pepper’s success in recent decades, listen to BD’s newest Episode 21 of the Breeze podcast HERE.)

Molson Coors has now launched a Simply Spiked Bold variant of the flavored malt beverage marketed under a brand license from...

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